There are a number of assistive software or add-ons that may support students with access to learning. Much like i-device apps, this area is constantly changing. A great start is to “know your purpose” when considering the following. (If you need support with these, please contact our Learning Technologies team.) ON THE COMPUTER EASE of…
Category: Software and Tools
Must be App Smash Time – List for 2016-2017
Seems like the world of apps is constantly shifting with an abundance of tools that promise just about everything except make coffee. I imagine that will happen soon. Here is our updated list of apps and ‘yes’, we like to keep the list to under 20 (leaving lots of space for saving creations). Again, some…
Math, Math and More Math
In partnership with Ron Coleborn (Math consultant), we are pleased to announce two Math softwares available for teachers to apply: Dreambox Learning (Math) Skoolbo (Math and Literacy basic skills) (Canadian version) DreamBox is an online Math resource (K-8) intended to support personalized instruction for students from intervention to enrichment. The ongoing formative assessments within the program…
2016 Must Have List of Apps for iDevices
I can’t believe that it was February, 2015 since I started a list of Apps that every school should consider having on their idevices. Anyone who has been to the App Store will know all too well the number of apps represent a mountain of options. How do we choose our apps for “THE LIST”? While exploration…
Our Top 20 iApps Recommendations for 2017
You might have guessed that in the last post, I was aiming for my top 20 apps for iDevices but ended up with only 14. It was incredibly challenging to filter the apps out of 800 on my list (yes you read correctly – 800 of the best). Well, I have finally chosen the last six…
Stories Told: Risk-Taking and Connected Relationships
We left off last year with celebration events for all of our teams. Many things stood out from those gatherings: risk-taking is built on trust, possibility thinking and time to ruminate, ideas start from what we know (a launch page), integration of purposeful technologies requires focused play, assessment is not an afterthought, articulating clear goals…
On the Geeky Side
If there’s one thing you can count on in Learning Technologies is that change is a constant. No longer can you rely on getting comfortable with only one tool; before you know it another version or upgrade is available. Even worse is when your favourite resource has been shelved and you’re on the hunt for…
Where and How of Using Images to Enhance…Sparking the Learning
What’s the one or two questions I get asked a lot from teachers and administrators? “Where do you get copyright free images to use for online platforms like blogs or in presentations like powerpoint. What types of images work better than others.” Images are extremely important especially in this increasingly visual world. They can serve to…
Our Must Have List of Apps for iDevices
Since ipads and ipod/touches hit the district, I can’t count the number of times I’ve been asked what apps are great. I wrote about this previously (Apps) using the lens of “Relevance, Thinking Skills, Sharing and Usability” (adapted by Tony Vincent; Kathy Schrock). Another layer may be to connect the app against the SAMR model (a…
Where the Intersection between Talk and Courage Meet
Created with Tagul.com We’ve been working and editing our Digital Citizenship (curriculum dare I say) for a bit now (squeezed in between all the other projects). And I’ve returned to the same conclusion I had at the beginning of this journey. The only thing that is really different is that we access an online environment…
Engage in the Experience – Professional Learning
As we organize our teaching/learning environments, it is important to hold time to learn ourselves – to challenge ourselves to engage with new ideas, to seek out new opportunities in professional learning, and to reflect how they relate with personal beliefs. This is about connecting to what is important. Only then can we bring powerful…
Voice and Choice – Teachers & Students Ring Out
From time to time we continue our focus on sharing practices in SD41 that create community and build connected stories using our blogs. On the Cariboo side of the city, resides Armstrong teacher, Jude Comeau. Her blog called Division 11’s Class Blog-Learning One Byte At A Time, is a hive of connected learning. Her purposes are…
iPad Apps that Enhance your Language Arts Program
Joined by a group of enthusiastic K-12 teachers and principals, we explored a number of apps at our District Pro-D session on February 21st. The feature story was Pete the Cat: I Love My White Shoes by Eric Litwin. After listening to the story and the oh-so catchy song, we used a strategy called Milling…
App #10 of “10 Apps to Countdown Season”
App #10: Partner a beautiful image that you’ve drawn or photographed with interactivity and you’ve got Thinglink. These rich interactives provide another way to curate and organize information. I’ve written about this before using the SAMR Model as an example (developed by Dr. Ruben Puentedura, Ph.D) and also here where I was participating in CLMOOC. Thinglink offers interaction tools that tag photos or images…
App #9 of “10 Apps to Countdown Season”
App #9: In our effort to highlight the SAMR Model of integration of technology, we’ve been considering what activities might fit into Redefinition (technology that allows creation of new tasks, previously inconceivable). What activities might have significant impact to student outcomes? The “tell your story” concept remains one of the powerful ways we have to teach others, to increase audience,…
App #8 of “10 Apps to Countdown Season”
App #8: Image editors are the tools that help your ordinary images dance off pages. IrfanView is a free program (on your school computers) that does a variety of basics like compression. I love the “batch conversion” feature when I need a ton of images resized for the web. (click here for instructions) When I need to…
App #7 of “10 Apps to Countdown Season”
App #7: How do you present information from research projects? Usually we default to PowerPoint. Another option is Haiku Deck for all platforms. I wrote about this app for the iPad before (click here). The presentation software offers a beautiful, yet simplistic way to to share information. Each slide offers options for layout, format (bullet points), images (including…
App #6 of “10 Apps to Countdown Season”
App #6: QR Codes (or Quick Response codes) are everywhere – in magazines, on professional cards, on billboards, websites, newsletters all because those little squares can be packed with information. You can even find them at the grocery store gracing the fruit section (giving you additional details of the grower). Teachers have used them to create…
App #5 of “10 Apps to Countdown Season”
App #5: Many of us have our students write stories and then illustrate the text. While the artists in the bunch do flips and cartwheels (and I’ve had those students), what happens to those who struggle with drawing the simplest shapes. You know what I mean… somehow my tree just doesn’t quite look like a…
App #4 of “10 Apps to Countdown Season”
App #4: “I hate Google Docs!” stated a student in an advanced writing class. The teacher being stunned by this emphatic state turned my way with a “now what!” look. After probing, it became clear that this writer liked the thesaurus dictionary in MSWord. A quick introduction to online visual dictionaries opened a whole different world not…