Ready for use in primary classrooms with any type of interactive whiteboard, these high-quality virtual manipulative tools help teachers connect students with great ways to make sense of math. Use these tools to create an environment for students to explain, discuss, and defend their mathematical thinking."
Inquiry is a dynamic process of being open to wonder and puzzlement and coming to know and understand the world. As such, it is a stance that pervades all aspects of life and is essential to the way in which knowledge is created. Inquiry is based on the belief that understanding is constructed in the process of people working and conversing together as they pose and solve the problems, make discoveries and rigorously testing the discoveries that arise in the course of shared activity.
School leaders around the United States continue to spend HUGE amounts of money on interactive whiteboards for classrooms, despite the fact that these devices universally FAIL to empower students to become more independent, self-directed and engaged learners in the way mobile learning devices (like laptops, tablets or other personal digital learning tools) can.
Planning is imperative for any technology initiative - iPad or otherwise. You need to ensure that you clearly understand and communicate how the technology integrates with your overall pedagogical objectives. Too many institutions purchase technology and then search for ways to utilize it ... or leave it collecting dust on the shelf.
Burley Chicago school shares their work with iPads and 1st and 2nd graders. App reviews, lesson ideas, podcasts,links to class websites. This is a great example of way to communicate iPad program
Laptops, iPads, social networks and computer simulation games are making their way into area classrooms, giving teachers a blank slate for innovative approaches to learning.
There are many different ways to set your iDevices up. Here is how I've done mine (I have struckthrough ideas I've changed since Sept 2010, and put in purple new ideas from June 2011):
This pilot will provide participants with an iPad and ongoing professional development, to enable teachers to explore, discover and develop ways in which mobile devices (iPads, iPods, iPhones, etc.) can be used to engage learners and maximize student achievement.
Interesting layout and way to show teachers which apps fall under what aspects of bloom digital tax. Still lacks a rubric but site asks for contribution from teachers. Can we rubric the quality at which an app meets higher order thinking or does it just meet the expectation? There are a lot of bookmarks here. For app rubric, search and tag with apprubric.