iPads Mania

Today, students applied concepts of black ink on white paper (some drill and practice problems) to pictures of real people.

We followed up the four problems with students reflecting on the day's work.  We placed emphasis on adding pictures to enhance our blog post and labeling the post with math concept words.

Today we used a Google search and our Twitter accounts to quickly accumulate all the United States stories for how they got their name.  This worked really well as a "anticipatory set" (old school language?) and lead in to seeing how the shapes of the states were formed via the history channel.  Our total lesson is located in Day 8 on this blog post!

When students are using the iPhone Blogger app on the iPad (or on the iPod) and adding a label a small punctuation mark can cause a non-publishing problem!

See how the student fixed the issue!

A couple of months ago, I remodeled my classroom so that the podium was in the middle of the room.  I didn't stand in front of the room anyway!  See how a student quickly shares their iPad findings.

I used the PowerCam HD camera app for this because it had a zoom feature.  It is supposed to look like this because I chose the vintage setting.

Can't imagine how our notes might look different if everything was a pencil in a notebook.  Students have truly personalized their content.

Explain Everything app is proof that sticking with an app for an extended period of time proves to be positive.  Sometimes this year, I have been so eager to try a new app.  This creates a learning curve with the digital tool so that that students sometimes get frustrated.  I don't hear comments about the frustrations of the app as I did in the first few days.  Now students understand the app and are using all of its features.  Cool!

Because we are using Explain Everything for our note taking tool for the story of westward expansion, students are really discovering the creativeness of the app.

Google docs continue to be a source of typing for our students.  Some error messages do exist on the iPad, but this student figured it out.



While it is true that a person can not bold, underline, and other cool features in a Google doc on an iPad, for basic word processing, Google docs on an iPad works fine.

Be patient with my explanation on the video.  It was challenging to jump back and forth from the laptop to the iPad.

Incredibly students love working on math facts when a "best of list" is at stake!  The Math Drills app allows for profile creations by students that creates an achievement list of all tests taken.  It shows their progress throughout the year.

We do not work on math facts every day, but work them in when five minutes are available.

This is a paid app, but I believe is the best app for math facts for grades four and up!


The list of accomplishments.


Students are able to personalize the look of the screen.

I teach a Wall Street class that allows students to invest $100,000 over 12 weeks.  Personal business TV apps such as CNBC RT and  Bloomber TV provide real time and archived video segments for learning about the day's business news.

Students are really getting the hang of the features in the Explain Everything app.  I have really noticed a sense of individuality and creativity in note taking.  Part of my struggle is that I know in high school note taking will be required at some point.  Maybe students will look at note taking differently after using an app with multimedia features.  At the same time, they are fully engaged in understanding the information this year.

Remember at the end of our journey to the civil war, they must use the Explain Everything app to "tell the story".  This will serve as their assessment.