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"While the experience of the Marathon Valley Academy in the first year of its iPad program has been mostly positive, there were still plenty of headaches - mainly dealing with keeping the devices functioning and up to date. For all their usefulness as a learning tool, the tablets are relatively fragile, and in the rough and tumble environment of a school nearly one in five of them broke during the course of the year."

"Earlier in the year I created a Scavenger Hunt for our Open House. It was a HUGE hit in our classroom. My kids keep asking me when they will get to scan again, so I have been working on a few new ways to integrate the QR codes into our classroom as well as looking through a few things my team created last year."

"I've been pushing a lot of people's button lately because they keep throwing around this buzz word "engagement". For example, we need to increase student engagement! We need to promote student engagement! We need to provide teaching that will develop student engagement! The problem I have with this is that it seems to me that many people confused the word "engagement" for "entertainment". If kids are having fun then they must be engaged right? And what concerns me more is the people who have taken the message about "increasing engagement" and translated that into a hidden mandate to "increase test scores"."

"But in order to see results like those in Singapore, a cultural change must take place in the classroom, points out Norris. It's not enough just to introduce technology into the learning environment and expect results, she says; you must change everything, from devices to curriculum to pedagogy. "You must give them curricula with the technology activities baked in," she asserts, "so students don't have to keep going back and forth from their paper and pencil textbooks to their technology activities." "

"Today is about Google Maps, though. The company has spent the past seven years refining its offering, making its internal systems run quickly to keep up with as many detours, traffic conditions and new apartment complexes that it can. All of that hard work paid off with this app. It's absolutely gorgeous, runs as smooth as a videogame and is a complete user experience overhaul from any Google Maps experience you've ever had."

"FaceTime is Apple's video chat service. It allows anyone with a recent iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, or Mac to make free calls to any other Apple user over Wi-Fi or cellular connection. On the iPhone, FaceTime is bundled into the Phone app. On the iPod touch, iPad, and Mac, FaceTime is a separate app. On all devices, FaceTime can connect to any Apple-registered iPhone phone number or email address. That makes it perfect for keeping in touch with family who lives far away, with the kids while traveling, with business partners at distant offices, or even with that special someone while shopping for the perfect gift."

"Technology and education are pretty intertwined these days and nearly every teacher has a few favorite tech tools that make doing his or her job and connecting with students a little bit easier and more fun for all involved. Yet as with anything related to technology, new tools are hitting the market constantly and older ones rising to prominence, broadening their scope, or just adding new features that make them better matches for education, which can make it hard to keep up with the newest and most useful tools even for the most tech-savvy teachers. Here, we've compiled a list of some of the tech tools, including some that are becoming increasingly popular and widely used, that should be part of any teacher's tech tool arsenal this year, whether for their own personal use or as educational aids in the classroom. "

"Some of the ideas for using the iPad in the classroom in the following presentation by scribd user denag33 are better than others. Projecting an image, making music, controlling your classroom computer, using it as a mini-whiteboard, accessing information, keeping notes, blogging, tracking an IEP checklist, making an impromptu teleprompter, and creating concept maps are some of the better ones. Some of the presentation is a bit janky as well-illegible text, for starters-but the inclusion of both apps and ideas together, along with the sheer number of ideas, made it worth sharing."

"We often talk about iPads in K-12 classrooms, the availability of information on the web for college students to access, and a host of other similar topics in too many categories to mention. But we don't often broach the topic of technology in early childhood education classrooms. While we've seen some statistics on kids and technology usage, that information doesn't usually fall into the 'classroom usage' category. So we were interested to see this handy infographic which looks at the technologies early childhood teachers and administrators use (or don't use) in their classrooms, including how often they're used, what tech is used, and why they are used. Keep reading to learn more."

" 37 18 2 inShare 1 Print! 6 iPad Apps for Better Classroom Management If you're looking to reduce your paper trail, keep parents in the loop and find more efficient ways to manage your students' behavior, there are apps to help you do it. Below are some of the best apps to help teachers manage their classroom. The list has been generously created and shared with us by MaryGrove College."

Keeping track of all that stuff!

"At last week's iPad site visit, a student on the panel was describing her favorite iLesson: "It was in science. It is an interactive periodic table (app). We were learning about the elements. You click on an element and it gives you the history, who made it, how you use it, what it is used for. Another cool feature is you can make them. You can keep on adding neutrons, electrons, and protons as much as you like and every time you click on the plus or minus, it tells you what element you just made. The results were really amazing. We had more interest in the periodic table than we ever had before mainly because it was fun, it was interesting, we actually got to play around with it and see what we could make with it instead of just giving us a piece of paper and telling us 'research these'.""

"After posting about iPad apps that teachers can use to create diagrams and charts, we went back into our archive and browsed through the posts we have previously published before looking for apps to use to create mind maps and to brainstorm ideas. We found some but were too old to feature now so we tried to look for new ones and we were surprised to find some really interesting ones. We have compiled a list below that contains some of the best mindmapping and brainstorming apps you could ever find online. We based our selection on the evaluation criteria we shared with you before. The best educational mindmapping tools can help you do a wide range of activities in your class. You can ask students to use them to brainstorm a topic with each one contributing an idea, they keep building up on them till they finally get a finished map of the main ideas about that topic.These tools can help your students develop creative ways of learning and enhance their critical thinking skills. Have a look at the list below and if you have suggestions, share them with us in the comment form below."

"I've been doing a lot of reading lately about kids and devices. It's mostly as market research for my new business (more about that later) and, luckily for me, it's also really interesting. I knew that devices were big with kids, but honestly, I didn't know just HOW big. So I thought I'd share a bit about what I've been learning, in case, like me, you haven't been keeping up-to-date on the trends…"

"Visualize this: A calculus teacher downloads an open-source digital calculus textbook. She deletes a chapter that isn't relevant to her class and replaces it with one from another open digital textbook that she's used in the past. She reads through the book, embeds several YouTube videos where relevant and an occasional humorous photo to keep students' interest, adds links to related websites and study aides, and uses a special app to create quizzes within the text that test the students' knowledge of the course material."

"critical idea to keep in mind is that the focus should be on the action, not the app or device itself"