One of the goals I ask teachers to set after my training is to find new ways to push students to analyze and evaluate as they learn to write.
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Always Write: Cobett's "7 Elements of a Differentiated Writing Lesson" Resources - 10 views
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As part of my teacher workshop on the writing process, we investigate multiple uses of student samples. One of my favorite techniques involves having student compare and contrast finished pieces of writing. During both pre-writing and and revision, this push for deeper student thinking both educates and inspires your students.
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The handout has student writers analyze two fifth graders' published writing with a compare and contrast Venn diagram.
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Revision is hard, and most teachers recognize it as an area of deficiency; the truth is, a lot of really great writing teachers I know still freely admit that revision is where they struggle the most.
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When students like what they've written in rough draft form, they're ready to move to revision. My other six elements aim at helping students increase their pre-writing time so they both like and see more potential in their rough drafts
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Professional development research clearly cites the study team model as the most effective way to have learners not only understand new ideas but also implement them enough times so they become regular tools in a teacher's classroom.
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Below, find three examples created by study teams during past workshops. I use them as models/exemplars when I set the study teams off to work.
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I also use variations of these Post-its during my Critical Thinking Using the Writing Traits Workshop.
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By far, the best success I've ever had while teaching revision was the one I experienced with the revision Post-its I created for my students
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During my teacher workshop on the writing process, we practice with tools like the Revision Sprint (at right), which I designed to push students to use analysis and evaluation skills as they looked at their own drafts
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I used to throw my kids into writing response groups way too fast. They weren't ready to provide critical thought for one another
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The most important trick learned was this: be a writer too. During my first five years of teaching, I had assigned a lot of writing but never once had I written something I intended to show my students.
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I have the following interactive plot element generator (which can be replicated with three coffee cans and index cards) to help my students feel in control of their options:
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If you want to hear my take on graphic organizers in detail, you're going to have to hire me to come to present to you. If you can't do that, then I'll throw you a challenge that was thrown once at me, and completing the challenge helped me become a smarter designer of graphic organizers. The challenge came in two parts: 1) learn how to use tables and text boxes in Microsoft Word; 2) for practice, design a graphic organizer that would help students be successfully with the following trait-based skills:
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"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, etc," which is an interesting structure that students can borrow from to write about other topics, be they fiction or non-fiction.
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Asking students to create daily journals from the perspective of other animals or even inanimate objects is a great way to borrow this book's idea.
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it challenges students to analyze the author's word choice & voice skills: specifically his use of verbs, subtle alliteration, and dialogue.
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Mentor Text Resource Page here at my website, because this topic has become such a big piece of learning to me. It deserved its own webpage.
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Here are seven skills I can easily list for the organization trait. Organization is: 1) using a strong lead or hook, 2) using a variety of transition words correctly, 3) paragraphing correctly, 4) pacing the writing, 5) sequencing events/ideas logically, 6) concluding the writing in a satisfying way, 7) titling the writing interestingly and so that the title stands for the whole idea. Over the years, I have developed or found and adapted mini-lessons that have students practice these skills during my "Organization Month."
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The problem with focusing students on a product--instead of the writing process--is that the majority of the instructional time is spent teaching students to adhere to a formula.
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the goal of writing instruction absolutely should be the helping students practice the three Bloom's levels above apply: analyze, evaluate, and create.
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Improving one's ability to teach writing to all students is a long-term professional development goal; sticking with it requires diligence, and it requires having a more specific goal than "I want to improve writing
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Robert Marzano's research convinced me years ago of the importance of having learners set personal goals as they learn to take responsibility for their own learning.
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Video Games Win a Beachhead in the Classroom - NYTimes.com - 38 views
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Go right! Go right! Go right!” the students were shouting. “Now down, down, down, downdowndown!” A few had lifted themselves onto their knees and were pounding invisible keyboards in front of them. “Whoa!” they yelled in unison, some of them instinctively ducking as Doyle’s sprite narrowly avoided a patrolling enemy.
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snap up more points and calmly offered a piece of advice. “That extra movement cost you some precious time, Al,” he said, sounding almost professorial. “There are more points up there than what you need to finish.
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watched a middle-school teacher named Al Doyle give a lesson, though not your typical lesson. This was New York City, a noncharter public school in an old building on a nondescript street near Gramercy Park, inside an ordinary room that looked a lot like all the other rooms around it, with fluor
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ESA - Space Science - ESA makes the Sun available to everyone - 43 views
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JHelioviewer is new visualisation software that enables everyone to explore the Sun. Developed as part of the ESA/NASA Helioviewer Project, it provides a desktop program that enables users to call up images of the Sun from the past 15 years.
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Using this new software, users can create their own movies of the Sun, colour the images as they wish, and image-process the movies in real time. They can export their finished movies in various formats, and track features on the Sun by compensating for solar rotation
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JHelioviewer is written in the Java programming language, hence the ‘J’ at the beginning of its name.
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Online Education - Introducing the Microlecture Format - Open Education - 4 views
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in online education “tiny bursts can teach just as well as traditional lectures when paired with assignments and discussions.” The microlecture format begins with a podcast that introduces a few key terms or a critical concept, then immediately turns the learning environment over to the students.
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“It’s a framework for knowledge excavation,” Penrose tells Shieh. “We’re going to show you where to dig, we’re going to tell you what you need to be looking for, and we’re going to oversee that process.”
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It clearly will not work for a course that is designed to feature sustained classroom discussions. And while the concept will work well when an instructor wants to introduce smaller chunks of information, it will likely not work very well when the information is more complex.
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the microlecture format similarly requires teachers to get the key elements across in a very short amount of time. Most importantly, it forces educators to think in a new way.
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1. List the key concepts you are trying to convey in the 60-minute lecture. That series of phrases will form the core of your microlecture. 2. Write a 15 to 30-second introduction and conclusion. They will provide context for your key concepts. 3. Record these three elements using a microphone and Web camera. (The college information-technology department can provide advice and facilities.) If you want to produce an audio-only lecture, no Webcam is necessary. The finished product should be 60 seconds to three minutes long. 4. Design an assignment to follow the lecture that will direct students to readings or activities that allow them to explore the key concepts. Combined with a written assignment, that should allow students to learn the material. 5. Upload the video and assignment to your course-management software.
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Good luck! Some of my (upper-division college) students don't even read the handouts I give them about assignments. Instead, they come during office hours and ask me to tell them how to do the assignment. When they do read things, like a textbook commonly used in 100-level courses, they misinterpret concepts through their own preconceptions. For example, the textbook says, "In this field there are these eight schools of thought: ...." So one student writes, "All eight schools are good ways to understand. There's no right way." (Even though each school is highly critical of the others.) The rest of the class comments, with things like "Good insight, Oscar." The textbook is about the field, so it doesn't go into any detail about the schools' criticisms ot the others. I can either tell the students or give them additional reading they probably won't do. Unless you can anticipate every student misunderstanding and have time for microlectures on every one of them, I think you'll need to do things the old fashioned way. At least this way you can make a valiant attempt at helping them understand the material correctly.
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Why Undergrads Aren't Writing Enough - Brainstorm - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 49 views
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When it comes to writing-heavy courses, students don’t want to take them and teachers don’t want to teach them. When it comes to writing assignments in non-writing-oriented courses, students don’t like them to run too long and neither do teachers. Writing is just too much work for both sides. For every upper-division class in the humanities, 25 pages of finished out-of-class writing is a proper minimum. But for most students, that sounds like a daunting total—and an unjust one. For teachers handling three or more classes with 25 or more students, grading all those pages conscientiously (which means giving substantive feedback) keeps them up all night three weeks every semester. For those lucky teachers on a 2-2 load with 25 students or less per course, they feel the publish-or-perish mandate and all those pages of student prose turn into a road block.
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When it comes to writing-heavy courses, students don’t want to take them and teachers don’t want to teach them.
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Think Again: Education - By Ben Wildavsky | Foreign Policy - 31 views
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But when the results from the first major international math test came out in 1967, the effort did not seem to have made much of a difference. Japan took first place out of 12 countries, while the United States finished near the bottom.
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By the early 1970s, American students were ranking last among industrialized countries in seven of 19 tests of academic achievement and never made it to first or even second place in any of them. A decade later, "A Nation at Risk," the landmark 1983 report by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, cited these and other academic failings to buttress its stark claim that "if an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war."
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J. Michael Shaughnessy, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, argues that the latest PISA test "underscores the need for integrating reasoning and sense making in our teaching of mathematics." Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, claims that the same results "tell us … that if you don't make smart investments in teachers, respect them, or involve them in decision-making, as the top-performing countries do, students pay a price."
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But don't expect any of them to bring the country back to its educational golden age -- there wasn't one.
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According to the most recent statistics, the U.S. share of foreign students fell from 24 percent in 2000 to just below 19 percent in 2008. Meanwhile, countries like Australia, Canada, and Japan saw increased market shares from their 2000 levels, though they are still far below the American numbers.
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And even with its declining share, the United States still commands 9 percentage points more of the market than its nearest competitor, Britain.
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A 2008 Rand Corp. report found that nearly two-thirds of the most highly cited articles in science and technology come from the United States, and seven in 10 Nobel Prize winners are employed by American universities. And the United States spends about 2.9 percent of its GDP on postsecondary education, about twice the percentage spent by China, the European Union, and Japan in 2006.
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But over the long term, exactly where countries sit in the university hierarchy will be less and less relevant, as Americans' understanding of who is "us" and who is "them" gradually changes. Already, a historically unprecedented level of student and faculty mobility has become a defining characteristic of global higher education. Cross-border scientific collaboration, as measured by the volume of publications by co-authors from different countries, has more than doubled in two decades.
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Lewisville's texting-in-class program gets thumbs-up from teachers, students | Dallas-F... - 57 views
www.dallasnews.com/...-up-from-teachers-students.ece
dallasnews mobilephone policy technology digitalcitizenship
shared by Roland Gesthuizen on 02 Jun 11
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After they finished answering the question about the Kashmir conflict via their smartphones and other devices, Harris’ students said the technology allows them to share more information and exchange ideas with each other.
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being able to use technology you’ve grown up with just feels natural. “It fits in with what we’re doing at home,”
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dotEPUB - download any webpage as an e-book - 125 views
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Really Like This >> dotEPUB -Download any Webpage as an e-book http://bit.ly/lOXUvZ #bookmarklet #ebook #edtech #elearning #tlchat #edchat
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The suburb of Saffron Park lay on the sunset side of London, as red and ragged as a cloud of sunset. It was built of a bright brick throughout; its sky-line was fantastic, and even its ground plan was wild. It had been the outburst of a speculative builder, faintly tinged with art, who called its architecture sometimes Elizabethan and sometimes Queen Anne, apparently under the impression that the two sovereigns were identical. It was described with some justice as an artistic colony, though it never in any definable way produced any art. But although its pretensions to be an intellectual centre were a little vague, its pretensions to be a pleasant place were quite indisputable. The stranger who looked for the first time at the quaint red houses could only think how very oddly shaped the people must be who could fit in to them. Nor when he met the people was he disappointed in this respect. The place was not only pleasant, but perfect, if once he could regard it not as a deception but rather as a dream. Even if the people were not "artists," the whole was nevertheless artistic. That young man with the long, auburn hair and the impudent face-that young man was not really a poet; but surely he was a poem. That old gentleman with the wild, white beard and the wild, white hat-that venerable humbug was not really a philosopher; but at least he was the cause of philosophy in others. That scientific gentleman with the bald, egg-like head and the bare, bird-like neck had no real right to the airs of science that he assumed. He had not discovered anything new in biology; but what biological creature could he have discovered more singular than himself? Thus, and thus only, the whole place had properly to be regarded; it had to be considered not so much as a workshop for artists, but as a frail but finished work of art. A man who stepped into its social atmosphere felt as if he had stepped into a written comedy.
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dotEPUB is software in the cloud that allows you to convert any webpage into an e-book
Finishing the School Year Strong | Edutopia - 96 views
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academiblog: 15 Tips for Postponing Writing Procrastination - 2 views
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Open your brain so there is flow.
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Yeah well, for some this can be quite demotivating - having a clean and empty document on your computer that screams for attention and at the beginning shows nothing but the fact that you haven't done anything yet. So instead of opening an empty document, I always suggest my students should use a good writing software that helps them to produce text naturally and "on the go". For this, my personal choice is Citavi.
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Days Like This… | alytapp - 132 views
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Instead of scribbling marks in the margins of printed papers, I opened each student’s paper in Google Docs, highlighted text and inserted comments to clarify my thoughts, and then turned on the screen recorder (Jing) to record my voice as I scrolled through the paper and pointed to items with my mouse. Right after recording, I uploaded the finished recording to Jing’s companion hosting site, and then I simply copied and pasted the link to the recording directly into the Google Doc.
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After about four minutes, they began the next task, copying and pasting my reflection questions into the bottom of their docs, and then responding to those prompts as they reflected on their work and my feedback.
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As I watched them, I couldn’t help but remember the way that I used to provide feedback. Students would receive their graded papers, flip past the comments I had scribbled in the margin, glance at the final grade, and then forget all about it.
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I always knew there was more I wanted to convey to them about their writing, about how they had or had not created meaning for the reader.
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It took me about 10 minutes per paper, times 68 papers, so the last week and a half have been intense. If you’re doing the math, that’s over 11 hours of paper grading. If I am going to put in that kind of time for grading, I must see my students growing as writers. Period.
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I liked knowing that my essay got individual attention, individual feedback, and I feel like you cared about what I wrote.
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A small number of students (actually, fewer than 5) said that they didn’t feel that the verbal comments were all that helpful.
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Writing is personal, and feedback can feel like an attack.
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ADD / ADHD and School: Helping Children with ADHD Succeed at School - 2 views
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Kids with attention deficit disorder respond best to specific goals and daily positive reinforcement—as well as worthwhile rewards. Yes, you may have to hang a carrot on a stick to get your child to behave better in class. Create a plan that incorporates small rewards for small victories and larger rewards for bigger accomplishments.
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Alternate seated activities with those that allow the child to move his or her body around the room. Whenever possible, incorporate physical movement into lessons.
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Write important information down where the child can easily read and reference it. Remind the student where the information can be found. Divide big assignments into smaller ones, and allow children frequent breaks.
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Develop a “secret language” with the child with ADD/ADHD. You can use discreet gestures or words you have previously agreed upon to let the child know they are interrupting. Praise the child for interruption-free conversations.
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consequences immediately following misbehavior. Be specific in your explanation, making sure the child knows how they misbehaved.
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Recognize good behavior out loud. Be specific in your praise, making sure the child knows what they did right.
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Provide a stress ball, small toy, or other object for the child to squeeze or play with discreetly at his or her seat.
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Read to children. Read with children. Make reading cozy, quality time with you. Make predictions or “bets.” Constantly ask the child what they think might happen next. Model prediction: “The girl in the story seems pretty brave—I bet she’s going to try to save her family.” Act out the story. Let the child choose his or her character and assign you one, too. Use funny voices and costumes to bring it to life.
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If you understand how your child with ADD/ADHD learns best, you can create enjoyable lessons that pack an informational punch.
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Establish a homework folder for finished homework. Check and help the child organize his or her belongings on a daily basis, including his or her backpack, folders, and even pockets. If possible, keep an extra set of textbooks and other materials at home. Help the child learn to make and use checklists, crossing items off as they are accomplished. Help organize loose papers by color coding folders and showing the child how to hole-punch and file appropriately.
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Allow the child breaks as often as every ten to twenty minutes. Teach a better understanding of the passage of time: use an analog clock and timers to monitor homework efficiency.
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Neurological deficits, not unwillingness, keep kids with attention deficit disorder from learning in traditional ways.
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If you can work with and support your child’s teacher, you can directly affect the experience of your child with ADD/ADHD in the classroom.
Daily Howler: The U. S. finished 21st on a science test. When we break down the scores,... - 0 views
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Do Schools Really Need Principals? - Finding Common Ground - Education Week - 50 views
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TouchDevelop - 45 views
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This is a fab suite of programming tools and toys from Microsoft Research. The site using HTML 5 which means that it works across most devices from PCs, Apple, Android and more. It has a get tutorial section to get you started and you are able to pick apart coding from other public projects. You can share your finished scripts and programmes with a link to play on most devices and even export it to the Windows Store. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools
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Presentation Software that Inspires | Haiku Deck - 76 views
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This is a presentation creating app for iPads. Enter a few titles and pieces of text and the app finds stunning images for you to choose from to add to your slides. The finished creations use html and can be viewed on most web enabled computers, tablets and mobiles. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools
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