Student Presentation Apps

Today was my district's annual iDevice Mini-Conference. I always love these conferences because of all the learning and sharing. There are so many good ideas that come from them! I facilitated two sessions on student presentations. Because of the focus on iDevices, I shared several apps that I love to use for helping students share their learning. Rather than just focus on tools, I like to discuss ways to help students be better presenters. My inspiration comes from a blog post by Lisa...

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Awesome iPad App: Adobe Voice

Storytelling is a powerful way to inspire students and give them a voice. They inspire us, catch our attention, and solidify concepts in our mind. The way stories are created and shared can be just as powerful. Students don't need a tool to be so complicated that it gets in the way of the telling of the story.  Adobe Voice is an iPad app that follows this philosophy. Check out this two minute...

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Awesome iPad App: Sock Puppets

Digital storytelling is one of my favorite activities for students to do on the iPad. Letting them do this really brings out their creativity. If done correctly, students can still go through the writing process, learning all those needed skills, and still create a fun product in the end. Sock Puppets is one of those apps that lets you create digital stories. With it you can create your own puppet...

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Blog overload: students as blog authors

image courtesy pixabay.com In the last few posts here and here I discussed ways of managing student blogs by gathering the blog links into one location. This makes it very easy for the teacher to go through the blogs to comment on and monitor student writing. While working with a high school teacher to incorporate blogging I discovered a third way that can be really useful. Again, this is for...

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Youcanbook.me love

image courtesy youcanbook.me As a Digital Learning Coach in the Clark County School District I have 8 schools that I work with. I rotate through those schools, which means the day of the week I am on campus varies each time. As you can imagine, with that number of teachers and students scheduling can become a nightmare. It's hard to remember which teacher is in which room at which school. Fortunately...

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Blog overload: Use Feedly to manage student blogs

image courtesy feedly.com Teachers have limited time to read and assess student work. When you add in student blogging with all the accompanying posts and comments, the amount of work can increase as well. What teachers need is one place to view student blogs, instead of hunting down and bookmarking each URL. Blogging platforms such as Kidblog and Edublogs include classroom management tools...

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Blog overload: Keeping up with student blogs

Now that many schools are using Google Apps for Education, teachers are discovering Blogger as a viable platform for student blogging. It is easy to set up, all students with a GAFE account have access to it, and its highly customizable. The one major downside to it is that there is no classroom management component. In other words, teachers don't have one central place to view or moderate...

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Why educators should trust Wikipedia

I’m a huge advocate of using Wikipedia. I know a lot of educators that cringe at the thought of students using Wikipedia as a source of information. For whatever reason there’s little trust in the accuracy of the information. I’ve addressed some of those concerns on my blog at In Defense of Wikipedia. Recently, Jeff Utecht, an educator/consultant/author that I follow on Twitter, posted on his blog...

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