Elevate - Train Your Brain

Voted as one of the top apps in 2014, Elevate is a nice iPhone, iPad, or Android app which offers a wide variety of tasks focused on all parts of your brain.

You begin using the app by creating your account and taking a placement activity so your brain practice is adaptive to your needs.

The app is free, however you can upgrade to the premium version.  With the premium version you get access to additional games and your growth is charted against others online.

There are nearly 20 games in five areas of brain training including reading, writing, listening, speaking, and math.

 

Each day three different tasks, which take about 5-10 minutes, are available for you to complete.  Elevate then charts your individual growth over a period of time which you can access at any time by checking your performance.

This app would be perfect for a personalized middle school or high school 1-1 environment so students can track their improvement over the course of a month, semester, or year.  As a teacher, take 5-10 minutes during the evenings and Elevate your brain, which probably can be done during a commercial set while you are relaxing on the couch.

Jefferson Lab - Science Education Resources

There are several National Science Laboratories in the United States.  One of these, the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (Jefferson Lab), has a nice collection of  resources for middle school and high school science classrooms.

The Jefferson Lab Science Education site, iPad and chromebook friendly, contains resources for the teacher and student, including loads of games and videos, to assist with the physical science classrooms.  

Games can include Element Hangman

Or Speed Math Deluxe.

 

Watch videos from the Frostbite Theater where Joanna and Steve provide you with many liquid nitrogen experiments, as well as other scientific eye catching topics.  These videos are typically 1-4 minutes in length.





Another video series hosted at Jefferson Lab is Physics Out Loud containing 1-4 minute videos regarding many explanation of common words used in nuclear physics research.

If you are interested in hearing a 40 minute lecture from highly credible scientists, check out archived science lectures from as far back as the early 90's. Many interesting topics to choose from.


Again, a nice collection resources to help students learn and review physical science concepts.

HSTRY - Create Interactive Timelines

I’m always searching for new tools that allow for student creativity and critical thinking, particularly those that are device neutral with the only cost involved is time spent learning.  When new resources become accessible, I encourage teachers to implement them because often times the newness is enough motivation to get students highly engaged.  And with newness students embark on a learning quest figuring out how to use the resource enriching their critical thinking skills.

HSTRY seems to be spot on with these criteria as a tool to allow a person to put together a linear list of resources called a timeline.  Some timelines can be chronological by the calendar, while others may be viewed as different sections of a report.

 

Using the teacher login, they can create a class, then either manually add students or have students join via a class code.  The student will not need an email address, just a username and password.

One feature I look into from the student perspective is what they can view by searching public resources, which HSTRY calls timelines.  This is particularly valuable for elementary students in case they stumble upon high school curriculum inappropriate for their age level.  HSTRY only allows students to view their own timelines, or those provided to them from the teacher.  

The teacher can search timelines posted to the community, and with a click share with the class. Once a timeline is shared with the class, students will be able to comment on any item, and yes the teacher can moderate all comments.

 

Which brings me to cost.  To use HSTRY, it’s completely free.  There is a premium version which provides you with access to created content, for instance Timeline bundles about the American Revolution.

Timelines contain a series of blocks which may include a text block, an image block, a video block, a question block, or a “did you know” block.  The author is free to drag and drop the blocks freely to fit their intended linear path.  

Sharing of timelines is limited to the teacher sharing one they create or find to the students.  HSTRY is working on a feature where students can share timelines with their class, but are very hesitant at allowing students share timelines with the community.  Currently a student submits a timeline so only the teacher has view privileges.

A nice getting started task could be to have everyone create an “About Me” timeline.  Then use this tool to have students demonstrate understanding for many projects throughout the curriculum, like state reports, expedition reports, animal reports, book reviews, author biographies, science lab write ups, or even math concepts. 

Photomath - Mobile Device Solves Math Problems

 

I remember teaching Advanced Math in High School, and often times I would randomly write down a few Algebra problems for students to solve.  However, I also needed to solve them to generate a key.  Even though that isn't a huge hurdle, there is an app for that.

Photomath, available for most any mobile device.  Yes, using the camera you get the problem into your viewfinder, and the expression is either simplified or the equation is solved.  You don't even have to key in the problem.

 

You can examine the steps taken to solve the problem.

 

The app also contains a history of all the equations or expressions you've scanned.

This would be a nice tool for students to use in order to check that they complete practice problems correctly. 

At this time the app can simplify arithmetic expressions, interpret fractions, decimals, powers, and roots, and solve linear equations.  It can't comprehend higher level math like Trigonometry or Calculus, yet.  Hopefully in the future, as the app was released just a couple months ago.

Google Docs on the iPad - Continuing to Improve - Table Editing!

A frustration for many of the teachers and students has been the limited usability of google apps on the iPad.  It seems that Google hears the needs and does work on adding them....slowly but surely.

 A recently added feature to the Google Doc app on the iPad is the ability to finally view and edit in a table!  Tables have always caused a problem in the app before this.  Requiring students to use the browser to access which is always a few extra steps that teachers would like to avoid.


With this great addition, there is still a few things missing like creating the table inside the app.  This is hopefully an option that will make an appearance soon. (fingers crossed)  Right now it's just editing in an already created table.








Another Quick Google Doc Tip:  If there is a file you access often, or would like to continue to work on even when lacking internet access, be sure to choose to make that file available offline by choosing the option to "Keep on Device".  This is great to show students especially who have access to their iPads at home but may have little or no internet access outside of school.

Hour of Code - Are You Participating?

I would guess you could look around at this moment and observe several items that require the skills of computer programming.   How many do you see?

Most of us understand all the games on our cell phones are computer programming generated, but what about items not so recognizable like stop lights, microwave ovens, or automobiles.  This list is practically endless.

It is estimate by the year 2020 there will be 1,000,000 more computing jobs than students.  So what can we do?  Take part in the movement to inspire our youth and involve them in the hour of code.  It's a start.

The Hour of Code takes place December 8-14, 2014.  Over 52 million have tried an Hour of Code.



Here are a few resources that all work on an iPad.  Select one that works for you, or maybe try a couple.

• Kodable - an iPad app where you create code to travel a path and collect coins
• Angry Birds - Create code so angry bird captures the naughty pig
• Frozen -Create code so Elsa creates snowflakes
• Flappy Code - Learn to code flappy bird game
• Lightbot - Create code to light up all the blue squares
• Tynker - Several choices, both creation type projects and game oriented projects
• Khan Academy - Drag and drop code drawing shapes
• HopScotch - Drag and drop coding creating many different items
• Touch Develop - at least 8 different hour of code activities to choose from
• Join a workshop at your nearest Apple Store  

Post It App - Great for the Teacher iPad!

I used post its a lot in class.... exit tickets, brainstorming, questions and we still do in our teacher trainings.  Post-it has a free app that allows the user to take the notes with them, move them around, group them, even edit and add additional notes.

These are the actual physical paper post-its.    We used this app to collect thoughts by teachers at the NE Oregon Regional EdTech Cadre about coding in schools.

Teachers wrote thoughts onto Post Its and then used the app to categorize and compare common thoughts that teachers had in their small group. They then sent a picture of their board to our working blog so other groups could see what their thoughts were.


Lots of conversation grew from this as to how to use this app in the classroom. Most common was the comment of how this would be great for a single iPad classroom.  Capture brainstorming, vocabulary, exit tickets, etc... Teachers could use it for later evaluation or in class to project for the whole class to see and help group.