4 Awesome iPad Apps to Help Kids with Their Writing

8:41 PM    

October 1, 2014
Writing is a tedious task and as such kids find it hard to sit down and write. Thankfully, technology has some interesting ways to get kids excited about  writing. There are a wide variety of web tools to help you engage young learners in the writing process. Writing prompts tools come on top of the list. These are applications that generate prompts for students to draw on  to compose their writing piece. Here is a web-based version of these tools but today I am sharing  with you the iPad based version. These  are excellent apps that kids can use on their iPads to get writing prompts and story starters.




1- Writing Prompts for Kids

Boost students' creative writing skills with writing prompts that will spark their imaginations. This writing prompt generator is quick and easy to use; your students will have an inspiring writing topic in seconds. Just tap the screen to pick a situation, a character, a setting, and an object.
2- Silly Story Starters

This app is great for helping kids hone valuable writing skills to expand their creativity both at school and at home! Kids canuse it to generate an unlimited number of story starter ideas. Some of the features it provides include:
  • Provides the ability for kids to type and save their writings. 
  • Remembers the student name/school/grade information for 'publishing' by email.
  • Stores the creative writing projects as a collection
  • Offers editing capabilities for existing writing projects. 
  • Export finished writing projects by email as published html files.
3- Write about This

Write About This is a visual writing prompt & creation platform perfect for classrooms and families! With endless ways to respond and the ability to craft custom photo prompts, it will kick-start any writing activity. Free version provides more than 50 leveled text & voice prompts and the ability to try the custom prompt creation and digital publishing tools!

5- Shake-a-Phrase

Shake-a-Phrase is a fun language app for creative writing prompts, vocabulary, and parts of speech practice. Perfect for learning and laughing in the classroom or on-the-go, it features over 2,000 words and definitions in 5 engaging themes for ages 8+.



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Must Have Resources on Using Twitter for Teachers Professional Development

7:53 PM    

September 30, 2014
Twitter is definitely one of the best social networking websites to help you with your professional development. I have been using Twitter for a few years now and I must say that it was and is still of tremendous help to me both in learning about resources and tech tools to share with you here and also in my personal growth as a budding scholar interested in studying the impact of emerging technologies on literacy learning. So it is no coincidence that my master thesis was on the educational potential of Twitter.


Recognizing the huge importance of Twitter in our professional growth, I created an entire section here in EdTech and M-Learning where I share tools , posters, and  tips and guides to help teachers make the best of this microblogging platform. Today, I am adding another excellent resource from Cybraryman's library. This is a page packed full of wonderful resources and materials to help you better leverage Twitter for your professional development purposes. I would highly recommend that you bookmark the page and keep coming back to it for Cybraryman is constantly adding resources to it.
Check out Cybraryman's Twitter for PD page.

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Interesting Visual Featuring 6 Instructional Strategies That Sticks

7:04 PM    

September 30, 2014
I love these witty quips that ASCD intermittently share with the education community in the form of visually appealing infographics. The recent visual they shared in this regard relates to the topic of issue number two of Education Leadership magazine. Instruction That Sticks is a beautiful visual that features 6 quotations from leading thinkers and educationists. The quotes , different as they are in their scope, each speak to one of the essential areas in teaching methodology. Think of them as tips to help you better conceptualize your teaching strategy to meet the learning needs of your students.

Here is a quick round-up of these 6 quotes. You can download this infographic in PDF format from this link. Enjoy

1- "Rooting around in memory, trying (perhaps struggling) to remember something, is actually a great way to ensure that the memory sticks. " Daniel T. Willingham,p.10

2-"The essential element of cooperative learning is individual accountability for all team members." Robert E. Salvin,p. 22

3- "Teaching for understanding demands going beyond basic facts and procedures to ask, why do we do this? Why does this make sense?" Mayilyn Burns,p. 64.

4- "When students have clearly articulated learning targets, they begin to see learning as growing a body of knowledge and skills, rather than completing a series of assignments." Susan M. Brookkhart and Connie M. Moss, p.28

5- "Engaging students in literate conversations with their peers is a powerful instructional strategy for fostering reading comprehension". Richard l. Allington, p. 16

6-"As we walk around the classroom, what we choose to focus on, how long we spend with each team or individual, and what we choose to say or not say has crucial instructional value". Bradley A. Ermeling and Genevieve Graff-Ermeling, p.55



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8 Excellent iPad Apps to Enhance Students Reading Comprehension Skills

3:54 PM    

September 30, 2014
After posting about web based tools to enhance students reading comprehension skills, I received a couple of emails asking about iPad apps on reading comprehension. So I went ahead and compiled these popular apps that I believe are really must have. These apps target different areas related to improving kids reading and literacy. They provide practice on key comprehension skills such as developing word awareness, sequencing, sentence fluency, and reading speed. Have a look and share with us if you have other suggestions to add to the list. Enjoy.



Subtext supports teachers in their Common Core instruction and helps students move closer to college and career readiness by encouraging them to analyze what they read, articulate what they think, and make connections between texts and the outside world.



e Skills Minimod Reading for Details helps the student build mastery in the essential reading comprehension skill of Reading for Details. This app is carefully aligned with the new Core Curriculum. Students can play in either practice mode or game mode. The game mode is a bingo-like game. Students will read a passage about a inventor and his or her invention, then practice their understanding of Reading for Details – the 5W’s of Reading Comprehension – who, what, why, when, where. Each program offers 3 levels of reading difficulty.


Question Builder is designed to help elementary aged children learn to answer abstract questions and create responses based on inference. Extensive use of audio clips promotes improved auditory processing for special needs children with autism spectrum disorders or sensory processing disorders. Audio clip reinforcement can be turned on or off for non-special needs children.


StoryPals has several features that make it versatile and robust. The included stories can be read independently, read aloud with professional narrations, or read aloud using high quality Acapela text-to-speech with word highlighting. Each story is accompanied by a vivid illustration that supports the meaning of the story via a variety of slick interactions that come to life with entertaining voiceovers and sound effects.


This app presents short, concise stories in an engaging format that leads to success. Interesting stories make it easy for children to try, practice and improve reading comprehension skills. Knowledge and confidence will grow with each new story.


Find out with The Opposites, an exciting word game which challenges children (ages 7+) to match up pairs of opposing words before the screen is filled. Opposites starts with easy word pairs, like 'up-down', but as players level up they are challenged with more complex and abstract pairings, until they are dealing with rare descriptive and technical words, from biology, economics, politics, medicine, poetry and classical Greek prefixes!


Same Sound Spellbound is an adventure designed to help the player understand homophones. You begin your adventure choosing to play as either Luna or Leo, young magicians at Magic School, beginning to master the magic of words. In this lesson, Luna and Leo must correctly identify the homophone which best completes the puzzle sentence, in a given time.


Kids Reading Comprehension level 1 Passages For iPad is an interactive and educational app, developed to assist parents, teachers and caregivers in teaching their children to learn the essential skill of reading comprehension.

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A Library of Great Free eBooks and Audiobooks for Your iPad

9:23 PM    

September 30, 2014
Free Books is a great free iPad app that provides you with a huge library of eBooks and audiobooks. It actually contains over 23.000 classic books that are all in public domain. These books span a wide variety of topics and different fields in human history including letters of leaders, the collected works of geniuses, the finest Victorian novels, the plays of Shakespeare, the philosophy of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, the autobiographies of Benjamin Franklin and Andrew Carnegie. It's all here, along with tens of thousands of other books.



Free Books app is also integrated with Dropbox and has a fantastic ePUB reader which means that you can import your books from your Dropbox and read them anytime you want. The reading experience on Free Books app is delightful as it makes use of interesting features like the night mode reading, beautiful high resolution covers, and well designed author pages. Another important feature provided by Free Books is that once you download a book from its library you will then be able to access it offline. And since it's free why not give it a try!


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7 Indispensable Google Scholar Search Tips Teachers Should Know about

8:05 PM    

September 29, 2014
Google Scholar is definitely one of the best academic search engines out there. It is helping me a lot with my PhD studies and I am using it almost on a daily basis. The search part which I am sharing with you today is only a small part of what you really can do with Google scholar. There are actually several other features that are indispensable for academics and student researchers. Staring from today, I will be sharing with you some of the tips and ideas on how to unravel the hidden mysteries of Google scholar and tap into its full educational potential.



In today's post, I am sharing with you some interesting ways to make the best of Google Scholar search. Using these hack will enable you to easily and effectively search, locate and cite your resources.


This is a snapshot taken from Google Scholar Help center.

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Three Important Updates to Google Forms Teachers Should Be Aware of

7:13 PM    

September 29, 2014
Google Forms has released a few useful updates today. The one that I like the most and which I am sure many of you are looking forward to is limiting form responses to one person. Using this new feature, you , the creator of the form, will be able to get one answer per person by simply turning on the "only allow one response per user" feature in your settings. Similarly, you can also limit people to one response per column for grid-style questions using the new option under"advanced settings".

Another important feature added to Google Forms is the " shuffle question order". Using this new feature will enable you to randomize the order of questions on quizzes or surveys.



Other features that were added to Google Forms today include:

Shortened ULRs
Now Google Forms provides you with a shortened URL to share your form with others. When you click on the "send form" button, you will see a checkbox for creating a tidy URL to share.



Search the Menu
Using the help menu will enable you to search for anything in your forms. To find a feature simply press ALT+/ or look under the Help menu.



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12 Excellent iPad Apps for Music Education

10:09 AM    

September 29, 2014
One of the key content areas where technology is making such a tremendous contribution is in the teaching of music. There are now a wide variety of web tools and mobile apps that teachers can use in their class to instruct their students on the various musical concepts from composition to distribution. Most of these tools are free and easy to use. I have featured several resources for teaching music in the past, however, today I am sharing with you this collection of interesting iPad apps to use in music classrooms. Have a look and share with us what think of it.

Image taken from " Music Technology in The Classroom"


1- Garage Band
GarageBand turns your iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch into a collection of Touch Instruments and a full-featured recording studio — so you can make music anywhere you go. Use Multi-Touch gestures to play a piano, organ, guitar, and drums. They sound and play like their counterparts, but let you do things you could never do on a real instrument.
2- Tab Toolkit

If you play guitar, bass, drums, or keyboards, TabToolkit is the best way to learn and jam along with your favorite songs! TabToolkit gives you 3 ways to get great music.
3- Chordmaster

Chordmaster puts a comprehensive and accurate library of over 7800 guitar chords into the palm of your hand. The Chordmaster displays the notes and fingerings on a virtual fretboard, and allows you to view each chord selected in every position up and down the guitar neck. You can even strum the virtual strings to play and hear each chord in pristine audio.
4- Guitar Studio

Learn and play your favorite songs with Guitar, the amazing acoustic guitar app for your iPhone or iPod touch. More than just a virtual fretboard, Guitar is an instrument optimized for performance. You can perform songs with any combination of chords and melodies on Guitar's highly playable and easy-to-use interface.
  5- ImproVox

ImproVox is the original vocal instrument for iPhone. Real-time pitch correction and harmonization enable you to create lush harmonies as you sing - and always sound in tune! Add vibrant textures with effects like reverb and echo, then record your performance and share it with friends.
6- Harmonica

Harmonica features a genuinely-sampled 10-hole diatonic harmonica. Both single notes and chords are playable, as are "blow" notes and "draw" notes. Harmonica includes all 12 keys - it's like having 12 harmonicas in your pocket! Harmonica couldn't be simpler to use. Simply touch your lips to the Harmonica, and play away! You don't even need to blow! If you'd prefer not to put your iPhone in your mouth, Harmonica works with your fingers too.


Guitar Lab is a series of intermediate and advanced guitar courses presented by Brad Carlton. Brad, who has been teaching and leading his own bands for more than 20 years, prides himself on his versatility.  Brad brilliantly performs an extensive lesson on Eddie Van Halen licks an exploration of London blues along with interpretations of Vernon Reid, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Mike Stern and even some 18th Century parlor guitar.


This free app brings you the best videos on how to learn to play the guitar. See the best YouTube videos on guitar lessons for beginners.


Take your grand piano with you anywhere. Glide across all 88 keys. Customize your key labels. Tune and transpose your piano with ease. Record and share music with friends. View real-time score notations and control various settings with Real Piano Remote, a separate app that can be downloaded for free.


From the moment you launch the app, you’ll see how forScore puts your music front and center. Don’t let the interface’s simplicity fool you, though—forScore has an arsenal of tools ready to help you turn practice into performance. Create links to handle repeats with a single tap, play along to an audio track, and use half-page turns to see the bottom half of the current page and the top half of the next one at the same time, removing jarring transitions once and for all.


Ear Trainer is an educational tool designed for musicians, music students and anyone interested in improving ones musical ear. It is filled with over 230 individual exercises covering intervals, chords, scales, relative pitch and melody. It has a playable keyboard with studio sound quality and a note view for superior visualization.

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Interesting Chart Integrating Maslow Hierarchy of Needs with Technology

8:26 PM    

September, 2014
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is a motivational theory developed by the renowned psychologist and humanist Abraham Harold Maslow (April 1, 1908 – June 8, 1970). Being disappointed by the behaviourist theories of the day that primarily focused on the study of problematic behaviour, Maslow took a different turn and did in-depth studies on the motivational part of the human conduct. He explored areas responsible for driving people's behaviour and happiness. For Maslow, any behaviour is a complex act that aim at the achievement of a certain goal. Human beings are goal oriented and as such they tend to channel their behaviour according to the motivational need underlying it.

Source: http://goo.gl/jssrJ0


In a paper called Theory of Human Motivation (1943), Maslow conceptualized a hierarchy of needs pyramid composed of five interrelated levels. He mapped out the human needs according to their corresponding level. At the bottom of the pyramid are the basic physiological needs such as the need for food, air, sleep, and water. Next comes the safety needs that include things such as security of employment, health, property..etc. The third level embeds the belongingness needs that include love, friendship, intimacy and family. Further up the pyramid is the esteem needs that relate to things such as confidence, achievement, self-esteem, and respect. At the top of the pyramid is self-actualization which is the highest complex need that that has to do with one's self-fulfillment, creativity, innovation, personal growth...etc.

These five levels of need are organized along a continuum of  developing complexity  starting with the basic physiological needs,  to social needs ( belongingness and esteem) to the higher need self-actualization. Maslow argues that for us to achieve higher order needs such as esteem and self-actualization, we definitely need to meet the basic or deficiency needs.As is the case with any behaviouristic theory, Maslow Hierarchy of Needs has some far reaching echoes in the education field. It helped educationists and pedagogues better understand and explain why students behave the way they do. But this theory has also its share of criticism. However, it is beyond the scope of this short article to talk about them here. I would rather refer you to the links below.

After this short refresher about Maslow's theory of needs, I want you now to have a look at this wonderful chart created by Anthony VonBank in which he integrated technology with Maslow's five level needs. For each of the needs category, Anthony came up with a set of technological needs that go with it. Read on to learn more about this " Technology Hierarchy of Needs".

Check out the full original chart here.


References:
Maslow Hierarchy of Needs from Simply Psychology
Maslow Hierarchy of Needs  from Learning Theories
Maslow Hierarchy of Needs  from Business Balls
Maslow Hierarchy of Needs Printables

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8 Must Have Classroom Posters for Technology Best Practices

7:20 PM    

September 28, 2014
Integrating technology in classroom teaching is not only about finding the best educational web tools to enhance students learning but a decent part of it is also related to the ethics behind such use. Students need to understand that using any sort of technology in class is governed by a set of rules and guidelines that have to be respected  and enacted. These guidelines do not only organize their interaction with this technology but, most importantly, makes this interaction pedagogically sound.

For instance, when embedding images from the web into their classroom projects, students need to be aware of the copyright rules and citation guidelines that underlie this practice. In other words, they have to act in accordance with what is generally accepted to be the case when integrating web content.Also, even the use of the hardware in class should be monitored and be regulated with strict and clear body of guidelines. It is the responsibility of teachers to provide these guidelines and explain them to students.

The collection of posters below provide some paradigmatic examples of what students should pay attention to when interacting with their technology in class. These posters are created by We Are Teachers and are provided for free download in PDF format from this link. You can print them off and hang them in your class as a reminder for all students on what it takes to educationally use their tech devices.




Courtesy of edudemic

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5 Great Tools to Improve Students Reading Comprehension Skills

7:22 PM    

September 27, 2014
One of the key concerns I often hear primary teachers vociferate revolves around the potential of technology in enhancing students reading comprehension skills. As a matter of fact, technology's role in this regard is phenomenal and there are now several web tools and mobile apps that are designed specifically for the improvement of students reading skills. These tools make use of a variety of activities and exercises all of which are geared towards providing students with meaningful practice in areas related to reading comprehension. Here are some of the key tools I would recommend to use with your kids and students to improve their reading comprehension skills.


2-Rewordify


Rewordify lets you read more, understand more, learn more words, and teach more effectively. It simplifies English, teaches vocabulary, creates learning materials, and lets you create documents to teach a global audience. It has many more features, and it's all free.

3- SpeakIt


SpeakIt reads selected text using Text-to-Speech technology with language auto-detection. It can read text in more than 50 languages.
This is how to use SpeakIt:
  •  First select the text you want it to read.
  •  Then click the icon to start listening.
  •  When it is ready to read, the number of sentences is shown on the icon.
  •  To stop listening at any time click pause
1- Reading Bear

Reading Bear is a great tool for helping kids learn to read. Reading Bear integrates both vocabulary practice (over 1200 vocabulary items) and phonetic awareness ( covering different phonetic principles and patterns of written English) into their lessons. All of these lessons are provided in the form of narrated presentations playable either as a video or as an interactive slide show. Presentations are available in seven different versions. In the fullest version, the narrator sounds out a word slowly and quickly, then blend it slowly, and finally (after an optional prompt) blend it quickly. As sounds are pronounced, the corresponding letters are highlighted. Then a picture is displayed illustrating the word, show a sentence (with the individual sounds again highlighted, karaoke style), and finally show a video illustrating the sentence.

 4- Read with Me

Read with Me is a web platform that for monitoring oral reading progress on any web device. It provides students with practice fluency at home on any web device and to keep track of miscues. They can also use it to record and listen to their own reading.

5- Language Garden


Language Garden is a treasure trove of materials and resources on teaching language literacy. Using Language Garden , students will be able to learn about language plants, read and listen to narrated stories, and compose their own language plants.

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Video Tutorials to Help You Create A Classroom Website Using Weebly

5:47 PM    

September 27, 2014
One of my favourite free web tools I always recommend for creating classroom websites ( besides Google sites) is Weebly for Education. Technically speaking, Weebly is very easy to set up. Also, its drag and drop editor is pretty simple to use. You can add videos, pictures, maps and text by simply dragging them to your website. Another key feature provided by Weebly is about students and teachers privacy. Teachers can password protect all their students website with one click. They can also easily bulk create new students accounts and oversee their students activity.



As a teacher, you can use Weebly for a variety of purposes , some of which include: creating a classroom website, designing students e-portfolios, and creating websites for assigned projects. If you like Weebly and want to give it a try, this collection of video tutorials are a must watch.

1- Weebly Beginner's Guide



2- Introduction to Weebly: How to create a free website


2- Here is an example of what you can do with Weebly for Education



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A Great Free Resource of Reading Lessons for Kids

9:32 PM    

September 27, 2014
Reading Bear is a great tool for helping kids learn to read. Reading Bear integrates both vocabulary practice (over 1200 vocabulary items) and phonetic awareness ( covering different phonetic principles and patterns of written English) into their lessons. All of these lessons are provided in the form of narrated presentations playable either as a video or as an interactive slide show.



Presentations are available in seven different versions. In the fullest version, the narrator sounds out a word slowly and quickly, then blend it slowly, and finally (after an optional prompt) blend it quickly. As sounds are pronounced, the corresponding letters are highlighted. Then a picture is displayed illustrating the word, show a sentence (with the individual sounds again highlighted, karaoke style), and finally show a video illustrating the sentence. Presentations give this treatment to around 25 words, though some have more and some have less. The result is a thorough yet painless introduction to phonics principles, while at the same time teaching vocabulary.



Reading Bear also has a comprehension check part after each of the lessons provided. Students can take the quiz and test their comprehension skills through a matching activity after which they get to hear feedback on how they did on the quiz. Watch the video below to learn more about Reading Bear.

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