Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Today, I learned about the iVisual info Touch iPad Infographic App through Richard Byrne @ iPad Apps For School.  We have implemented infographics in our high school Human Geography last year so I was intrigued to see if an iPad app could be used with students.

I created an infographic for Lunch N' Learn statistics.  This is the first full year of volunteer learning opportunities for our high school staff.


Positives of iVisual Touch 
  • Free Form Writing Lines
  • Multiple Backgrounds
  • Four Pages of Icons
  • Colorful World Flags
  • Color Palette
  • Seven Fonts
  • Add Pictures (Great to use with other apps such as Skitch or PicCollage)
  • Grid Lines for Creating
  • Save To Camera Roll (Great for uploading to Google Drive)
Negatives of iVisual Touch
  • No Locking Options of Objects
  • No Undo Button
  • No Automatic Save
  • Free app great to try, but limited options (I purchased the full app)
Impact On Students:
Creativity: Students can continue to use their imagination to create graphics that express their summary skills.




Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Our calculus teacher was tutoring a student on a Friday.  He forgot to mention a crucial part of the solution. He emailed the student the critical part to the solution.  On Monday, he asked the student, "Did you get me email?"  The student replied,

     "No, I never check my school email!"

Solution: Create a trigger and action using IFTTT.  IFTTT is so simple, a teacher almost can't afford to not offer it to their students.



Great thing about this was that I created the trigger and action on my iPhone in front of the teacher.  He sent me an email and the text showed up on my iPhone.  Demonstrating how it worked so quickly was a selling point!
Video Link
Saving video to an iPad from Google Drive was not possible until I found a solution courtesy of one of our IT people, @kenwestphal.

Collaborating with multiple students on different iPads or taking video with an iPhone or iPod was a difficult task because the Google Drive app only allowed downloading of images for use in iMovie.  Using the G Drive (Green) app now allows for videos to be imported into iMovie once the video is uploaded to a student's or teacher's Google Drive account.

If students are recording video using an Android device, the video will need to be converted before G Drive will import it into iMovie on the iPad.  We use Any Video Converter.

G Drive (Green) App
Google Drive App

View how it works!  Don't forget to have students log out of the G Drive app.


Video Link

Sunday, December 15, 2013

I searched for a web tool that students could write a book about Canada and would, according to a middle school teacher,
  • Drag and drop pictures or easy to insert pictures from web or upload
  • Easy to add text
  • Embed on blogger
  • Log In with Gmail or easy to create an account
  • Chromebook or laptop/desktop
I tried Google Drive tools and couldn't get into the template gallery according to an error message.

I tried widbook.com and it was a social site that I didn't think students needed to mess around with.

I tried storybird.com and it was also a lengthy sign up process and constituted social networking.

The above products, while great in their own right, didn't meet most of the criteria that the teacher was looking for.

I decided to look at Haiku Deck for creating an online book.  We have used Haiku Deck for a number of other creation projects and I believe this tool will work for creating a book. View short book.



Thursday, December 12, 2013

I learned about Printing YouTube video clips from SLATE!

The directions are easy.

The result lands in your Google Drive or on paper.


Impact On Students:
Critical Thinking:  Teachers print the YouTube video out or create it digitally.  Students write a reflection to summarize their learning or pull out video elements.

The Trading Card activity was taking to a level by Mrs. Brylski that actually had the students print the Trading Cards and trade!

Video Link



Impact On Students:
Creativity:  Students needed to decipher the information that should be placed for each question.
Collaboration:  The discussion that incurred during the trading of cards was pretty in depth.  Some great feedback was provided for each student by each student.
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