Links for engaging learning in your classrooms!

Have you been looking for a new way to integrate technology into your classroom?  I have some tried and true websites that have been successful in my classroom.
The two easiest are wordle and taxgedo.  These turn words into word clouds.  Students can take famous speeches, song lyrics, slogans, news articles, letters, or even papers and create word clouds.  In word clouds,  the words that appear more frequently are given more prominence.  You can improve writing by having the students put their papers in a wordle to see which words they are overusing.  A wordle makes a great topic starter or can be used for review.
Xtranormal, Animoto, Voki, and GoAnimate are sites that allow you to create short movies.  Some change text into movies, and others allow you to take pictures and clips into professional looking video slideshows.  How much more engaging is a writing project put to music by a talking animal?  Book trailers are so much more engaging than a written book report!  Another site that students love to use is My Avatar Editor.  Students can create their own characters to move through stories in Keynote or iMovies.
A great source for current events, science or weather events, and in different languages is Newseum.  It gives the frontages from all over the United States and the world.  Checking for comprehension in a foreign language?  Why not pull up a newspaper written in that language?  Discovery News is also a good site for current events.
Any site can be used for different classes and in many different ways.  Check back for apps that you can use in your classroom.

We got iPads!!! Yeah! Oh...Now what?

10 Questions about Deployment....

We were so excited when we found out that we were able to get iPads for our teachers and 3 iPad carts for our high school.  When the excitement died down, the questions started coming and coming and coming!  How are we..., who is going to...., when are we going to.....  The list kept growing.  If your school is getting iPads, iPods, Android tablets, or any other devices, look over these simple questions and see if you have a plan for the devices.  So many times with this great advancement of technology in schools, the plan comes after the devices instead of before.  Be proactive!

1.  Do you have enough wireless bandwidth to sustain the population of your mobile devices?

2.  Do you have a Mobile Device Management system in place to effectively manage and support the  

     devices?

3.  Do you have a mobile filter on these devices?

4.  Do you have the personnel in place for the Apple Store Volume Purchasing program?  Set aside 

     money for the Vouchers.

5.  Management plan for Carts or plan for roll-out of iPads or  Devices?  Responsible Use Policy?

6.  Professional development for teachers and/or training.

7.  How will you push out apps?  Create accounts for each devices so the district maintains

    ownership of the apps, or are you going set accounts for each student?

8.  Is there a curriculum vision for the devices?  You don't want them to become just word 

     processors, music devices, or not to be used at all.

9.  Do you have a Learning Management System to make the devices effective? 

10. How are you going to get information to the students and assess their learning?

      Check out our training on Schoolwork, Bundles, Groups and many others!

So whatever devices your school is purchasing or even if you are going BYOD, just make sure you have a plan!  My Big Campus is a great way to make the most of any device. Check it out! www.mybigcampus.com

So that's how my kid did that!

I can’t tell you how many times during an iPad training that I have heard a teacher say, “So that’s how my kid did that!”  Our digital native kids are not afraid to push buttons, to learn and explore on their own.  They also love to share how they did something or the newest game they have just mastered.  Have you ever heard, “Hey look at what I did”?

Their digital scrapbook starts before they were born, with their mothers placing their ultra-sound picture on Facebook.  Their pictures are plastered on sites such as Instagram, Facebook, Photobucket, and Flickr.  The videos of their first steps are uploaded to YouTube and they haven’t touched a computer yet.

The first thing my niece (3) and nephew (5) say to me is “Hi Aunt Cissie, where is your iPad?”  They love the games, the books, the songs, and the fact that they can control their own learning.  My nephew, who would rather be playing a hunting game, sat down with me the first week of summer after finishing an awesome year in Kindergarten to explore a math game.  Within ten minutes, he was adding 3 digit numbers.  Why? Because it was fun, gave him instant feedback and reward, and it was game-like.   Could he have figured it out on his own? Maybe, but what fun we had together learning the concept of carrying and borrowing!  Then he took off and was so excited to show his mom and dad. I told him I would get his mom to load the app on her iPad. Instead of the shout of joy I expected, I got a look of disappointment and these words, “I will have to start over on level one.”

So should we limit or monitor these digital natives exposure to technology?  I would say yes to both.  Limit in the sense that they need to be active and play outside!  Our children need to develop social skills, by playing and sharing with others.  Monitor? Of course, because with technology comes great responsibility.  We need to be aware of what our kids are doing while online.  That is one of the things that I love about letting my little ones use my iPad.  You see, my iPad has the Lightspeed Mobile filter on it.  So the same filtering that my school has on the school computers is on my iPad even though I am at home. I do not have to worry about them getting on the web and seeing things that their eyes shouldn’t see.  

Our digital native kids have such a head start on learning, exploring, creating, and collaborating!  There are so many apps that open the world to them.  It will be exciting to see all the things that they will add to their scrapbooks.