Group items tagged

"Adobe has unveiled Slate, a new tool for iPad that allows students and teachers to produce multimedia presentations that are viewable on any platform. Slate allows users to combine text and images into template-driven, multi-page interactive documents that offer transition effects, professionally designed typographical themes and photo layouts and cover treatments, all in an HTML5 package that is viewable through all modern browsers."

"Do you ever start using a Google service and feel like you really don't know how to use it properly? I feel that way quite often with Google Docs and Google Calendar. It's not that I don't know how to use them - I don't know how to use each feature and option like a nimble productivity ninja! If you sometimes feel the same I definitely recommend you check out 'Training for Google Apps'. This free, By Google extension delivers interactive training and walkthroughs for a slate of Google services, including Calendar, Classroom, Docs, Drive, Forms, Gmail, Google+, Groups, Hangouts, and more."

"Fact: Kids love Minecraft. The unique and ridiculously popular game is often compared to digital LEGO's, and at it's core, allows players to place and break blocks in a 3D world. With more than 22 million users in 40 countries, the Minecraft craze is only growing and kids can't seem to get enough. The draw of Minecraft? For kids, it's a blank slate and gives them the opportunity to let their imagination run wild. For educators, it is a perfect opportunity to fully integrate technology with learning. Minecraft is being recognized as an incredibly powerful, educational tool that acts as a medium for educators and students, alike, allowing them to unleash their creativity and fully integrate technology with learning opportunities. Because the game lives online, the multiplayer format can be utilized to emphasize digital citizenship and collaboration all through integrated project based-learning. Meet Connected Camps, an online summer camp for Minecraft that is breaking the rules in all the right ways. Yes, you read that right, Connected Camps is a virtual summer camp, that connects kids from around the country (and even the world) through a dedicated, monitored and secure Minecraft server."

"Khan Academy, the wildly popular Youtube lecture series, is slated to launch its iPad app any minute now in Apple's store. The enhanced version of Khan Academy will include time-syncing between devices--no Internet connection required, an interactive transcript of the lectures for easy searching, and a handy scrubber for moving between parts of the lectures. Perhaps more importantly, now that more schools have begun adopting Khan's lectures for their own classrooms, the free iPad app could possibly replace or supplement textbooks, saving cash-strapped schools and students a lot of money."

"Think back 20 years. Pay phones still worked, and only doctors carried pagers. Laptops weighed as much as bowling balls, and few of us had Internet access. In fact, much of what we now consider commonplace -- Google, email, WiFi, texting -- was not even possible. If that was 20 years ago, where are we going in the next 20? We are all going mobile! Tablets, smartphones, Chromebooks -- and yet, these devices only serve as the most recent iteration of mobile technology in the classroom. Remember Netbooks? How about those old-school Macbooks that looked like toilet seat covers? What if we go back further? What about chalk and slate?"

"For students who dread writing class, a blank page can look a lot like a ten-foot monolith; an imposing, empty slate towering over their homework list. Visual storytelling is one way to break students out of writer's block, and storyboarding apps are a pre-packaged strategy you can use to bring images to the narrative. Whether your students are afraid of writing or you're simply looking for a way to break up a brainstorming session, these 10 storyboarding apps for iOS and Android devices can help inspire-and organize-students of any age. The best part might be the flexibility of these apps. While they can be used for strict storyboarding in the creation of fiction, they can also be used for other tasks, including documenting project-based learning, sharing assignments, or capturing research notes."

"I had the pleasure of being at SLATE (technology conference here in Wisconsin) the last two days, and beside the wonderful people I got to connect and re-connect with, there was also one session that made me terribly excited. And while I am not usually one to share tech tools, these are all pretty easy, free and fantastic. All of this come courtesy of Mickey Chavannes @mchavannes."