It Has Finally Arrived!

When I heard the news, I will say that I was beside myself. So many of us have been waiting so patiently. Padlet is finally an app! Padlet, which is essentially a virtual bulletin board, allows you to post videos (without having to mess with YouTube or Vimeo), text, images, and links onto a Padlet wall. Some of us were using Padlet on mobile devices through our Internet browsers but it was always a bit glitchy. Now, we can use the app version. Simply log into the app with your padlet.com account and host your great work from within the app. Here are just a few ways in which we are using Padlet throughout our school:

• Dinner Discussions: Love the home school connection use here!

• Sharing artwork

• Communicating with other students around the world when the time difference prohibits Skyping

 

• Sharing weather reports filmed in front of the green screen

• Sharing commercials made in Social Studies

Accessibility is key so knowing we can use Padlet within the app is a game changer. 

App Creation with Tiny Tap

Today's tech tip is really quite awesome. It's an app called Tiny Tap that allows you or your students to create apps. It is suitable for any age. At GaETC, I learned that their is a Speech Pathologist, Ellen Weber, that creates apps with Tiny Tap quite regularly for her clients. If you would like to see the apps she has created (you can use them too!), click here. You must create your own Tiny Tap app on an iPad or iPhone but you can play and use the apps on an iPad, iPhone, or a computer. How great is that?! This is a free resource. You can use other people's apps for free too. 

The story behind the app is quite interesting. The creator of the app invented Tiny Tap to help him communicate with his mentally disabled father. He found it to be quite powerful and was sharing it at the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas. An educator at SXSW thought the app would be useful in his school and helped him leverage his market for the app. People that now know about Tiny Tap can't get enough of it. 

What are some ways that you can use it in your classroom?

*Students can create an app to learn about content
*Students can play each other's apps to study that content
*You can create an app to advertise a classroom event or even better, have your students create it (for example, the Hanukkah party)
*Students, Teachers, or Parents can create an app to assist with learning math facts
*You or your students can create an app to teach digital citizenship
*Students or teachers can create an app to practice site words
*Teachers can create an amazing activity to do on Grandparent's today- have students create an autobiographical app with their grandparent
*Teachers can use this app for differentiated instruction- have students create an app as an enrichment activity

To see an app that Ellen Weber created about Narrative Elements using the book Rosie Revere, Engineer by Andrea Beaty, click here. (It is one of my favorite picture books!) I can't emphasize enough what a "gem" this tech tool is and I hope you will find it to be fabulous too.

Follow Me This Sway

Created with Sway

There has been a lot of hype surrounding Sway so I thought I would go ahead and share it with you. Perhaps you have not heard of it yet? It is a tech tool created by Microsoft (but is compatible with iPads and iPhones) that allows you to create story lines, presentations, cards, newsletters, and just about anything else that you wish. It is like a Tackk, Smore, Powerpoint, Storify, and Canva tool all wrapped into one. What is its purpose? It can be used to create a webpage, a photo journal, a how-to presentation, an event flyer, a syllabus, an interactive social studies lesson, a research project, a commercial for a new product, a vocab lesson, and more. You can use it for just about anything. 

If you would like to learn more, there is a tutorial here. Another feature of Sway is that when you search for images within Sway, by default, it directs you to images that have creative commons licenses. You can uncheck a box to take that default option away but you probably wouldn't want to do that. If you would like to read a Sway about how to create a Sway, click here. I have discovered that you could spend hours creating in Sway. Sway might just sway you to create something great!