This week Friday
Five is really random! This is the last of the random posts for a while. The next few weeks will be devoted to
technology that can be used to support a PBL project in your classroom.
1. Why Didn’t I think of that? Do you ever have one of those moments that you
find something so simple that you wonder why didn’t I think of that? You may be
smarter than me but I had one of those moments while searching for this week’s
Friday Five. I found a link to a school’
in New Jersey’s Excel project. They taught second graders coordinate grids
by having them use the fill feature to fill each cell a different color to
create a gingerbread house. I know this is a fifth grade standard but it is a
great intro to using Excel for any grade. Their coordinates and template are
included on the link.
2. App Control:
I recently had a teacher ask me about locking an app so students had to
stay on a certain app without changing.
I’ll attempt to step you through the process. Click on settings. Under the general tab look
for the Accessibility section and click on it.
Look for Guided Access, click, and slide the button so that it turns it
on. Click set passcode. Enter a passcode
and then you are done. Open your
app. To activate the Guided Access,
triple click the home button. A border
will appear around the app. Click the
start button. Now students are locked in
the app. To disable the Guided Access,
triple click again, enter your passcode and touch end. This may be especially helpful for young
students that randomly wander through apps.
3. Thinglink:
This is a modern day interactive poster.
Upload a picture and tag it with web content. The image can then be shared to make it
interactive. You can annotate images, embed interactive images, or record an
instructional message for students. They offer a free sign up for educators.
All images can be embedded practically anywhere. My students will be using this
next week in their study of Geographic Regions.
They will choose a biome and add video links of themselves describing
the region. I can’t wait to try it!
4. Chirp App:
This is a great app for sharing information such as weblinks, notes, and
pictures across ios devices. Just load
the app on all of the ios devices that you want to chirp/ share
information. Chose the content and hit
the chirp button. It is a great way to
push out a picture that you want students to “mark-up” or label in another
app. Such a quick formative assessment.
You can also send links so that all students are going to the correct website. This
may become one app that you wonder how you lived without it if you have
multiple devices in your classroom.
5. App Smashing: Whenever you use more than one app to
complete a project it is call app smashing.
At the iLivetolearniLovetogrow has a great App Smash to
practice vocabulary. They used Storymaker,
Balloon Free, and PicCollage to make a mini project that helps students learn
their weekly vocabulary words. What are
some of your favorite app Smashes?
Have a
Great Weekend!
