iPads Mania

Yesterday, I helped Mr. Mihaski, high school mathematics teacher, created a slightly different classroom space.  He is allowing students to be the resource for discussion of problems in his class.  To facilitate this, he created a "station" in the classroom that has a document camera.  Students will be asked to explain their work while students add constructive conversation to the class. Mr. Mihalski will focus on questioning of the student as to why they completed a step in a math problem.  This will also place the emphasis on explanation by the student which will help with Common Core skills.

While conducting Day 3 of my "Teaching With Technology Tools" graduate class, I was able to incorporate the Air Server app for displaying iPads on my laptop computer.

Bottom line: Fantastic!

Students created Explain Everything screen casts or PicCollage creations that could be used in their classroom.  In an efficient sharing method, the Air Server app allowed for students to quickly connect to display their creation and to disconnect so that another student could display their creation.

Thankfully, our district has decided to purchase this amazing tool for our teachers!

Many resources have been discovered over the last few months.  I will be sharing the following resources with teachers tomorrow.

Thoughts Before The Resources:

• You find a great article, you give it to students, they don't read it because they know the teacher will give them everything they need to know from the article.  Determine a new way to allow students time to gather the important information from the text.
• Pose a real life, driving question that can allow students to pull the needed information from the text
• Allow students to state the questions that they have from the text that could enhance the driving question or providing them a purpose to find more text to answer the questions.

Resources:

• Columbia University
• Newsela - Nonfiction Literacy & Current Events
• ASCD Transformative Classroom
• Recommended Books, Suggested Strategies
• The "What Children Should Read" Debate
• 11 Tech Tools To Teach the Common Core Standards
• 10 Ideas For Using Instagram
• 9 Lesser Known Common Core Resources For Teachers
• Selection of Authentic Text & Resources
• Library of Congress Resources 
• Lesson Plans
• Informational Text - Pinterest Board
• Twitter Search - Informational Text

Yesterday, was an incredible day in which educators from our district were able to meet and brainstorm!  As library media specialists and technology integrators, we discussed a number of items.

• Summer Updates:  As a group, we need to be ready to answer all of the questions that staff members will have as it pertains to technology updates.  Our IT staff has put together some resources to aide in the transition.  Because we are allowing teachers to add information they would like we provided...
• A Back To School page
• Summer Information page

• Project & Process
• The graph above is a great graph that explains the process of projects
• Will share with teachers to keep them informed of the progress
• Most Important - After imaging Information
• When teachers return, their computer desktops will look different
• We need to facilitate their transition
• Learning: We spent a great deal of time teaching each other and learning from one another

• iBooks Creator - create on Mac, read on iOS mobile device
• iTunesU - Create in Safari, read on iOS mobile device
• Google Plus - open to our staff - instant help desk with shared screen
• Chrome Webstore - our leader created this which ROCKS
• Freedom Flix & True Flix - video resource options (paid)
• NETS and ITLS 
• Discussed what we were doing well and what we needed to work on
• We needed to read 
• Transitions to Digital Media
• ISTE.NETS-S