Quick Hits #3 - App Edition #Edchat

I hope everyone had a very wonderful Thanksgiving or a pretty good Thursday for non-American readers. :-)

I wanted to share some quick thoughts on some apps I have been playing with lately.

iAnnotate PDF - $9.99

I really like this app. I have been looking for apps to use on my iPad since I knew I was getting a class set and this app has been very useful. It allows the user to take any PDF and annotate it freely. You can use a variety of tools to highlight, underline, strike-through and even stamp. Once you are done annotating the document, you can save it with the annotations and email it to yourself or others. I like the app because it would allow students to annotate pieces I send to them and they could send it back to me with their thoughts.

The app also allows for Dropbox integration which I love. I can pulls documents from Dropbox and annotate them and send them back to Dropbox. I recently uploaded my class list to the app and used it to enter in grades while I check writing assignments. After I had completed all of the checking, I was able to quickly reference the grades on the app and enter them into the online grade book. I can keep the PDF there and continue to annotate it over time. I have found it to be very valuable.

The app might seem a bit pricey, but I think it is a fair value for how I want to use it and how I hope to use it in the future. If you are looking for ways to annotate PDFs of the go, I suggest you take a look at iAnnotate PDF for your iPad.

The Tower Pulse - Free

For those of you who do not know, I am a co-adviser to the the school's new online newspaper, The Tower Pulse. We started last year and have picked up steam this year. I help on the tech end of the paper and my co-adviser works on the journalistic end. It's been a great marriage and the kids have turned out an amazing product. I thought it would be cool if I could turn the paper into an app for the students to download for free to access the content on the go. After some searching, I found UppSite.com. UppSite takes your WordPress site and converts it into an app. It will create a free Android app and help you set up an Apple Developer account so your app can be made available on OS Devices. I already had a Developer account, so I was able to create Android and Apple apps. After two weeks, the app was ready to go on all devices. The kids are excited and I cannot wait to see how many people download the app. If you have a WordPress site and are looking to create an app, take a look at UppSite.com.

Charlie Brown Christmas - $4.99

This cartoon is one of my all-time favorites. There is no question about it. I love every part of this cartoon. I stumbled upon the app looking through the store and downloaded it without question. That is not the wisest of decisions for app purchasing, especially at $4.99, but I was not disappointed. It is the complete story told by the original voice of Charlie Brown and has all of the original voices from the cartoon. It is the complete cartoon with many different interactive elements. My son, Leo, is only 6 months old and he was mesmerized by the app. He would touch the screen and turn falling snow into giant snowflakes or touch one of the Peanuts characters and they would dance or talk. He loved it and that made the app priceless in my mind. If you loved the cartoon growing up, you will love this app, and so will your kids. Here is a video from the creator of the app with more details. 

 I wanted to share some cool apps I've been using the past few weeks. I will have some more app suggestions in the near future as my class set of iPads sees more action with the students. I hope all of you have a great weekend.

- @TheNerdyTeacher

Quick Hits #2

Here are some things that have come across my mailbox that I wanted to share with all of you. Take a look and see how you might use these tools or take this ideas for your classroom.

Sister Act's School Challenge Initiative

The marketers of Sister Act have just launched Sister Act's School Challenge Initiative. They are asking teachers from grades 5 through 9 to share their class’ acts of kindness with us by submitting a photo of their class giving back to the community, along with the story behind it, for a chance to win a class field trip to Sister Act on Broadway! You can find all the details here.

Follow the link for more information on Sister Act.

I love the idea of having entire classes get behind good deeds and sharing them with the world.

Don't worry about curriculum for a couple of days and try to do something good as a class.


Acceptly

Acceptly is great tool for students trying to get into college. Their blog offers many great tips for preparing for college interviews and essays. Acceptly looks at the many different parts of a student's profile and gives them advice on how to improve different parts to increase their chances of getting into the school of their choice. As college admissions continues to get more competitive, it's nice to give a student help to improve their chances.

Classroom Makeover

Here is a fun contest where a class can make a music video and win a $75,000 Interactive Classroom Makeover!

Here are the contest rules for submissions.

• Be in the format of a music video that is either an original song or a parody of an original song that demonstrates or envisions the use of technology in the classroom such as:
  • Your vision of a classroom that is creatively and effectively using technology to enhance learning.
  • How your class uses technology every day to make the learning experience great.
  • How your class used technology to make a class project better.
  • How a class project could have been better with technology.
  • How you plan to use technology in a class project in the future.
• Feature the teacher submitting the video and at least one student. All students that are in the video must be in the grade or age category for which the video is being submitted.
• Include "eInstruction" at least once in the lyrics of the song and show the eInstruction^® logo.
• Show an image of one or more of the products below, or show them in use:

• End by directing viewers to the contest website www.2011classroommakeover.com to vote for the best video.
• Not exceed 2:30 minutes in length. Due to differences in rendering times for different video formats, entries that are one or two seconds longer than 2:30 may still be accepted.  Video must be in a format that can be uploaded to Shycast’s website, i.e. mpeg (recommended), mov (recommended), qt, avi, mp4, mpe, mpg, or wmv (least recommended) with a Maximum file size of 100 MB 

 The submission deadline is October 25th, but you might be able to put something together in time to with this great prize. 

Quick Hits #EdChat

One of the things I love to do is review products, but with school starting, I just do not have the same time as I once had. I decided one cool thing I could do would be write a bunch of quick hits.

A quick hit is a very brief overview of a site I think is worth your time. A few sentences on why I like it and why you should check it out. I'm starting with a few cool things here, so I hope you like them. I encourage you to go and explore these sites/apps on your own.

ImageChef.com

Here is a great site that allows you do great things with pictures and words. Using templates, you can create word mosaics like this one.

 

You can also do Photo Frames, Poetry Blender and Sketch Pad. I could have countless hours of fun using this site and students could as well. I will be having my students blog regularly this year, and ImageChef.com will be a site that I will be directing them to. 

ImageChef also has an app called Framed! I'm not screaming, that ! is part of the name. A fun mobile way to use ImageChef on the go. It is $0.99 and worth a look. 

Chopsticks Culture

Here is a fun little app that shows the English and Chinese names for various foods. It is a fun and simple app to challenge your friends and yourself as you try and learn Chinese. The app could also be helpful if you are traveling and need to the exact name for a Chinese dish. The app is $2.99 and might be worth picking up if you are trying to learn Chinese. 

Present.Me

Present.Me is an exciting tool that should be able to find a place in your classroom. This is a free tool (There are paid options that give access to more tools) that allows the user to record their PowerPoint presentation and share it with others. The free account allows for 15 minutes of recording time. I think this is the right amount of time for any classroom presentation. A student shouldn't need any more than this.

I really like the idea of having students record their presentations and posting them so others can see it. Making presentation a bit more social will widen the audience and hopefully motivate the students to do a better job.

I definitely recommend checking out Present.Me to see if it is what you are looking for in online presentations.

Report Card Comments

Here is an interesting site that allows a user to use pre-made report card comments or upload their own. Here is a video that shows how the system works.

I like to give personalized feedback to my students, but this could be a nice way to get some of those common phrases I find myself writing over and over again. I think this is worth checking out, especially when it comes to report card time.