Visual aids almost always reinforce understanding while studying just about any subject. Digital storytelling is an important tool teachers can implement in their classrooms to help encourage their students to make connections not previously possible. Slate is a free app on the Apple App Store that allows presenters to create projects to do just that.

With Slate, I was able to upload pictures, add text, and use several other useful features to construct a virtual tour of the modern day Gettysburg Battlefield. After a couple hours of intensive work, I had a completed project that leads viewers around the battlefield and highlighted several of the most significant memorials and dedications placed there throughout the years. You should check this out.

Gettysburg Virtual Tour

Slate was actually a difficult program to work with. When it was all said and done, I spend way more time and effort creating the tour than I would have if I had used a iMovie or even PowerPoint. Additionally, the app is overloaded way too easily and causes it to force quit automatically. This was extremely frustrating, especially toward the end, because it would often not recover the last pictures or captions I had added. Because of this, I will probably never use it again. Instead, I’m positive there are more impressive programs around that could allow me to create the same project with half the headache.

Being the Change: Exploring Leadership and the Work of Nobel Peace Prize Laureates appears to be a fantastic course that teaches leadership through the eyes of Nobel Peace Prize Laureates.  It is a six week course that would be great to be completed as a whole with a student council or other leadership group.  It would also be great broken up into pieces and spread out through the school year for entire classes of students.   It includes PDF’s for classroom instruction and four different books that include instruction about Noble Peace Prize Laureate’s Leymah Gbowee and Jimmy Carter.  Included are links to fifteen different thought provoking websites that can be used to generate essay questions and learning experiences.  I am excited to use this and future iTunes U classes in the students classroom that will help create a community of learning.  As you can see in the below picture there are plenty of lessons to choose from, each coming from a variety of subjects.

“The Apps in the Classroom series was created to provide teachers with a few ideas on how to integrate content creation apps into daily classroom instruction. Each guide includes ​a collection of activities that span age ranges and subjects and can be modified to work ​in your own learning environment. Inspired by Apple Distinguished Educators, the activities are designed to encourage students to think in new ways and help them take a creative approach to applying and demonstrating learning.”

In iTunes U, in For Educators, there is a category called Using Apps in the Classroom. If you click or tap the see all link, you will find eighteen courses, that are free, for you to check out. A few that interest me are; Tag Jornal Lesson Ideas, Art Authority Lesson Ideas, and Explain Everything Lesson Ideas.

I took a look at Explain Everything Lesson Ideas. I have used the Explain Everything app for a class project. The cost of the app is $2.99. “It is a terrific interactive whiteboard and screen casting app, it is perfect for making instructional videos that clearly demonstrate concepts. Annotate, manipulate, and at narration to documents, photos, and videos, creating visual presentations that you can share. Instructors can use this app to explain everything from math equations to football plays, or they can task students with producing their own projects to show to the class.”

The Lesson Ideas iBook provided great ideas to use in the classroom. They covered Kindergarten through High School and they covered all subjects. I liked the idea of using this app for the Kindergartens to find things in the classroom that start with a certain letter. The students would use their iPads to take pictures of those items and create a presentation of what they found.

For this weeks review I looked at the book series One Best Thing. This is a series of books published by Apple but written by educators from a wide arrange of backgrounds and topics. The books cover a wide variety of things from teaching strategies, great apps and what to use them for and different classroom technologies. They are short books that are helpful to implement a strategy into practice successfully. All the books are free on the IBook store and more will be added in the future.

For my book I looked atApple TV: A Deployment Guide. This short book is about how to successfully implement an Apple TV in the classroom. I choose this book because of my recent use of Apple TV has been a learning experience and I think it does have merit in the classroom. The author of this book was Mr. Paul Yip, he has been a Computer Resource Teacher for 10 years in Ontario, Canada. This book is about 18 pages going over brief deployment guides for the Apple TV from costs, installment, use, and security. It starts off by giving a brief explanation of how the Apple TV is useful in 1:1, shared devices and BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) classroom by allowing a consistent flow in learning because this device is basically a lot of devices in one, like an interactive whiteboard, projector, and TV. Then it starts by talking about a proper place to keep the device where it would be the most effective. It needs to be close to Ethernet,  Power and an A/V wall plate. Then it briefly goes over mounting, saying it is not necessary but because it is small, portable and lacking a locking hole it is recommended to get some kind of security lock. A few brands it discussed were aTryten mounting plate, or even just aluminum plumbers tape. For safety he recommends plastic panduit, raceway, wire-mold or a steel conduit depending on your schools regulations. This is for cord safety as well as management to make the classroom look neater and safer for the students. The Apple TV can also be run through WIFI but it is recommended to run it through an Ethernet jack just for a consistent stream.  Overall he says to work closely with the IT department to make sure of proper set-up and connectivity between classrooms and teachers. It runs through air-play on any Apple product 2nd generation and newer and can also be used on some third-party applications but it is not recommended because they are not supported by Apple.  In the final part of the book he goes over cost and cost saving. The Apple TV costs about $109 and with mounts, panduits, and cables it makes it around $250 which does seem like a lot of money especially if you are putting it in all the classrooms. But in his cost saving questions he discusses how it is cheaper than it seems. Given that an average interactive whiteboard costs anywhere between $3000-$5000 you can install Apple TV in multiple classrooms for that price and the IPad can do almost as much as the interactive whiteboard can which would be incredibly cost effective in lower end schools. Overall this book was really informative on how to purchase, install and run Apple TV in schools but it does not do any explaining on an application in the classroom besides as a replacement for interactive whiteboards. But given that these books are a basic introduction to a topic more exploring would be done on an individuals part.

I really like these series of books, they are very entertaining and filled with a lot of interesting knowledge about a varying amount of topics. I recommend them to anyone going into the field of teaching in any concentration.

Videos are always a great way to help convey just about any concept. They captivate our attention like nothing else can. Using them in the classroom is almost essential in today’s world to help students continue to grow. Building custom videos specifically for your own classes is a great way to personalize the material for your students. It allows better avenues for finding individual relevance in one’s life.

To practice this idea, I made an iMovie project for Celebrate Kansas Voices. This program is designed to highlight the History all around us. Every Kansan has a story to tell and this is the perfect outlet for sharing them. The video I made tells the ledged of Comanche the Brave Horse. Comanche was a Calvary horse that survived Custer’s Last Stand. He became a symbol to all Americans and we in Kansas have a special connection to him. Check it out and see why.

I incorporated several apps to create this project, including, GarageBand, iTunes, AudioBoom, and Eons Timeline. Using each app individually I was able to create different pieces of the video before uploading them into iMovie. Once all strung together, editing everything down for content and fluency became easy. There are many other options out there when it comes to apps one can use to make fun things in videos, so exploring is key. Overall, this was a fun project and it was a great experience getting to research something so significant that’s also close to home.

For this project I used the whiteboard screencasting app Vittle. Vittle allows users to create a prerecorded presentation that is interactive and engaging. There are two versions of Vittle on the Apple App Store. I used the free version for obvious reasons, but there is a paid version with many more features for $8.99.

This was my first experience using a screencasting program so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Upon entering the app, however, I was presented with several tutorials I could use to quickly learn the ins and outs of the app. Within seconds, I was able to upload photos and annotate them in any way I wished. After five minutes, I had created an entire video introducing a lesson for a Kansas Geography class. See what it’s all about!

This app was surprisingly great for being free. I can definitely see myself incorporating this app into my classroom in the near future because of its ease of use and adaptability. Because of this, I will most likely purchase this app later down the road when funds are more expendable. It can be used in a verity of different ways. For example, if I were sick and could not attend class, I could create a short five or ten minute video covering the material planned for that day. This would allow class to flow normally and take a lot of stress off of the substitute.

Not many downsides exist with this app, which is great. The free version only allows videos to span one minute, which makes the paid version worth it. My chief complaint would be that editing is impossible. If I made a mistake while recording my video, I am forced to re-record the entire thing. It would be nice if I could crop the audio or add to it, but since videos are only one minute in length it isn’t such a big deal. I highly recommended this app and discovering applications for it in classrooms of any age, content, or intelligence. Go give it a try yourself!

Everyone hates textbooks. They’re big, usually very complex, expensive, and too often end up as a paperweight. Wouldn’t education be so much easier without them? The latest trend has been converting a textbook into an eBook, which makes getting them, reading through them, and searching for information much easier. But, still, do we really need even that much? Matt Miller, author of the blog Ditch that Textbook, says no.

Miller suggests that teachers already have more than enough information required to teach any subject for free via Internet access. And, as a student, I know he is correct. I can’t even count how many times I’ve neglected to buy a textbook for classes because it was too expensive and I knew I’d never use it. All the information I would ever need for any class is already online. All I would have to do is go get it. Miller says teachers should use this same technique to design their lessons.

Primary and secondary sources provide more than enough information for learners to understand a topic. Since I teach Social Studies, I’ve already learned quite a lot about where to find such sources. Nevertheless, Miller has taught me a great deal on how to improve my resource collecting and then how to utilize it in the classroom.

Miller’s blog is a well kept, informative, and organized outlet for learning these skills. He posts blogs fairly regularly that are designed to help educators ditch their textbooks for better sources of learning. For example, Miller supplies teachers with several great apps, programs, and similar resources that can be used to create a virtual classroom sufficient for 21^st century learning. Several of his ideas are great, and others not so great, but the point is that he is attempting to provide tips for how to get rid of the portions of our education system that are outdated and serve little purpose.

One of my favorite parts of Miller’s blog is his articles tab. Here, Miller provides articles centered around learning environments absent of textbooks. These provide a great perspective on how to incorporate similar class setups into your own classroom. They give real world examples on how to use technology instead of traditional texts to teach the exact same lessons and improve student learning.

This blog is definitely in my bookmarks and is something I will visit frequently in the future. I really enjoyed the way Miller organized the site for ease of use. Also, I liked how he provides many other resources that can be explored further on just about every subject he touches on. Miller’s Ditch that Textbook is very useful and is by far the best blog I have reviewed to date.