First in the list of apps I am going to look at is AirPresenter.

The vast majority of students I teach don't have cell phones, which is to be expected in a K-6 school.  Today though, I was at the dentist and saw something that I thought was a little odd, and somewhat disquieting.

When I was sitting in the waiting room the only other people present were a mother and her two teenaged daughters, one being between 13-14 and the older 15-16 years old.  They were chatting about something when I sat down, homework that had to be done, and an upcoming dance.  The older girl was called in to the office for her work, and left her purse and other objects sitting in the chair between her mother and her sister.  Within moments of the girl going beyond the doors her mother casually popped open her purse and pulled out her cell phone and prepared to start looking through it.

The younger sister let out a startled, "MOM!" and immediately told her mother to stop.  Her mother said she was just looking at it for a moment, and then asked for help unlocking it.  The youngest daughter replied that she wasn't helping her and politely, and firmly, asked her mother for the phone.  She was quite insistent persistent, and within a minute or two she had the phone from her mother and placed in her own purse.

I had never even considered the idea that some of these students might have issues of privacy like that.  As far as I know I had never had anything like this happen to me when I was that young, but when I was that young there was no digital footprint or tracks to leave.  Everything was over the phone, and unless someone was listening in to your phone conversation there was nothing to see.  For these kids, text messages, facebook, twitter, instagram, emails, all leave a trail that almost impossible to hide from it.

I don't know what the educational implications of this are, I just hadn't really considered it before.

Bonus.

I have always been a big fan of Google Earth.  It has so much information, and presents it such an interesting manner.  I have used it before for a couple of lessons, in particular for a Grade 4 scavenger virtual scavenger hunt where they had to tour the city looking for the answers to the clues.  It was fun, but just involved looking at information that was already present in Google.

On Friday a Grade 5 teacher wanted to an activity involving Google Earth where the students would search around the Nile River for a variety of landforms.  They would mostly rely on the pictures found on Google Earth as well the natural features you can see there.  I told her it sound alright, and made the arrangements to do it with the students.

Looking closer at Google Earth though, I remembered a recent post I had seen detailing the fact that more tours had been added to Google Earth.  I checked them out, and they were pretty interesting, but I had no idea that it was so easy to actually create your own tours!

After a bit of a hiatus with Glogster we are using it with a Grade 6 class tomorrow.  I really like the concept of Glogster, but I had in the recent past found it slightly difficult to work with.  The interface was slightly kludgy, and occasionally it was also really slow.  It did sometimes take too long to upload images as well, which made it essentially unusable too.

Ms. Whites class checked out books today and it was so warm that we went outside to read in the outdoor classroom!

The Grade 4's did a quick audio activity yesterday. Students selected a poem from two sites that had Halloween Poems for children. They then needed to select two Halloween sounds from the bank that I had downloaded from Sound Bible.  One sound was for the introduction of the poem, and the second was for the closing.  After they found their two sounds, students then needed to use Audacity to add their first sound, record themselves reading their poem, and add their last sound.

The finished product wasn't too bad, although I didn't remember to tell the students to name the poem or give credit to the author after they finished.  They worked in partners too, which gave me half as many computers to deal with plus I think it really increased the success rate of the students.  I sometimes forget in my zeal to have each student seated in front of a computer that sometimes individual work isn't the best method of getting something done.

I find a lot of the time when working with students we simply look at the information they are learning or studying in text form, ignoring all the other myriad ways there exists for presenting facts.  That is partly because people don't know about other ways to represent their work, and partly because most of us are slaves to the ways we have always done things.

Google Green Scrapbook seems like a nice idea.  It presents you with a series of questions you answer, and in the end you are given a nicely laid out scrapbook with all kinds of environmental information.  From the site:

2011 Green Scrapbook

Ipads have become very popular lately, due to their ease of use, large screens, and great interactivity.  Below is a link to a Google Spreadsheet that has a large list of apps that many have used with students who have autism.  They are sorted by topics such as advocacy, communication, and art.  Take a look and see what others have contributed.