As a result of distributing and setting up quite a few iOS devices throughout the district as part of our technology mini grant program, I participated in many conversations that resulted in app recommendations, questions about apps., and ideas for further investigation. Over Thanksgiving I had time to sort through quite a few apps and here are some keepers that I found. ALL ARE FREE!!!
Story Telling
ShowMe - You can take a picture and then draw on it while recording your voice. Use it to record an explanation or have kids use it to demonstrate their understanding
Toontastic - The easiest animation tool I have ever seen. Also incorporates academic language such as conflict, mood etc. In my opinion this is the best app in this post!
PreSchool
Spanish PreSchool Education - Kids can color and play games to develop Spanish vocab.
Elementary Reading Material
International Children's Digital Library - Many free books in numerous languages. No audio books.
I Like Books - This is a very nice collection of 37 audio books for early readers.
Story Chimes - There are a number of audio books listed under this in the App. Store. Some you have to pay for but many are free.
Decoding/Literacy
ABC Spelling Magic and ABC Reading Magic - Some of you were looking for literacy apps that support tactile activities aligned to blending, reading, segmenting, etc. These apps do that.
Concept Mapping
Total Recall - free, easy to use, basic concept mapping
Feedback / Student Engagement
Socrative - Do you want to use mobile devices as Clickers - this is the app. to use. Robust, easy to use, and can be accessed from any mobile device or computer (iPads, iPods, iPhones, Android, laptops, etc.)
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Moodleing Around - Starting a High School Online Education Program
In the Spring of 2011, the principal in my building mentioned to me during a meeting that he had a real interest in offering some online courses at our school but that for various reasons he had never pursued the idea. At the time I was taking some graduate courses related to designing and implementing online programs. In addition, I had recently created an online Cultural Proficiency professional development opportunity for district teachers using Moodle, which one of our enterprising tech personnel had installed on our server since it was free and he thought maybe someone would find it useful. The light bulb when on. I wrote up a proposal for a pilot program and presented it to the high school principal. He received board approval and we were in business!
The next step was to get CDE approval for the program. Given that this ours was a "supplemental program" and only comprised of two initial course offerings, we only had to fill out a two page application. A few emails from CDE and a handful of revisions later and we had an official letter of approval from CDE. Next up - what classes should we offer?
As it was a bit late in the game (students registered for courses starting in January) I worked with counselors closely to determine what courses would most likely appeal to the biggest audience of students. Since Health is a requirement for all students, we decided that was a good place to start. The counselors also indicated that other electives would be ideal. Since we had a teacher who was interested in teaching online, developing online and was uniquely qualified to do so, we went with her content area, Speech for our second course offering. Okay - board approval - check, CDE approval - check, classes offered - check. Will anyone register for them?
If you build it they will come.... We decided to try out two methods of course content development, build it yourself and lease it from someone else. I leased the Health course from Aventa learning while our Speech teacher opted to build her own course. I thought this was a great way to go as we could compare outcomes which would inform future decision making for our program. Well by two weeks before school in August we had over 42 students enrolled in the two courses. Awesome! But then some problems started coming up......
Turns out our Moodle had a few glitches. For one we could create courses but we could not install courses that had been backed up or that had been created by someone else. In addition, our user authentication process (ldap) was not working properly and to make matter worse neither was the bulk user info upload function of Moodle. The forward thinking tech person who had installed Moodle wasn't able to guarantee that he could prioritize fixing these glitches prior to our "live" date. So there I was the week before school unable to load the course I had leased or easily set up users.
Fat Cow to the rescue - After some frantic researching, I found that Fat Cow was a recommended host for Moodle users. Set up was easy (less than a minute to install Moodle using simple scripts) and costs low (around 100 per year). So, I set up Moodle there, got the class installed and set up user accounts...just in time for online orientation day!
So that brings us to the present. How did the courses work out? What student feedback did we gather? What did we learn? What is the future of our program? Check my next post for all this and more:)
The next step was to get CDE approval for the program. Given that this ours was a "supplemental program" and only comprised of two initial course offerings, we only had to fill out a two page application. A few emails from CDE and a handful of revisions later and we had an official letter of approval from CDE. Next up - what classes should we offer?
As it was a bit late in the game (students registered for courses starting in January) I worked with counselors closely to determine what courses would most likely appeal to the biggest audience of students. Since Health is a requirement for all students, we decided that was a good place to start. The counselors also indicated that other electives would be ideal. Since we had a teacher who was interested in teaching online, developing online and was uniquely qualified to do so, we went with her content area, Speech for our second course offering. Okay - board approval - check, CDE approval - check, classes offered - check. Will anyone register for them?
If you build it they will come.... We decided to try out two methods of course content development, build it yourself and lease it from someone else. I leased the Health course from Aventa learning while our Speech teacher opted to build her own course. I thought this was a great way to go as we could compare outcomes which would inform future decision making for our program. Well by two weeks before school in August we had over 42 students enrolled in the two courses. Awesome! But then some problems started coming up......
Turns out our Moodle had a few glitches. For one we could create courses but we could not install courses that had been backed up or that had been created by someone else. In addition, our user authentication process (ldap) was not working properly and to make matter worse neither was the bulk user info upload function of Moodle. The forward thinking tech person who had installed Moodle wasn't able to guarantee that he could prioritize fixing these glitches prior to our "live" date. So there I was the week before school unable to load the course I had leased or easily set up users.
Fat Cow to the rescue - After some frantic researching, I found that Fat Cow was a recommended host for Moodle users. Set up was easy (less than a minute to install Moodle using simple scripts) and costs low (around 100 per year). So, I set up Moodle there, got the class installed and set up user accounts...just in time for online orientation day!
So that brings us to the present. How did the courses work out? What student feedback did we gather? What did we learn? What is the future of our program? Check my next post for all this and more:)
Apple Vs. Non-Apple - A whole new world!
The district I work in is officially single platform (PC/Windows XP and 7). However, due to decentralized purchasing practices, personal initiatives of staff, and several building initiatives to purchase iPad carts, there is a strong unofficial movement towards using Apple products. With this in mind, I decided it would be prudent for me, in my role as a district technology coach, to purchase a MacBook Pro and familiarize myself with it. Previously I used an HP running Windows XP. Here are some of observations thus far (after 3 months of using it):
Uptime / Productivity - On this single feature alone, I feel justified in the extra money I spent on my MacBook. I am in and out of various building every day and I find that I can close my MacBook in one building and open it in another (without shutting down) and be up and working in about 15 - 20 seconds. On my HP this process could take up to 10 minutes if I didn't shut down the machine and about 5 minutes if I did. The time savings I realize from this economy is invaluable!
Quality of Components - The camera, screen, keyboard, and microphone on my MacBook are all of excellent quality. While I realize that I could get these features on a PC/Windows machine, it is nice to know that they are a given on all Apple products.
Software: I have found this to be a mixed bag thus far. I do quite a bit of data analysis and manipulation and have found that there are some things that Numbers won't do that Excel will. I realize I can get Excel for my MacBook but it would be nice if Numbers (which works with iCloud and iOS devices) was just a little more robust. On the other hand, when I made my first video on my MacBook, I was blown away with the ease of use, intuitive nature, and great features of iMovie. You can check out my efforts here. It beats out Movie Maker on functionality and stability by a long shot.
Support - For both the MacBook and the PC I mainly use Web tutorials to solve my problems. As of now the only Apple customer support contact I had was when I initially bought my machine. To be honest I was not very impressed. I was trying to copy my personal info from Firefox on my PC to Firefox on my MacBook. I attempted to do it manually by copying folders from PC to MB. This did not work and actually created some glitch that wouldn't allow me to open Firefox any more. The CS rep could only come up with reinstalling the OS as a solution - which did not help. I ended up solving the problem myself by digging deeper into tutorials, deleting some hidden file in FF via Finder, and then reinstalling Firefox. Turns out that there was an easier way to import the info that I should have done in the first place. Anyway, my point is I was a bit surprised that Apple support didn't have more knowledge on this issue of transferring personal data from PC to Apple.
To sum it up, my MacBook does everything that my PC did only better, easier, faster and more consistently. In addition it supports my creative side with excellent, easy to use software such as iMovie, iPhoto, and PhotoBooth. Finally, it is designed to work with iOS devices which are quickly becoming a force in education.
Uptime / Productivity - On this single feature alone, I feel justified in the extra money I spent on my MacBook. I am in and out of various building every day and I find that I can close my MacBook in one building and open it in another (without shutting down) and be up and working in about 15 - 20 seconds. On my HP this process could take up to 10 minutes if I didn't shut down the machine and about 5 minutes if I did. The time savings I realize from this economy is invaluable!
Quality of Components - The camera, screen, keyboard, and microphone on my MacBook are all of excellent quality. While I realize that I could get these features on a PC/Windows machine, it is nice to know that they are a given on all Apple products.
Software: I have found this to be a mixed bag thus far. I do quite a bit of data analysis and manipulation and have found that there are some things that Numbers won't do that Excel will. I realize I can get Excel for my MacBook but it would be nice if Numbers (which works with iCloud and iOS devices) was just a little more robust. On the other hand, when I made my first video on my MacBook, I was blown away with the ease of use, intuitive nature, and great features of iMovie. You can check out my efforts here. It beats out Movie Maker on functionality and stability by a long shot.
Support - For both the MacBook and the PC I mainly use Web tutorials to solve my problems. As of now the only Apple customer support contact I had was when I initially bought my machine. To be honest I was not very impressed. I was trying to copy my personal info from Firefox on my PC to Firefox on my MacBook. I attempted to do it manually by copying folders from PC to MB. This did not work and actually created some glitch that wouldn't allow me to open Firefox any more. The CS rep could only come up with reinstalling the OS as a solution - which did not help. I ended up solving the problem myself by digging deeper into tutorials, deleting some hidden file in FF via Finder, and then reinstalling Firefox. Turns out that there was an easier way to import the info that I should have done in the first place. Anyway, my point is I was a bit surprised that Apple support didn't have more knowledge on this issue of transferring personal data from PC to Apple.
To sum it up, my MacBook does everything that my PC did only better, easier, faster and more consistently. In addition it supports my creative side with excellent, easy to use software such as iMovie, iPhoto, and PhotoBooth. Finally, it is designed to work with iOS devices which are quickly becoming a force in education.
Sunday, November 20, 2011
Technology in the High Country
My name is Glen Egbert and I work for Summit School District in Summit County, CO located in the Central Rocky Mountains. I have a several official job titles including: Online Learning Coordinator at Summit High School, Online Health Teacher, and District Technology Coach. Interestingly, these three job titles only comprise a part-time position:) In addition, I am working to complete my Masters Degree in Instructional Systems - Educational Technology through Penn State's World Campus. All of my positions at Summit were newly created this year and combined with my coursework I have many learning opportunities. As a result, I have decided to start this blog in part to share what I learn and also to provide myself with an external workspace in which to reflect on my experiences.
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