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