A Handful of Free iPad Apps for Creating Videos. Even if they haven’t used it, most iPad owners are familiar with iMovie. Many schools buy it for all of the iPads that they distribute to students and teachers. If your school hasn’t bought it for you or you just want to try some other video creation options without spending any money, take a look at this small collection of free video creation apps for your iPad. Loopster is a free iPad app that is probably the closest you will come to iMovie without spending any money.
Loopster is the app that I would have my students use for documentary style videos and other projects that are going to go more than 60-90 seconds in length. The Loopster iPad app provides a four track editor. There are tracks for video and images, transitions, sounds, and text. You can import images and videos from your iPad’s camera roll or shoot a new video with the app and edit it. 30hands is a free iPad app that makes it very easy to create a narrated slideshow. How to Create Your Own Search Engine. Use Text and Images for Better Google Image Search Results. Best of the Web 2013. A Map of Nearly 100,000 Historic Places. Historic Places offers a Google Map of nearly 100,000 historic places in North America. Browse the map and click on the placemarks to discover historic sites all over the continent.
Or use the search box to look for historic places in a specific area. Clicking on the placemarks in Historic Places will take you to more information about the location of the site and a link to learn more (links not included for all places). Applications for Education Social Studies students researching different areas of North America may find the Historic Places map to be useful in starting a search about the local history of an area. You might also find that your students will discover new-to-them historic places in their own backyards. If that's the case, plan a field trip to go learn more about those places. H/T to Google Maps Mania. Lesson Plans – Search Education – Google. Picking the right search terms Beginner Pick the best words to use in academic searching, whether students are beginning with a full question or a topic of just a few words. View lesson Advanced Explore "firm" and "soft" search terms, and practice using context terms to locate subject-specific collections of information on the web.
View lesson Understanding search results Learn about the different parts of the results page, and about how to evaluate individual results based on cues like web addresses and snippets. Engage additional search strategies, such as generalization and specialization. Narrowing a search to get the best results Apply filtering tools and basic "operators" to narrow search results. Compare results for basic searches with ones that use operators to discover the impact the right operator has at the right time. Searching for evidence for research tasks Evaluating credibility of sources Consider, tone, style, audience, and purpose to determine the credibility of a source.
This Link Will Self Destruct - Create Links to Share for a Limited Period of Time. This Link Will Self Destruct is a free service for sharing links that are accessible for a finite period of time. This Link Will Self Destruct shortens your URL to make it easier for others to copy or remember. TLWSD allows you to specify how long your shortened URL will be active. You can set a limit of just a few minutes, hours, or days. Password protecting your TWLSD links is an option too. Applications for EducationThis Link Will Self Destruct could be a good service to use when you need to shorten and share the long link to a WallWisher or TodaysMeet activity happening in your classroom.
7 Great Note-taking Tools for Teachers and Students. This is another post that was prompted by a reader's email. The email was looking for a list of recommended note-taking tools. I've reviewed a lot of note-taking tools over the last five years, but I have never made a list. So here's my list of seven great note-taking tools for students and teachers. InClass is a free iPhone and iPad app that could be a very useful tool for students carrying those devices. InClass provides students with tools for taking text, audio, and video notes.
Color Note is a simple note-taking app that I've been using on all of my Android phones for the last year (yes, it's been a rough year for phones in my life). Save Meeting is a meeting recording app for iOS and Android devices. Notes.io offers a simple platform for taking and sharing notes. No list of note-taking tools would be complete without mentioning Evernote. MySchoolNotebook is a service for taking, saving, and sharing notes online and offline. Turn Pictures Into Stories With Fotobabble. This morning I shared an old post about Fotobabble on the Free Technology for Teachers Facebook page. In response to that post Stewart Whitney shared his experience of using the Fotobabble iPhone app. Stewart's comment got me to try the Fotobabble iOS app. Fotobabble is a free service that allows you to quickly turn a picture into an audio picture story. Using Fotoabble is easy, just upload an image to Fotobabble, allow Fotobabble to access your computer's microphone, and start recording your voice.
You can comment on your photo, explain what's happening your photo, or tell a story related to your photo. The Fotobabble iOS app is just as easy to use as the web version of the service but with an added bonus of visual effects editing. Applications for Education The Fotobable iOS app could be a great app for students to use to quickly create short audio stories about pictures that they take with their iPhones and or iPads (the app isn't optimized for iPad, but it works on it).
Create Trading Cards for Historical and Fictional People, Places, and Events. Through one of Tony Vincent's Tweets I learned about a wonderful free iPad app from Read Write Think. Read Write Think Trading Cards allows students to create trading cards about people, places, and events both real and fictional. I used the app to create a trading card about Winston Churchill. To create my Winston Churchill trading card I simply selected "real person" from the list of trading card options, uploaded a picture of Winston Churchill that I found on the web, and then filled in the details that the trading card template asked for.
My completed trading card can be shared via email, printed, or saved to my iPad's camera roll. Applications for Education Some of the ways that the Read Write Think Trading Card app could be used by students is to create a set of trading cards about characters in a novel, to create a set of cards about people of historical significance, or to create cards about places that they're studying in their geography lessons. A Fun Way To Make Your Own Newspaper Clippings. I stumbled upon a simple web tool the other day that, among other things, animates cat GIFs with speech bubbles that say whatever you want. We all know the internet loves its cats! See example to the right. Upon further exploration of the site, I discovered that they also have a newspaper clipping generator , which allows users to input their own information and the program generates a fairly realistic looking newspaper article which could be used as a part of a larger project or for a stand alone assignment to write a newspaper article on a particular topic.
Teachers could use the tool for special events, student birthdays, classroom blogs, or any other timely topics. And don’t forget that you can use the animated cat (or owl, squirrel, flower, etc) GIF generator to send messages to your students! Make Your Own PBS Cyberchase SMART Board Game Show. PBS Kids Cyberchase website offers dozens of educational games for students in grades three through five. The games are intended to help students develop their skills in mathematics, logic, and pattern recognition.
Students who have PBS Kids accounts can keep track of the games they've played and rank the games they've played. If you would like to make your own game for your SMART Board, check out the PBS Kids Lucky Star Game Show template. The template contains 150 questions that can be used to create games. One of the activities that you can develop using the template is a "game show" featuring your students' favorite Cyberchase characters. Applications for Education PBS Kids Cyberchase games and the SMART Board template could be useful for elementary school mathematics lessons.
8 Exam-Prep Activities Students Actually Like. After Christmas break students will return to school for 8 days of review prior to taking their End of Course Exams. I can give my students a review packet with hundreds of problems, but that would only lead to them giving up, sleeping, and not even trying. So below are 8 fun activities I created to motivate and engage my students in their final exam reviews. 1. Vocabulary Gallery Walk – Each student will be given a word to define and provide an example for. Students will use Sock Puppet or Go Animate to create a mini skit to define and example their word. Students will lay iPads around the room and walk around to review each skit. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.
These are 8 fun review games that is sure to get students motivated to review for their final exams! Visit my blog for printables, instructions, and examples! Create Digital Magazines With Glossi. Glossi is a new service for creating digital magazines. Glossi magazines can include images, videos, audio files, and links to external sources of information. The magazines that you create are displayed with page-turning effects. Your magazines can be embedded into your blog. Learn more about Glossi in the video below. Applications for EducationGlossi is still in a closed beta so you will have to request an invitation before you can start creating your own magazines. How to Use the Google Drive iPad App to Create Student Portfolios.