Google Classroom and iPads in a Music Classroom

I love being out in schools and hearing how teachers are using the technology they have available in their classrooms and it's even more exciting when it comes from a non-core subject teacher.

In one of our schools in out region we have a music teacher, Jordan Bremrose at Ione Community School, where students have one to one iPads. She reached out to figure out a workflow for using the pdfs in Google Classroom of music note activities that she uses in her classes.

As with any technology little glitches were occurring along the way.  We had to make sure students were logged into their network filter which was a common issue because Google Classroom would load and refresh even without logging onto the network but when they tried to open the PDF it wasn't viewable.   Next we worked through how to make the pdf open in another app.  This was an issue if the students were logging into Google Classroom through the browser and not in the app on the iPad.  

For pdf annotating we used TinyPDF.  It was free, highly rated, and very easy to use - just remind students they can zoom in and out when tying to draw notes on the staff with their big fingers! Then the last major step how to send it back to classroom or drive so that they could turn it in.   Lots of steps to us, but for the kids, they worked together and quickly figured it out.

While visiting, Jordan also shared that students turn in practice videos to Google Classroom.  Older students are allowed to take their iPads home and students are encouraged to record themselves practicing and upload them for homework.  This way Jordan can listen to students practice, as well as students being able to listen and watch themselves play.  As I left that day, we had a brief discussion on mp3 recorders on the iPad as well for auditions and other assignments.  

It's encouraging to see teachers embrace and think of new ways of using the tools they are provided with.

Seesaw - ePortfolios for Elementary Setting

There are many great ePortfolio options available, including Evernote or Google, however they can be a bit overwhelming for the students in primary grades.  Especially if you want to have them save exemplars.

Seesaw is a free iDevice app that is very simple to use allowing any student capable of using an iPad to take a photo to save an exemplar into their ePortfolio.

Instead of calling them ePortfolio's, Seesaw uses the term journals, both class journals containing works displayed by the entire class and individual journals containing works by any particular student.

The process is quite simple.  As a teacher you create your free account which will be tied to your classroom.  Set up all your students inside that class.

From there you can add either a photo, video, drawing, or something from the camera roll.

 

Once you upload an item, like a photo, you can add annotation, voice recording, or text.

Then you select which student is associated with the artifact.  You can select multiple students if it is a group project.

The app allows for student access as well.  The only rights students have will be to add artifacts. Students do not need an account, just scan a QR code and they are in.  While logged in as a student they will have the ability to view any artifact from within the class, not just their own.

Let the students do the work: take the picture, create a drawing, shoot a video, or select a project from the camera roll to insert into their own journal.  As a safe guard, before it is finalized into a students journal the teacher must approve the artifact from within their teacher account.




Seesaw allows for you to invite parents so they have ability to see only their child's artifacts.

If you have been looking for an ePortfolio type tool to use with K-3rd grade, this is a perfect fit.  Easy to use so students do the work, teacher has full control over anything posted, and parents have access to their child's work.  Also a great visual recap come conference time.

Kahoot or Quizizz - Game Based Classroom Response Systems

These two free, device neutral, online resources are sure to bring high engagement and active participation into any classroom.  The idea is simple, students answer questions in a competitive atmosphere, there will be a winner.

For both Kahoot and Quizizz, the facilitator creates a series of questions to be answered by the participants.  Each question can have a time limit before the participant must select a response.  The quicker the participant chooses a response, the more points they earn providing their choice was correct.

Using Kahoot, the questions are asked to the participants one at a time.  Participants view the projected screen, answer a question by selecting the corresponding color on their device, points are awarded, and a new question is provided.  When finished, persons with the most points will be displayed.

Using Quizizz, the facilitator starts the activity at which time participants are given questions in a random order.  The participants read the questions on their device and answer them at their own pace.  Once all participants complete the activity, persons with the most points will be displayed.


Quizizz would be a great tool to use for an entire class, or as a center since it is student driven.  Kahoot is teacher driven providing time for discussion between each question being asked.

I've tried using both resources with groups of at least 40, and each time they worked fine.

Both Kahoot and Quizizz allows teachers to create their own questions, which can include images. When finished with the activity, the teacher can save the data describing how students answered each question. Teachers can explore through the many public assessments created and shared by others.

In either case, these opportunities provide a nice review experience or possibly a motivating pre-assessment experience.  Definitely stated, the experience will be fun, highly energetic, and competitive.

Classflow - an Engaging Presentation Tool

Imagine presenting to your students a typical PowerPoint or Prezi.  You have a great presentation planned with images illustrating key ideas instead of a screen filled with text.  However, this presentation is still in the form students watch while teachers present. 




What if you can push individual slides of a presentation to student devices, so those sitting in the back row who forgot their glasses aren't squinting to see the slide?  Those that are losing attention because they are looking over a half dozen other students, can now maintain focus because the material is 6-12 inches in front of them.

And what if students could respond back by adding content to an existing slide, in which the instructor obtains x number of alternative results from students and can select which slide or slides to display in front of the class.

Classflow is a free online tool allowing teachers to have engaging presentations with their students.



Some of you are asking, but "Nearpod" does that already.  Correct, this is very similar to Nearpod.  One difference is Classflow also integrates with an existing Interactive Whiteboard, the Active Inspire or Promethean environment.

First step is to create your free online teacher account at Classflow.

If you are an Active Inspire user, give your students the class code and have them join your Classflow session.  Students can join using the Classflow Student app or connecting through classflow.com/student. 

Start by pushing out flipchart pages to student devices with a click of a button inside the software.

When you want the two way engagement piece you'll need to toggle over to the Classflow website.  Send students a slide in "Ad-hoc mode", which keeps your students in the same class as they are when you're using Classflow inside Inspire.

With the Classflow Student app, students can use pens, shapes, text, and even add images from the camera or their photo album.

As a teacher, you also have the traditional student response opportunities like multiple choice, text, numeric, and true false for questioning the class.

Another nice student response feature is the Word Seed.  Great for brainstorming ideas with your students as they enter in their text response, and words are placed in a circle around the slide as they send in their results.


Once you begin using Classflow, look into more advanced features like integrating Active Expression or assessment activities, or individualizing content by providing students with web links and videos during a lesson.

If you do choose to use the web based Classflow presentation platform, you can upload existing Promethean Flipchart or SmartBoard Notebook presentations.

Classflow is a program that may take some time learning, so be sure to check out the Classflow Youtube Channel.

Number Line

Integrating Math Manipulatives into a classroom can provide a rich experience for kids learning about math concepts and number sense.  One manipulative that is most likely under utilized is the number line.


Clarity Innovations has created a free Number Line App for the iPad.  This app can be used to help students visualize the four major mathematical operations.


Options in the app allow you to change the tic marks for several different common increments, or you can even enter in your own custom numbering.  There is a setting for tic mark spacing, and a setting to cover up the tic mark labels. 



















 Once you adjust your settings, you can use the text tool to type in numeric expressions or equations.

 

Finally there is a jump tool where you can bring in your jumps, as many as you like, both forward and backwards for addition and subtraction.  The jump interval can be manipulated to be as long or short as you wish, with the interval visible or not. 

 

An annotation tool allows you to add free hand items for additional clarity.

 

Currently this app is limited to just positive numbers. Several people have posted comments requesting to have the number line extend into negative numbers.  The app also does not provide a way to share your work, so if you want students to create images they would need to take a screen shot of their iPad using Home - ON/OFF sequence.

The Number Line App is a great resource for elementary students learning the concepts of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division while also strengthening their number sense.

Klikaklu - Picture Matching Treasure Hunts

Are you familiar with Geocaching, where you use GPS to find a hidden treasure by navigating to a location and using some clues if necessary?  Do you remember the scavenger hunts you went on as a kids where you collected a series of objects from around the neighborhood?





Klikaklu is a free app available for iPhone, iPad, and even Android.  This free app allows you to navigate through a modern treasure hunt.  At each stop there is a photo, find the photo, match it with your iDevice, and proceed onto the next stage. If you complete the hunt successfully, a reward may be waiting on the end.

Where do you find these treasure hunts, or better yet, can you make them?  Klikaklu just revised their app so during the first seven days after installation you can create treasure hunts.  After seven days, you'll need to purchase the upgrade for $4.99 to be able to create new or modify existing treasure hunts.

When creating a Klikaklu hunt you will have two options, either linearly where students progress from clue to clue in order, or as a scavenger hunt where they get all the clues up front and can find them in any order.





This would be a great activity to have incoming students at your school, for instance Freshman orientation day, find different locations throughout the school property.

You could use this activity for regular classes where each stop is a question, math, science, or language arts, and they must generate answers along the way.  Klikaklu has this feature built in where you can have students answer multiple choice, true false, short text, or number questions at each clue and upon completion of the hunt.

For creative writers you could put stops where words are visible,  students must bring back the words they found, and when finished write a story using all the words they chose to bring back.

Klikaklu would be very entertaining for those special days throughout your school calendar. 

Who knows, maybe you'll find that pot of gold at the end of your next treasure hunt.

Ask3, a Collaborative Screencasting App for the Classroom

Many of us in education have a few "Go To" apps we think work well in the classroom.  Some of these apps are free, while others come at a cost.

For example, Educreations is a great free screencasting app, or you can pay for a different screencasting app called Explain Everything which contains many more rich features.  However, the question comes up quite often how do students share their creative content with the class?

Try Ask3.  This is a wonderful, free, screencasting app designed for collaborative classroom use. iPad only with IOS 6.1 or later.




To begin, a teacher creates themselves a teacher account.  Then they create a class which uses a class code.

Students sign up with their first name, and the class code.  No email or online registration required for the students.

Anyone can create a screen cast video using the basic tools, such as annotations, record, and inserting images.  While creating the video one can pause and start throughout.  However, there is not a feature which allows you to modify your audio content without starting over.

Once a person thinks their video is ready to share, they upload it to the class with a title.  Everyone in the class will find all the videos in the "Bulletin Board" section.

While viewing the video one can leave comments, both in written form and as a video.  The cool aspect is you can pause the original video, then leave your video comment creating a video beginning where you paused.  A viewer can also star videos and/or comments that they want to flag as helpful.

This tool can be great for math students to share math problems or exit tickets, science students to explain concepts, social studies students to share map annotations, elementary students to share animal or state reports, and much more. 

Give this app a try, as it may become one of your "Go To" apps.

Virtually Visit the Smithsonian on the iPad!

The online virtual tour of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History has always been a favorite resource of mine for the classroom.  Students can virtually take a field trip and tour the many displays in 360 views of different areas of the museum.  There is now a mobile friendly version of this site that has made this site possible on the mobile devices, both iOS and Android.  

Choose the gallery that you would like to visit from the list.  Each gallery is full of many rooms. Geology, Egyptian mummies, mammals, the Ice Age, fossils.... just to name a few! 

Inside each room your can use your finger to move in all directions and zoom in closer on displays.  Tap on the images along the bottom to move, or use the arrows on the iPad to move to the next room. 

This is a mobile friendly website, not an app.  To save it to your iPad for easy access by students, add the address to the Home Screen.  

Little Stars Customizable Multi Player Skills Practice App PreK/Primary

Little Stars Toddler Game is a great Pre-K to kindergarten practice app for students.   This free app is ad-free, great layout, for both the iPad and iPod, and easy to use.   Students can work in one or two player mode, listen to the word, and choose the image that matches.  Correct answers get a verbal congratulations and moves their rocket along the path.  

The preloaded topics of the game can be seen below, covering many basic skills.  Teachers can choose which categories the game will draw from in the settings.

The power in this app, as well as most by Alligator Apps, is that the app is customizable.  Teachers can adapt the game to include categories of skills that may not be loaded already or modify the categories already loaded to match their curriculum materials.  By using the camera and microphone built into the iPad, this is very easy.  

Add categories like basic sight words, images from around the classroom or school, teacher and student names, etc. are just a few ideas for customizing the app for a specific classroom or student. In addition by recording the audio, this app could be customized in any language expanding the possibilities!

Restricting Websites on IOS 7

After upgrading to IOS 7 last week, there were some features this new operating system contained that were intriguing.  One in particular was the ability to control which websites were allowed or not allowed to come through on an iPad.

There are three choices for restricting websites:  All access, limiting adult content, or specific websites only.

If you want some tighter restrictions on content for teens or tweens, a good setting is "limiting adult content".  This setting allows students to navigate to most any kidsafe website, but should block the rest.  If you feel a site is valued and want to have access to that website, click "Allow website" and key in the 4 digit restrictions code.

Another example of using these restrictions is to select sites you want students to use in order to obtain research on a particular subject.  For instance, students could be researching about a state, an animal, Oregon Trail, or Lewis and Clark.  You can collect all the websites you want available for that research, enter them in the "specific websites only" list, and the rest of the Internet will become off limits during this time period.

If you are restricting sites on your iPad, when opening a new tab in Safari you are provided with colorful icon bookmarks for just those particular websites.

Restricting websites on an iPad further than your district web filtering has advantages, and now IOS 7 gives you rights to tinker with those settings.

Annotate on PDF using PaperPort Notes

Paperport Notes is a great free iPad app that allows you to annotate on top of pdf documents stored in your dropbox or google drive account.

Certain criteria to look for when previewing free apps are:

• Does the app push out ads?  Paperport Notes does not.
• Does the app allow you to work on more than one project? Paperport allows you to work on multiple projects at once.  This is great if you are using an iPad center in classroom where several students share an iPad during the day.  Each student can work on their own project and have it saved in the Paperport table of contents.
• Does the app only allow you to share via social media? Paperport allows you to export a set of notes a variety of ways, including Google drive and Dropbox.

Paperport allows you to import pdf files from your google drive, dropbox, or straight off the Internet.  While working on a document, you can insert blank pages at anytime between any two pages.  Blank pages can consist of lined paper, graph paper, blank paper, or other documents.

Paperport allows you to annotate with a highlighter, pen, text, and voice recorder over any page on a pdf document.  In the text tool you can create text on top of a page, type on a stickie note, or insert an image.  You can insert multiple audio annotations on each page, saved for playback on demand at a later time.  Some advanced features include speech to text dictation and inserting text using the camera.

When Paperport projects are shared via email, google drive, or dropbox, the document is converted to pdf, thus audio is not shared.  There is an option to share via iTunes Docs Folder which will also share the voice recordings.