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Apps That Rise to the Top: Tested and Approved By Teachers. Michelle Luhtala/Edshelf With the thousands of educational apps vying for the attention of busy teachers, it can be hard to sift for the gold.

Apps That Rise to the Top: Tested and Approved By Teachers

Michelle Luhtala, a savvy librarian from New Canaan High School in Connecticut has crowd-sourced the best, most extensive list of apps voted on by educators around the country. “I wanted to make sure we had some flexibility because there’s no one app that’s better than all the others,” Luhtala said. Some apps are best for younger students, others are more complicated, better suited for high school students. Many apps do one thing really well, but aren’t great at everything. 30Hands allows a user to make pictures, annotate them, record a voice explainer and then packages it all into a video. Adobe Voice is a recently released education product from Adobe that allows students to narrate a story over an array of digital images. Tellagami is a tool to share quick animated messages. ExplainEverything is another tool for creating video like tutorials.

How To 'App Smash' And Implement Digital Storytelling On The iPad. App smashing, the process of using more than one apps in conjunction with one another to create a final product, is a concept that allows students to create engaging educational projects and illustrate their creativity in multifaceted ways.

How To 'App Smash' And Implement Digital Storytelling On The iPad

One of the most gratifying and effective ways to use app smashing in the classroom is to create digital storytelling projects. The concept of digital storytelling is emerging as a form of personal and collective expression of knowledge, ideas, and perceptions. Its numerous and positive effects on students’ communication skills are well documented. Digital storytelling is the perfect vehicle for the delivery of visual and audio stimuli that greatly enhance a storyline or a simple narrative. Here is an iPad app smashing activity you can use in your classroom in order to create professionally looking digital storytelling projects.

Getting Hands-On: The Project A typical app smashing activity has four steps: First, you start with the end product in mind.

Story Telling/Presentations

14 Free Apps for Higher Order Thinking. Apps for higher order thinking can be a great push for your students to explain their thinking and create their own digital portfolio items.

14 Free Apps for Higher Order Thinking

Apps that focus on higher order thinking can help your students start using focused thought processes to address new questions, investigations, and basic HOTS skills. Each of these apps can be used to complement and execute Bloom’s Higher Order of Thinking framework, focusing on analyzing, evaluating, and creating. With these high order thinking apps, you can focus your students on: raising questions vital to discussiongathering and assessing information systematicallytesting conclusions against criteriathinking with an open mind about alternative theories and solutionscommunicating complex ideas effectively Please enable JavaScript to view the <a href=" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', ' 'discussion by Sidelines.') Share this post with friends and colleagues:

How-to: Use AirDrop to share files between iOS devices [Poll] AirDrop can be a be a quick, simple way to transfer files between iOS devices.

How-to: Use AirDrop to share files between iOS devices [Poll]

It can be especially handy because it is truly a device-to-device transfer that works even when neither device has internet access, although Wi-Fi and Bluetooth have to be turned on for it to function. In this article I will discuss how to turn on AirDrop and use it to share files between devices. In Apple apps, any files that can be transferred using the share icon can be sent via AirDrop. This includes photos, videos, iWork documents, notes, contacts, links, directions, and location data.

Some third-party apps can also share data using AirDrop. RequirementsIn order to take advantage of AirDrop, you have to be running iOS 7 on one of the following devices: iPad 4 or lateriPhone 5 or lateriPod Touch 5th gen Both iOS devices need to have Bluetooth and Wi-Fi turned on in settings as mentioned above. Set-up To activate Airdrop, access Control Center by swiping up from the bottom of the screen.