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"iSchool: a closer look at Manhattan Beach Unified's iPad pilot program email Does Manhattan Beach Unified's iPad pilot program represent the future of education? Kindergarten students at Grand View Elementary School use iPads two times a week. Photo by Alene Tchekmedyian Kindergarten students at Grand View Elementary School use iPads two times a week. Photo by Alene Tchekmedyian Just before 8 a.m. one recent Tuesday, Andy Caine wheeled a waist-high cart into his second-floor history classroom at Mira Costa High School, as the Beach Boys' "I Get Around" played faintly in the background. On the syllabus for the day: the First Amendment. As the first period bell rang, Caine unlocked the cart. "Come and get 'em," Caine said to his class of seniors, and stood behind his podium, on which he's pasted a sticker reading, "Think for yourself. Question Authority." The students put aside their pens and notebooks and lined up at the cart to pick up an unconventional tool that school districts across the nation have been implementing into classrooms. Each student grabbed an iPad and returned to his or her seat. Caine is one of 43 Manhattan Beach Unified School District teachers chosen to try the $500,000 iPad pilot program, which started last fall. At Mira Costa, two English, math, science and social studies teachers use iPads, along with eight science teachers at Manhattan Beach Middle School and 27 teachers of different grade levels at each elementary school. The district purchased 560 student iPads (32 gigabytes and costing around $700 each), in addition to iPads for pilot teachers and administrators. A quarter of the pilot costs are grant funded, while the district supports the rest. Later this year, the School Board will decide whether, and in what capacity, to continue the pilot. Caine and pilot teachers implement iPads into their curricula two to three times a week, a total of 30 to 90 minutes. "I would use them every day if I had the po

Planet Quest Alien Safari is a great interactive site for kids. It lets you go on an adventure by exploring different "life zones" around the world. By visiting these, you will find all different types of organisms that are living on our planet. Students get to learn about what the organisms reveal about finding life in space. So, they will learn which can survive without sunlight, which have a high radiation dose, the most acidic and the ones that live the furthest underground, for example. By clicking on a life zone on the 3D Earth, you can watch a video introduction to that organism. This website is a great classroom and research tool. You can use it to simply explore all the things around you, or use it as a starter for deeper learning and researching on a specific subject or topic. Students can really get creative by writing stories and other works of writing based on the subjects and organisms they have been learning about. This site is a great tool to use in the classroom on an interactive whiteboard. With the music and interactive nature of the site, the whole class can get involved with learning about the various organisms. Go on a safari without leaving the room!

Twitter Resources for Teachers You've heard the buzz on the Twitter phenomenon. Everybody seems to be hooked by this micro blogging service. It's been a catalyst for marketing in multinational companies, personal branding for entrepreneurs, and a simple advertising tool for the small businesses. Professionals from the education sphere seem to be catching up to the trends of technolgoy. Whether you're innovating teaching strategies for the university or looking for education jobs online, Twitter is one versatile venue where both teachers and students converse meaningfully. Don't take our word for it, here are some expert guides and tips on how to use this magnificent social networking site to your learning advantage. Articles on Twitter In Education 1. Teaching Twitter to the Teachers - To use twitter effectively, you need a reason to start with. 2. Twitter Tweets for Higher Education - Doing a little online searching (emphasis on the little), the author of this blog has found the following items related to Twitter and education. 3. 50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Education - Blog By Carol - Based on a list by Chris Brogan - 50 ideas for using Twitter in Business. 4. Using Twitter as an Education Tool - Are you using Twitter yet? If not, you may want to read how other educators are using Twitter as an education tool. 5. Twitter Transforms Teaching - Twitter's now tapped as a teaching and learning tool with opportunities to motivate students and advance achievement. 6. Teaching with Twitter - Steve Wheeler's 10 top uses of Twitter for education. 7. Twitter Professors: 18 People to Follow for a Real Time Education - 18 people Lon S. Cohen (writer and social media strategist. He is @obilon on Twitter) following for a real time education. 8. Educational Tool: Twitter - 'Twitter in the Classroom' techniques by Christine Morris. 9. Twenty-Five Interesting Ways to use Twitter in the Classroom - Excellent presentation by Creative Commons 10. N

Touchcards is an iPhone app that supports loading cards from Quizlet and StudyStack, two of the most popular flash card sharing sites on the web. Thousands of great free sets are already available, and you can always create your own. You get the benefits of the hard work you or other people have put into creating sets on Quizlet and StudyStack, but also have the freedom to study the cards on your own. If the flashcards are edited and changed after you've imported them, you can easily re-sync them with Touchcards, so you'll always be up-to-date. If you need to create your own flash cards and don't want to use Quizlet.com or StudyStack.com, you can create a simple spreadsheet in Google Docs, with one column for questions (the front of a card) and one column for answers (the flipside of a card). Publish your spreadsheet as a web page and tell Touchcards where to find the set. Touchcards is easy to use and interactive, relying on swipes, taps, and shakes to study a flash card set. You can make your own cards in Google Docs or through Quizlet and StudyStack (both sites are free to use and have active communities). Thousands of free flash cards are already available, covering topics in math, Spanish, French, English, music, anatomy, the GRE, MCAT, SAT, LSAT, weather, body parts, history, algebra, geometry, chemistry, accounting, and many more. Flashcards can be an integral part of learning new material. It's important to mentally anticipate the answer or definition to a given card. Doing this increases retention of knowledge and facilitates building a mental model around the material. In short, you'll do better on tests.

"Apple's iOS 5 added new enhancements to its email app. To use them, you'll need to set up your email first. Here's how to do it. Open Settings and select Mail, Contacts, Calendars. Then under Accounts tap on Add Account. Add Account Now tap the email service you want to add. Here I'm going to set up my Hotmail email. Select Service Next, you're prompted to enter your email address, password and description for the account. Tap Next. Email Credentials Now turn on the features you want to have your iPad check. Click Save. Email Features You'll be taken back to the Mail, Contact, Calendars screen. You'll see the account you just added. Tap on it to change settings. New Account Ads by Google Galaxy Nexus Phone google.com/nexus Calling All Dessert Lovers New! Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich Sync All of Your Files www.SugarSync.com/Sync_Files No More USBs or Emails to Yourself Auto Sync Files to Your Own Cloud! Hilton Garden Inn ® www.HiltonGardenInn.Hilton.com Book Online or Call (888) 370-0984 for Our Best Rates. Guaranteed! The account screen will come up. Here you can turn features on or off - and delete the account if you want. Mail Selections On the Home Screen you'll see a red notification with the number of messages you have. Tap on it. Mail Notifications Now you can use your email account on your iPad. If you enable iCloud, it will sync your messages, calendar, and contacts between all of you iOS devices and Mac. iOS 5 Inbox New features in iOS 5 include dragging addresses to different fields, formatting message text and an enhanced search. iOS 5 Mail delicious facebook linkedin reddit stumble twitter email About the author Based in Pelican Rapids, MN, Brian Burgess is executive editor at groovyPost. Got an idea for a How To? Email it to Brian at Brian@groovyPost.com. Twitter | Google+ | More Posts Related posts: iOS 4.2.1 Released: Big Changes for iPad, Plus AirPlay and AirPrint for iPh... How

it2Go is a free online collection of stories and poems in Mp3 (audiobook) format. You can: * Download the files to your Mp3 player and listen on the go, * Listen to the Mp3 files on your computer, * View the text on a webpage and read along as you listen, * Print out the stories and poems to make your own book. There are four ways to get started with Lit2Go: 1. Browse by Author. You can pick your stories by the author's last name. 2. Browse by Title. You can pick your stories by title. 3. Search Database. You can search the collection by title, author, keywords or reading level. An abstract, citation, playing time, and word count are given for each of the passages. Many of the passages also have a related reading strategy identified. Each reading passage can also be downloaded as a PDF and printed for use as a read-along or as supplemental reading material for your classroom. 4. Launch iTunes. If you have iTunes software installed on your computer, you can download many of the selections directly into your iTunes library. The free iTunes application for either Macintosh or Windows computers may be downloaded directly from Apple, Inc.

it2Go is a free online collection of stories and poems in Mp3 (audiobook) format. You can: * Download the files to your Mp3 player and listen on the go, * Listen to the Mp3 files on your computer, * View the text on a webpage and read along as you listen, * Print out the stories and poems to make your own book. There are four ways to get started with Lit2Go: 1. Browse by Author. You can pick your stories by the author's last name. 2. Browse by Title. You can pick your stories by title. 3. Search Database. You can search the collection by title, author, keywords or reading level. An abstract, citation, playing time, and word count are given for each of the passages. Many of the passages also have a related reading strategy identified. Each reading passage can also be downloaded as a PDF and printed for use as a read-along or as supplemental reading material for your classroom. 4. Launch iTunes. If you have iTunes software installed on your computer, you can download many of the selections directly into your iTunes library. The free iTunes application for either Macintosh or Windows computers may be downloaded directly from Apple, Inc.

This video shows the winner of "Ukraine's Got Talent", Kseniya Simonova, 24, drawing a series of pictures on an illuminated sand table showing how ordinary people were affected by the German invasion during World War II. Her talent, which admittedly is a strange one, is mesmeric to watch. The images, projected onto a large screen, moved many in the audience to tears and she won the top prize of about £75,000. She begins by creating a scene showing a couple sitting holding hands on a bench under a starry sky, but then warplanes appear and the happy scene is obliterated. It is replaced by a woman's face crying, but then a baby arrives and the woman smiles again. Once again war returns and Miss Simonova throws the sand into chaos from which a young woman's face appears. She quickly becomes an old widow, her face wrinkled and sad, before the image turns into a monument to an Unknown Soldier. This outdoor scene becomes framed by a window as if the viewer is looking out on the monument from within a house. In the final scene, a mother and child appear inside and a man standing outside, with his hands pressed against the glass, saying goodbye. The Great Patriotic War, as it is called in Ukraine , resulted in one in four of the population being killed with eight to 11 million deaths out of a population of 42 million. Kseniya Simonova says: "I find it difficult enough to create art using paper and pencils or paintbrushes, but using sand and fingers is beyond me. The art, especially when the war is used as the subject matter, even brings some audience members to tears. And there's surely no bigger compliment." Please take time out to see this amazing piece of art. click on the link below - http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=vOhf3OvRXKg

Weblist is a new way to gather and organize content on the web. Create your list of URLs centered on a specific theme and we will combine it to one easy to navigate URL. Once you have created your list you can save it as a smart bookmark or as a customizable home page, share it with friends via email or through the top social media networks, and post it on your blog. Weblist is a great place to discover new user edited content across the web. Find lists in any subject from musical playlists to lists of informative scientific articles and anything in between. Weblist is a free service and registration is optional. If you choose to register as a user your entire list will be saved under your account and you will be able to edit, delete and add to your lists. Coming soon: Firefox add-on, user voting list, site widgets, and more.. stay tuned.

uquery.com is a new search engine focused on the emerging market of iPhone & iPod Touch applications. We have listened to many requests of the community and the frustration of being able to search and find applications on the iTunes AppStore. With 81,816 applications available on the AppStore, it has become tremendously difficult to find the right application. Our goal is to index and offer a very fast and easy way to find the application that you need. Utilizing new indexing technologies we have created a huge index of all the applications currently available in the United States iTunes AppStore. With features like: filtering by price, date and category and a full-text index of the application description, we allow all iPhone & iPod users to quickly improve their app discovery experience. We strongly believe these applications that we allow to search on our website is considerably changing the way we live our lives, and we would like to improve this experience with an awesome search product. We encourage all iPhone & iPod users to send us feedback on how we can improve our product

The motivation behind Math Mov!es At 13, Ngoc moved to Australia and experienced a different education system, in which people are afraid of mathematics, in contrast to her class in Vietnam, where people love mathematics! After Ngoc graduated from university as a mathematician, Ngoc decided to demystify mathematics. Why are people so afraid of mathematics? How can we apply mathematics thinking to everyday life? Is mathematics really that important and useful? Those are some questions we seek to answer with this website. How the crew was formed Ngoc dragged her computer science friend, Viet Anh, to join the team as the animation expert. Viet Anh called on Son, a student in New York, to split the work, since movie making sure requires a lot of animations! Through Krithika, a friend and relative of one of our coaches, we found Punit, our HTML designer, and Krishna, our graphics designer. And thanks to facebook, Ngoc and Viet Anh found another graphic producer, Linh. So the team was completed! As for the coaches, we can't remember how Salwa and Nagi were drawn into the team. it feels like they have always been with us since day one. Where the Mov!es idea came from First we intended it to be a conventional website, but our coaches require very high standard, pushing our imagination to the max. How can we be different? A team discussion was conducted. Websites so far have been mimicking the tabloid / newspaper format, emphasizing on texts as the main content, but why plain text? Why not use another media, such as pictures and animations? Moving pictures? Movies... Movies!!! There we go! From then on, we became the official movie crew.

GistWeb will give the gist of any web page's actual content. It's goal is to provide a "summary" version of any page, giving you the meat and discarding the fluff. This saves loads of time when doing research online. To use GistWeb, drag this -> Gist It! Open) and click your GistWeb bookmark. One last note: As a rule, GistWeb only works well on English documents. Using it on documents of any other language may produce low quality results.

iPresentee offers a variety of Keynote Themes for iPad you can choose from to create a new presentation. You can transfer pre-made Keynote templates to your iPad without creating presentation on your computer and build Keynote presentation on iPad. Furthermore you may create your presentation on a Mac and transfer it to your iPad. Share your great ideas effectively with iPad. Choose theme from a variety of presentation styles with coordinated fonts, colors, background textures, unique bullets and picture frames. Each Keynote Theme is available in 1024x768 and 800x600 sizes in pixels. To get the most out of Apple's Keynote choose Keynote Show only for $70. Keynote Show includes: 80 Keynote Themes, 52 Keynote Motion Themes, 33 Keynote Themes for iPad, 115 Keynote Animations and 181 Keynote 3D Stuff objects. Buy now! Keynote Themes for iPad requires Keynote installed on your iPad or Macintosh computer running Mac OS X with iWork '09. Keynote Themes for iPad includes 33 themes. Click on any Keynote Theme for iPad and see how it works! Purchase Keynote Themes for iPad only for $25. Buy now!

This wiki was created for an iPad workshop at ESSDACK in Hutchinson, KS on October 18, 2011 by Judy Beam and Mary Frazier. You'll notice the pages of this wiki (on the left hand side) are the Common Core Standards. We have placed iPad apps on each page that might help your students learn that concept. There will be overlap - one app may meet more than one standard. Please leave comments, suggest apps, or share your experiences in the discussion tab of the appropriate page.

"The concept is simple. Allow students 20% of class time, or one day a week, to work on and explore one topic of their choice." - Sean Ziebarth

"Stand Tall: "One Brave Thing" Pinterest Contest How does Abraham Lincoln's legacy inspire your students to do "One Brave Thing"? Share your class story on Pinterest and you could win a class trip to Washington DC and a private screening of the movie "Lincoln." Use the sample entry below from the WeAreTeachers staff as inspiration. For full contest rules, visit bit.ly/OneBraveThing"

"Teachers Guide on The Use of Wikis in Education guides, social networking tools, wikis in education Med kharbach Today's guide is about Wikis in education. This is the 14th guide we are publishing here and there are more coming on the way. We . in Educational Technology and Mobile Learning, are very much hoping that by the time we finish posting all the series of guides we have been working on, our readers ( most of whom are teachers and educators ) will have already acquainted themselves with some powerful web tools to integrate technology into their education. As I said in earlier guides, we will also publish a free ebook containing all the guides we have written plus several other surprises for teachers, so stay tuned."

"The app opens to a series of templates, which include basic, contemporary, modern type, classic, editorial, and craft. I'm assuming that you can also use custom created templates that have been downloaded from external sources as well. When a template is chosen, it switches into edit mode, which reminds me a lot of Keynote. There's a bar on the left that organizes all of your pages, and the window on the right displays the page currently being worked on. I chose to experiment with a picture book that also has some text. "

"IF you have an iPod/iPhone, please make sure that you are not on the mobile version of Pinterest.com when you are on Safari. How do you know? Open Safari, go to Pinterest's website, look at the URL bar and make sure that the URL says: http://pinterest.com and NOT http://m.pinterest.com. See the 'm'? IF your Pinterest website shows this mobile version, you need to select 'Full Site' first before you can make the below tutorial work. Here's an example. I was on the Pinterest website using my iPod. You see the 'm'? Yes, NO NO!! Look to the right, next my avatar is a drop down arrow. Click that! You will see three option with one being 'Full Site'. Click that and you now should have the regular Pinterest website - it'll look the same way as when you look at it from a regular computer screen."

"Apple and education have always gone hand in hand, but Cupertino has taken a bold leap with iBooks 2, a full version update offering zero new features for those of us who graduated from school long ago. But for iPad-toting students, the company's new digital textbook initiative is a revelation. iBooks 2 is the same as it ever was, adding only the ability to read interactive, multitouch textbooks on the iPad, purchased via iBookstore on your tablet or through iTunes on the desktop; iPhone and iPod touch users are sadly left out on this fresh feature. But despite Apple's hyperbolic marketing, iBooks 2 arrives with a mere nine textbooks from two of the three top publishers. "

There are a tremendous amount of websites out there now (usually referred to as web 2.0) which allow users to create content. You're actually on one right now…a blog. With all of these resources, they offer tremendous promise for classroom application. The trick is to pick a few and begin to infuse inside your class. From time to time, you will see our TCI bloggers refer to, or even use, sites. For techies, web 2.0 is like breathing. They can't imagine life without it. For many teachers though, it can be overwhelming. We've worked to create a quick guide to some of the more popular web 2.0 sites out there. This guide will give you basics on how to get started and how they can be used in a great TCI activity. Feel free to download and share this document with colleagues. If there's another site you feel we should really take a look at, please let us know! We're always on the hunt for great new tools for teachers