What I'm Reading Lately (weekly)

• Schools Ditch The Classroom To Put Play Back In Education | Co.Exist: World changing ideas and innovation
  tags: REACH edtechsec

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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.

Logo Programming with Scratch - Let your students construct!

Let me start off with this caveat - Scratch is not a "sec" thing - it's more like a half an hour thing in terms of the initial prep.  With that said, I'll start singing the praises of this little program: it's fun, it will help your students construct and think in ways that make you want to sing, it's engaging, students become immersed in it, you will look at them in whole new ways!

Blooms Wheel and Blooms words - plan your activities thoughtfully

Blooms taxonomy has been around for a long time, and educators have found many creative ways to use it.  One way that I find it to be the most useful is in writing learning objectives.  In my mind, I have an idea of what I'd like students to know at the end of a lesson or activity, but using Blooms words helps me to really be specific about what kind of learning I'd like to happen, and then I can start planning for how to make that happen.

GoAnimate - a quick way to teach (and re-teach) quick ideas

GoAnimate is another one of those great free web tools that have the potential to bring your lessons to life.  It's one of those tools I really love because it creates immediate engagement, is useful for all kinds of topics, all kinds of lessons, and all age levels, and it's very very fast and easy!

What I'm Reading Lately (weekly)

• Code Literacy: A 21st-Century Requirement | Edutopia
  tags: digitalfluency code programming programminglanguage edtechsec
• Right of refusal | Dangerously Irrelevant
  tags: edtechsec refusal 1:1
• Technology Changes - Your Lessons Should Too - Instructional Tech Talk | Instructional Tech Talk
  tags: lessons edtechsec
• Study: Students Want Teachers To Use Technology ASAP - Edudemic
  tags: edtech techintegration edtechsec

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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'm Reading Lately (weekly)

• Home - Educator's Toolkit - ResourceGuides at Alaska State Library
  tags: toolkit alaska edtech edtechsec
• Why Haven't Districts Adopted Blended Learning Faster?
  tags: blendedlearning edtechsec
• 5 School Technologies To Watch: Personalized Learning Is Here - Forbes
  tags: personalized edtech onlinelearning edtechsec
• 30 Recommended Apps For Online Students - Edudemic
  tags: onlinelearning apps onlineapps edtechsec

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

What I'm Reading Lately (weekly)

• Should we get rid of technology directors? | Dangerously Irrelevant
  tags: leadership edtechsec
• How Are Districts Covering the Tech. Costs of Common Core? - Digital Education - Education Week
  tags: techcosts edtechsec

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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!