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"The founding members of this wiki consist of "old" therapists, with over 200 years of experience working with special populations and technology. We hope that people will use this site to make informed decisions before downloading. Our purpose in creating this wiki is to foster collaboration around how applications can be used in unique ways to support learning in home, school, and therapy settings. If you have used iPad/iPod applications with special populations, please consider joining and contributing to this wiki by adding information to the charts on the various pages (see navigation pane on the left). You can also contribute without joining by adding entries on the discussion tabs for each page."

"A few days ago I shared here PBS Kids Video app that provides a wide variety of educational videos for kids. Today I am adding another wonderful iPad app in this direction. Brainfeed is one of the top ranked apps in the iTunes store. Designed to inform, entertain and inspire, Brainfeed provides children 7+, tweens, teens and even inquisitive adults with a safe corner of the web to explore a universe of educational videos. Each video in Brainfeed  is handpicked by a team of enthusiastic educators from around the globe who are tasked with finding short (under 10 minutes) and documentary style videos that meet the following criteria:Curriculum-based, entertaining & engaging, visually stimulating, high quality content, age-appropriate , and child-friendly."

"There are a variety of forms in which visual representation is materialized. Knowing these forms will enable you to diversify the visual channels through which you communicate information to your students. To this end, I am sharing with you this wonderful periodic table that features different visualization methods. When you Hover your mouse on any of the boxes in this periodic table, a pop-up picture will be displayed showing the name and a sample of the visualization."

"Surveys and polls can serve a wide variety of educational purposes. As a teacher, you can use them to initiate quick formative assessments, gather informal feedback on your students learning, run mock exams, learn about students interests and learning pace to mention a few. You can also use them to evaluate your own teaching strategies and gain an insider look into your instruction. Upon your request, we have compiled some of the best iPad apps you can use to create  surveys and polls. Check out the list below and as always, share with us what you think of it."

"The two web tools I m sharing with you today are ideal for creating and sharing mapped stories. Students can use them in class to organize, narrate and present information through the means of geography. Both of these tools are easy to use and are also student friendly. Have a look and share with your students."

"One of the strategies that I use when creating lesson plans is to reflect on the previous lesson. Part of that reflection includes feedback from students. This can be done by simply asking students to raise their hands in response to a "did you get it?" type of question, but I like to have better record of responses than just a hand count. Here are some tools that can be used for collecting exit information from students."

"Paste your text into Analyze My Writing and it will generate a ton of information about your writing. Analyze My Writing will give you a break-down of the readability of your writing on five indices. The analysis will include listings of the most common words and most common word pairs in your writing. A listing of how frequently you use punctuation and punctuation types is included in the analysis provided by Analyze My Writing. Finally, a word cloud is included at the end of the analysis of your writing. "

"One of the more exciting apps that has recently made it's way onto the social media scene is Periscope. Periscope is a live, interactive video streaming  app which allows users to broadcast media and footage while their followers engage in their content at the same time. When used in the classroom, students are able to connect with the world in real-time and interact with any of the content that is made available to them. One of the ways Periscope can be used to enhance a lesson or unit is with a teacher-directed Periscope. Inviting students to interact in this way now allows for personalizing what is needed from each individual at that very moment. When creating content with a screencast program, teachers must already anticipate the needs of their class. With Periscope, teachers can broadcast content live to their students with the ability to tailor the video on the spot in response to student questions and conversations. Flipping a lesson, re-teaching a strategy, or communicating classroom information all in real-time now gives the teacher the power to easily personalize instruction through the interactivity of this app. Students on the other hand, now have the power to pick the path of their own learning."

"When the results of today's U.S. midterm elections are tallied, people will have a clearer sense of how the American people really feel about the current administration. Or at least, how they feel based on the information they've read leading up to the election - not all of which was factual. Alas, it's not just the temperature of the U.S. political climate that will be gauged; so too will the impact and reach of online misinformation. All the major social networks have made attempts to clamp down on fake news, but the trickery has only grown more insidious and pervasive, with new derivatives of fake news, such as fake fact-checkers. Indeed, it would appear that just as we outsmarted fake news, those pushing misinformation have outsmarted our outsmarting."

"At TeachThought, nothing interests us more than students, as human beings. What they know, might know, should know, and do with what they know. A driving strategy that serves students-whether pursuing self-knowledge or academic content-is questioning. Questioning is useful as an assessment strategy, catalyst for inquiry, or "getting unstuck" tool. It can drive entire unit of instruction as an essential question. In other words, questions transcend content, floating somewhere between the students and their context. Questions are more important than the answers they seem designed to elicit. The answer is residual-requires the student to package their content to please the question-maker, which moves the center of gravity from the student's belly to the educator's marking pen. In that light, I was interested when I found the visual above. It's okay to say "I don't know." Teach your students how to develop questions (because) it helps conquer their own confusion. Rebeca Zuniga was inspired to create the above visual by the wonderful Heather Wolpert-Gawron (from the equally wonderful edutopia, and also her own site, tweenteacher). The whole graphic is wonderful, but it's that I don't know that really resonated with me. Traditionally, this phrase is seen as a hole rather than a hill. I don't know means I'm missing information that I'm supposed to have."

"In what ways do Scratch and visual & media arts inform one another? How can Scratch be a platform for artistic expression and vice versa? Can visual and media arts help introduce and extend computational creativity? Together, Scratch and art have limitless potential for learning and creating! We've started assembling Resources and Scratch Projects and we'd love your input! Do you have  lesson plans, activities, websites, videos, example projects, or something else to share?"

"Exit tickets or cards are informal assessment tools teachers can use to assess students understanding at the end of a class. They can also be used for formative assessment purposes to help teachers design better instructional content based on students feedback. Exit tickets can take the form of a prompt or a question related to what have been taught in the lesson. Here are some examples of questions and prompts to use in your exit cards as featured in "

"Content curation is nothing new and has always been a coveted skill. It has been this way for hundreds of years - think of art galleries, museums, or newspapers.  Educators, too, have always been curators- bringing together the most valuable materials to help their learners learn. However, in the past, this might have been limited to books, posters, concrete materials, guest speakers, etc. However, as of now, we are in a world of information overload. So, to help you hone your digital content curation skills, we decided to list some tips."

"Over the past three decades, a handful of products like Netscape's web browser, Google's search engine and Apple's iPhone have truly upended the tech industry and made what came before them look like lumbering dinosaurs. Three weeks ago, an experimental chat bot called ChatGPT made its case to be the industry's next big disrupter. It can serve up information in clear, simple sentences, rather than just a list of internet links. It can explain concepts in ways people can easily understand. It can even generate ideas from scratch, including business strategies, Christmas gift suggestions, blog topics and vacation plans."