Mobile Learning Series: Overgram for great title slides...and poetry!

Overgram is a free app that I've been using for awhile on my iPhone because it can quickly add info or even humor to some of the pictures that I share through Twitter, Flickr, or even that I just text to friends. As an added bonus (for the Instagram crowd) they can also be shared through Instragram.  I recently loaded Overgram onto my students' iPads.

Mobile Learning Series: Educreations - creating instructional resources on the fly!

Educreations is an app that makes doing a SmartBoard style lesson easy enough to do on the fly and also keeps it easy by allowing you to capture and share any portion of your lesson.

What I've Been Using Lately - ProPrompter

Awhile back, I wrote about a very handy web tool called CuePrompter that allowed you to type or paste text into a screen, and it would work just like a teleprompter on your computer screen, allowing the user to adjust the color, size, and speed of the text as it scrolled.  This handy tool transformed our classroom-produced videos and took us to a whole new level of "polished".

Last year, when we switched our 1:1 program to iPads, we would still use CuePrompter on the one spare laptop I had.  Students filmed with their iPads, but could still copy, paste, and read script from the laptop.  However, our laptops are getting pretty thin around these parts - the few spares we have are often in use elsewhere, and the fleet is not working too well.  But what we have coming out of our ears is iPads!  I have written before about how the iPads are posing new and interesting challenges to us to be able to find work-arounds to be able to do the same things we used to do on laptops.

The newest workaround is a great app we purchased called ProPrompter.  It works a lot like CuePrompter, but is NOT free.  ProPrompter is one of the more expensive apps we have purchased, but if you are at all like us, and create videos and multimedia frequently with your iPads, it is worth it! ProPrompter was developed by Bodelin Technologies, which is a professional teleprompter manufacturer.

ProPrompter is really simple to use.  In the Scripts menu, just push the plus button and paste in your script (one you wrote on the iPad, or one you emailed to yourself).  The settings button offers easy options for setting countdown, orientation, type of script, speed, colors, etc. It also has a handy remote feature - if someone nearby has a script in their ProPrompter app on their iPad, you can share scripts remotely.  This is handy if two students are working on a project together.

ProPrompter marks yet another successful workaround for our iPads - this time in the form of an app!

Beginning to use QR Codes - some quick ideas

I'll admit QR codes were a bit of a mystery to me until recently.  I've seen the funny little codes in magazines and advertisements, and I understood that if you had an app on your phone you could scan them and get...somewhere.  Beyond that I didn't give them much thought. However, it seems I've been reading about them everywhere recently and they really can have some practical uses - even in the classroom.

The first thing I did was get a free QR reader app for my iPhone - I got one called Qrafter.

This app is pretty basic - touch it, hold your phone over a code and it automatically scans and takes you to the site.  Handy. I read an article that talked about how easy it was to generate your own QR codes for a website - another free app called QR Code Maker (for iPad on iTunes).  It's a little glitchy, but when you put in a URL it will generate a nice code every single time.  You don't need an app or a mobile device to generate codes - you can make them for free online at many sites. I made a code for my class blog page, which is my central site for all of my courses.  I printed it out on a big page and hung it on my classroom door.

Then I decided that since those apps were free (and easy), I'd put them on my middle school students' iPads - also easy.  The kids had seen the codes before.  The first thing they did was use the reader on my code I'd put by the door. That was the extent of that learning curve.

A few weeks ago the kids had done some art projects - in the process they documented their work with pictures and video, and later narrated their process and edited these to make personal art documentaries.  They had posted these short films on their blogs.  The finished artwork is hanging up in my classroom.  The students went to the blog posts they'd made of their documentaries and used the URL's to make QR codes on their new iPad app, QR Code Maker.  They printed out small codes, and tacked them to the side of their artwork.  Now the students with their iPads, and visitors with phone scanners, can scan the code next to their artwork and connect immediately to a video the students created which documents the process they went through in creating that piece of art.

WHY SHOULD YOU TRY THIS? This can be a great way to "go deeper" into student work - especially when they are working on projects that may involve skills, performance and various creations.  QR codes are a simple link that can help a student put physical and virtual elements together.  They can bring the depth of a project to a virtual and a physical audience.

My middle school students are currently working on a research project in which they are using some old photos displayed in the school and creating web pages about those photos that expand the information with their research.  They will create QR's for those pages that we can attach to the photos in the hall.  Visitors to our school will then have a way of learning more about the old photographs and our local history.

In the meantime, the kids are really getting into generating codes for their blogs - maybe a little overboard...

Some help for teaching with your iPad

Earlier this year I came across this great wiki called teachwithyouripad.  For those of us using iPads in class for the first time this year, this simple wiki is a link to a wealth of possibilities for helping students to use these as true learning devices.

On the main page of the wiki are four short sections, from the simple (#1. What is an iPad?), to the more useful for those of us who have fully implemented them (#4. How do I teach with it?).  The number 4 section has one link, which opens to a list of 14 sample projects, links included, that could be easily implemented into any classroom.

The bottom of the main wiki page includes a link to a full "Teach With Your iPad" online  newspaper, which seems to be regularly updated, and is a wealth of ideas, articles, and app lists for all grade levels and subject areas.

I really like that none of the options or projects presented are complicated. The iPads are a pretty straightforward device, and both the wiki and this online newspaper seem to be in keeping with the idea of keeping the mystery OUT of them.

The Classroom Camera

Although your classroom may be tech-poor, chances are you can gain access to at least 1 digital camera - even if it is your own - even if it's just a cell phone camera! Although more would make certain things a little easier, one is really all you need to do a lots of great things! There are some activities that can be done as a class and the teacher takes the pictures, and some where you could group the students and then easily stagger their picture taking time. What kinds of great things can you do? The things that make learning more personal, engaging, and visual for your students. So for the purposes of this blog (the need to get tech ideas in a sec), we'll keep our list short.

1. Visualize the spelling/vocabulary list for the week. For elementary students, this can be a fast but fun activity. Put the list of words up and talk about them a little. You can ask the students to show what a word means through some kind of pose, use of props or other creative means. Take a picture! Do that for all of the words on the list. This picture activity not only visually documents the students' interpretation of the words, but the act of "acting out" or visualizing the meaning of the words is an activity that will help the students to better learn the words. You can print out the pictures and post them by the list, or load them into a simple PowerPoint that your run on your overhead projector whenever you do a review of the words. Students can see the pictures and then use their own paper or mini dry erase boards to guess and spell the words. Lots of fun - especially when the students themselves are in the pictures!

2. For older students, split up a word list - and give a pair or threesome of students their word group. Let them take the camera and get a shot of their own interpretation of the words (they will have to discover the definitions on their own). Either print the pictures or project them. Have other students guess what the word is - or have the students who took the picture give clues or describe the meanings. This often becomes a contest about creativity among the students - figuring out the most interesting way to interpret a word visually.

3. Picture scavenger hunts - especially useful when teaching an abstract concept, like "democracy". Students can use the camera to set up a scene that is meant to capture a key concept like equality, majority rule with minority rights, etc. This is a great way to teach students to think metaphorically as well, and modeling for them ways that a simple visual image can convey many ideas without being literal.

4. Story board planning - really fun for group stories! Set up a story board for students to work with (individuals or groups could easily do this). Have students plan their plot, characters, and scenes by using photographs. The story boards can be digital - in Comic Life (installed on all teacher Macs), or even on a simple slide show like PowerPoint, or Google Presentations. The story boards could also just be a large chart of paper - pictures could be printed in black and white and tacked up onto the story board. Students can visualize points of plot, characters, and order. There are also tons of great online digital storytelling tools if you want to go that route, like Storybird, Picture Book Maker, or Kerpoof, just to name a few.

5. Summarizing - learning to summarize the key points of a story or piece of information is an important skill for students. Summarizing using a picture or two can help more visual students hone this skill. After reading a chapter in a book or a section or scene in a story, ask the students to come up with an idea for a scene that would capture the essence of the message.

The great thing about using photos this way in the classroom is that you can have a lot of fun discussions modeling how pictures can tell many stories. Put together a simple PowerPoint for the projector and fill it just with images that you can discuss with the students. Google Images, Flickr, and Picasa are fantastic sources of crowd-sourced pictures that you can easily narrow down by category. Select a set that you think would make for a great discussion (depending on what you are teaching - i.e. summarizing, metaphorical representations) and just drag those photos to your slide show - no need to type any text. Or, you can even snap your own photos of people and places the kids know around town or the school for the same effect. This makes even a modeling lesson engaging and lively!