iTunes U

iTunes U This looks like something I'd like to put together for my Bio kids.

Even orangutans learn with iPad. Shouldn't our students too?
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/05/09/orangutans-learn-to-communicate-via-ipad/

iFest June 9th

Trent sent an email out for iFest,  seems like something at least one of us should check out.  I will be out of town and not able to attend.  It's only a 1/2 day...

Prezi.com - More Creative Presentations

So.... it takes a while to learn and do, but it makes presentations more interesting.  Check out the demos and you can see a humble one I did for next years Back to School Night.

http://prezi.com/of8uxmkrujap/back-to-school-night/

"Delicious" - A Sharable & Publishable Bookmarking Site

http://delicious.com/

Great to share bookmarks of websites you want kids to peruse.  I made a list of summer programs my kids can look into:

http://delicious.com/stacks/view/I1tKvZ

Puppet Pals - Customizable Cartoons for Variety

Apple App Store - Puppet Pals ---  Soooo, it may seem silly and a waste of time... but... if you're dealing with dry material and you want to introduce something that will make the kids remember because of its ridiculousness, then try Puppet Pals.  It's free, but you can upgrade for 2.99 to get additional characters - which I did. 

At the bottom of this page:
http://polishedplay.blogspot.com/

is a video instruction on how to make the cartoons.

Penultimate - App for Writing on iPad

If you're frustrated that you can't type fast, if you wish you could just draw something quickly, then for $.99 is a good investment in Penultimate.  I plan on using it to write quick sentences for projecting or basic diagrams.

Makers - Video Interviews of Exceptional Women

Check out the Free App from PBS and AOL that has hundreds of interviews with leading women of our time.  Not only educational, but inspiring.

Turnitin.com - Peer Editing

Turnitin.com is not just a plagiarism detection software... it's got some good functionality that I've been exploring.  PVHS pays extra to have the peer editing functionality.  I used that recently and the kids overwhelmingly thought it was helpful and much more fun than doing it on paper in class.  The software allows the teacher to ask questions that the reviewer must answer and how many words must be in his/her response (so the answer isn't just "good").  Also the reviewer can add edits within the peer's essay.  The students found it fun to have that much control over putting comments where they liked.  You can have them do it anonymously but I prefer not.  Accountability helps ensure politeness.  It takes a bit to set up the class and assignment, but once it's done it's worth it.  I'll be using it a lot next year.

Survey Monkey - Not New But Effective

I've been using Survey Monkey to see the problem areas my kids are having in Grammar before the Star.  I've created surveys on certain areas such as pronouns.  Students love seeing the cumulative results.  They've even asked for period specific surveys so they can compete with the other classes.  The free account lets you create 10 questions.  PVHS has paid for an account that lets you add more.  But, you've got to gain access from administration or Trent.

Quizlet - Flashcards to share

I had a student type in hundreds of words and definitions sorted by type so that all the students could log on to study, play games, and quiz themselves.  They can do this online or through their handheld electronic device.  It's a great site that you create once and use again and again.  Quizlet.com

How to make a nearly 500-year-old play about a morose, pampered prince relevant to contemporary high school seniors? Try iPad’s innovative, interactive “Shakespeare in Bits: Hamlet Edition” and other creative multi-touch texts complete with cool 3D graphics. Instead of ongoing, old-fashioned paper based lessons, traditionally bound books and handouts (and endless interoffice call slips, notes, and forms); students can create e-readers and short books with iBooks Author. Ipads also provide a better way to take notes. Students simply swipe over text to highlight (teachers too), and organized notes are ready- made and ready to be posted on Edline. In addition, iPads in the classroom offer a virtual library at teachers’ and students’ fingertips. And fast, fluid, graphics make visual, interactive learning content cool and appealing to every learning style.

Students are excited...

In AP & regular US kids are using gflash, mostly on iphones, to create flash cards for the AP exam, and STAR exam. 

In Women's Studies students will be using goodreads on phones or ipads as we work through The Handmaids Tale.  One group will be reading electronically.

In both cases students were visibly excited to have electronic options for their assignments, which speaks to how technology is a motivator with our kids.

iPad's Frog Dissection & Rat Dissection Applications: Humane, Budget Conscious Classrooms

As a teacher and mother promoting humane education, I am always disturbed by vivisection and animal experimentation in the classroom.

California law stipulates that NO students can be failed for not participating in experiments/projects that violate their parents'/personal code of ethics. Students must be given an alternative assignment AND this assignment option must be made available to them at the onset of potentially objectionable projects and in lieu of other activities. Students are also not to feel singled out for selecting alternative assignments, which should be promoted just as much by teachers and administrators as other activities. 

iPad not only provides excellent, ethical alternatives to traditional dissection, but saves schools money. At approximately $3.95, iPad's Frog Dissection and Rat Dissection applications are kind to animals and school budgets, alleviating costly purchases of so many questionably obtained animal laboratory specimens. 

Clearly, all PVPUSD teachers, administrators and parents must promote humane alternatives to dissection and animal experimentation. iPad meets this demand.

Instead of using cruelty in the classroom, why not create lasting impressions of kindness and compassion? 

Infostripe

This could be an interesting way to make links to course content (videos, photos, etc.) available to students in app form.
http://infostripe.com/

VGA Adapter

To connect your iPad to your LCD projector you will need a VGA adapter.  I bought one at Mac Mall for $29.  Tried it this morning it worked well!

Teachers can inspire student creativity via Internet and digitally-based lessons. That's one of the messages behind journalist Jonah Lehrer's new book Imagine: How Creativity Works (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

Diverse urban cityscapes and classrooms model the Internet's potential to motivate creativity, a pivotal task for teacher's charged with cultivating creative mindsets needed for a diverse, global future. Creative minds, Harvard's Howard Gardner (2010) reminds us, are at a premium in a virtual world. And group interaction and collaboration play a major role in creative innovation.

"Instead of sharing links with just our friends, or commenting anonymously on blogs," Lehrer writes, "we must engage with strangers and strange ideas. The Internet has such creative potential; it's so ripe with . . .  originality, so full of people eager to share their work and ideas."

What does this mean for the classroom, along with PVHS' own iPad challenge?

Educators invested in advancing classroom technology are charged with sharing ideas and practices both school wide and within the community. Good teaching, found in constructivist, collaborative, talk-centered classrooms, not only inspires creativity, but also, when coupled with digitally based lessons, has infinite potential to transform students' lives locally and globally.

Brittanica focuses on online encyclopedia; halts traditional texts

Britannica's halt of print edition triggers sales

By DON BABWIN, Associated Press – 7 hours ago  

CHICAGO (AP) — It turns out all Encyclopaedia Britannica had to do to breathe new life into the sale of its print edition was to kill it.

Since Britannica announced last month that it was discontinuing its print editions, the Chicago-based company said sales have skyrocketed. It has sold all but 800 of the 4,000 sets of the 32-volume 2010 edition it had left at a Kentucky warehouse, the company said.

"We were averaging about 60 sets a week and the next thing we knew, we were selling 1,050 a week," Britannica spokesman Peter Duckler said Thursday. "When people thought they were going to be around forever there was no rush to buy one and then suddenly, boom, and now there is a scarcity and it's a collector's item."

Britannica announced March 13 that it would stop publishing print editions of its flagship encyclopedia for the first time in 244 years and instead focus on its online encyclopedia.

Duckler said business got so busy after that — Britannica at one point was selling the print editions at a clip of about two sets per minute — that a senior vice president and chief marketing officer jumped in and started taking orders over the phone.

The company will likely sell out by the end of the month, Duckler said. He added that Britannica — which first published its book form encyclopedia in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1768 — will hold onto a few sets so they can be displayed somehow or donated to museums.

As they did before the announcement, the sets are selling for $1,395. If that sounds like a lot of money, secondary sellers online are asking more than $3,200 a set for the 2010 edition — and that's before the company has run out of the ones it has.

Duckler said the sudden spike in sales hasn't prompted anyone at Britannica to rethink the decision to discontinue selling the print edition. Though the scarcity of the 2010 edition may be making it popular, the company has long known that the print sales were never going to come back to anything approaching the peak year of 1990 when 120,000 were sold.

Britannica, which published the first CD-ROM edition in 1989, introduced an online version in 1994. Online versions of the encyclopedia now serve more than 100 million people around the world and are available on mobile devices, the company said.

"It just makes sense to embrace our digital products," he said.

Copyright © 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

I've been looking at free apps that have applications for the classroom.  

gFlash+
for creating flash cards, it can be used on iphones or ipads

Goodreads
This is a "social networking" site for book lovers.  I am considering using it for my classes when we have literature circles.    They can comment on their books, rate books, and track reading progress.  iphones/ipads

iPad Security, iBooks

From a listserv (once we get some iPads in student hands):

iPad Security -- "it is really not that hard to prevent kids from getting apps, you just set up account passwords and lock the ability to change accounts, and lock down access to the app store and they won't be able to open it (in fact the icon won't even show up without the correct passcode). You can turn off the browser entirely if you want, as well as Youtube, the iTunes store app, and many others. Also of note: you can install the "Where's My iPad" app and lock it down, this offers a layer of anti-theft security (though a savvy kid will know to simply connect with a cable and reset it to factory)."

iBooks -- "If you are writing iBooks, you can add all sorts of great additional content to your books, including videos, images, assessments, and really informative internet links and the like, to allow students to explore the content. I think they are incredibly engaging and allow a level of flexibility that you simply cannot get from a traditional text."

Teachers must make learning meaningful in the digital age

Apple is the leading promoter of replacing traditional textbooks with e-books and electronic devices, according to Michael Hiltzik, L.A. Times columnist ("Hyping Tech Will Not Help Students," Feb. 5, 20212). Consequently, the value of "fancy educational electronics" in the classroom is "commercially processed claptrap," Hiltzik says. Digital classrooms are just another fad, Hiltzik adds, and pushing technology in schools is not driven by pedagogical concerns, but pure corporate profitability. Additionally, wannabe tech educators and innovators make no effort to integrate groundbreaking technology in the classroom, Hiltzik maintains. Drives for digital classrooms are as effective, he claims, as "snake oil."

 Snake oil? Technology has transformed the world more over the past fifty years than all prior historical eras combined, with more people collaborating, competing in real time across global borders than any time in history. Tech-savvy students today are not only the first global, digital generation, but have never known life without the Internet. Yet many old-fashioned public schools still teach to a world of the past. Curricula developed fifty to one hundred years ago fails to suffice, or entice the largest, most diverse, digital demographic of students ever enrolled in high schools and colleges.

 More than ever, teachers have the crucial task of making learning meaningful in the digital age.

Welcome

Welcome to the PVHS technology blog.  The purpose of this blog is to provide a forum for PVHS teachers to share technology practices in their classrooms with their colleagues in order to promote best practices.  The hope is that the discussion expands beyond the use of iPads and document cameras and evolves into a library of exemplary practices and lessons across a wide range of subjects and ability levels.