Everyone Can Create

What: 

Apple offers numerous products for educators to implement in the classroom including curriculum called Everyone Can Create and Apple Classroom. Everyone Can Create is a comprehensive curriculum to help “find the creative genius in every student” (source). The curriculum is housed in five different iBooks including a teachers guide and separate iBooks for photos, drawing, music, and video. Each iBook includes project guides that help educators bring meaningful projects to life using multiple apps across the Apple platform. 

Why:

The Everyone Can Create curriculum allows students to be creative while learning tips and tricks for Apple’s most popular apps. For example, Drawing offers students a chance to publish a storybook using the apps Keynote, Pages, and Tayasui Drawing School. Photos offers student projects to learn about perspectives in images using the apps Camera, Photos, and Keynote. Videos offer students the chance to create their own movie trailer using the iMovie app but also introduces the Clips app to create shorter movies including silent films. Finally, Music allows students to master Garageband including making tunes from scratch and editing current popular music. 

I completed Apple’s Everyone Can Create curriculum with sixth-grade students. I not only loved how easy it was for me to implement quickly in my classroom; but, I also loved students reactions. Numerous students began with phrases like “I’m not creative” or “I can’t draw”. Yet, after completing the Everyone Can Create projects felt empowered and readily showcased their work to other students, teachers, and their parents.  

How / Next Steps: 

Check out the Everyone Can Create educators guide for upper grades and for littles

References:

References are hyperlinked above as applicable. 

TLDR (too long didn’t read):

Everyone Can Create is a comprehensive curriculum to help “find the creative genius in every student” (source). The curriculum is housed in five different iBooks including a teachers guide and separate iBooks for photos, drawing, music, and video. Each iBook includes project guides that help educators bring meaningful projects life using multiple apps across the Apple platform. 

@hollandkaylah

Monitor Student Devices with Apple Classroom

What: 

Apple offers numerous products for educators to implement in the classroom including curriculum called Everyone Can Create and Apple Classroom. Classroom is an app available to iOS and Mac OS devices and allows a parent device to monitor other devices from one screen (as shown in the image above) using bluetooth. Classroom not only allows the parent device to see the individual screens but also allows all connected devices to be locked, muted, or grouped. Classroom also allows the parent device to send a specific link to all connected devices or a specific group of connected devices. 

Why:

Apple Classroom is easy to set up and yet extremely powerful to use. Educators can connect each class and easily help students navigate to websites, lock students in apps, or lock student iPads. However, Apple Classroom is much more than a monitoring device by allowing educators the ability to control the atmosphere of the classroom. My favorite use of Classroom is as a timekeeper. When students are working on projects throughout the classroom (and are even in the hall) I will send memes to all student devices suggesting ten minutes left, five minutes left, and finally, a come back together meme. This allows students to work without feeling the need to constantly check the time. I found students to be much more productive without me constantly interrupting their work with vocalizing the time left. 

How / Next Steps: 

Check out this educators guide for setting up and implementing classroom. 

References:

References and image sources are also hyperlinked above as applicable. 

TLDR (too long didn’t read):

Classroom is an app available to iOS and Mac OS devices and allows a parent device to monitor other devices from one screen (as shown in the image above) using bluetooth. Classroom not only allows the parent device to see the individual screens but also allows all connected devices to be locked, muted, or grouped. Classroom also allows the parent device to send a specific link to all connected devices or a specific group of connected devices. 

@hollandkaylah

12 of Google Photos’ Most Amazing Features


“Google Photos has grown into an awesome service. From automatically backing up your phone’s pictures to letting you easily share your photos, there’s a lot to love for anyone who works with photos. Whether you want to make a mini stop-motion animation or just make a slideshow of related pictures, Photos can help. Select the Animation button under the Assistant tab, and you can choose from 2–50 photos to add. Once you’re satisfied, click Create and you’ll have a neat little GIF ready to share.” — Ben Stegner

Read Full Article.

Pokémon Go Automatically Granting Permission to Read Your Gmail

Pokemon Go

The Verge is reporting that “Pokémon Go has become wildly popular in the days since its release last week, but the app may be hiding a serious security issue. In many cases, users who sign into the app through a Google Account are often inadvertently granting broad permissions over all information linked to the account, including the power to read and send emails. At no point in the sign-in process does the app notify users that full access is being granted” (Source). Read more at The Verge.

Perhaps the app developer will correct this issue in the near future.

Apple vs. Google: A Rural School District’s Perspective

Chrome AppleI enjoyed listening to the following interview from Robert Scoble. On his Facebook wall Robert states that he learned “from an Indiana school superintendent, all about how Google Chromebooks are really changing what he can do and why Android tablets are coming on strong against the iPad” (Source).

What are your thoughts and experiences related to these platforms and tools?

Mobile Technology Can Be Assistive Technology

iPad Education in Use

“Mobile learning is seen by many as a disruptive technology. This is because it has been identified as a technology which holds great potential to transform the learning and teaching within a classroom. What follows is a mash-up presented at the NSWDEC 5th Biennial Equity Conference in 2011 which explains some of the issues.” (Source)

Suggested Reading: Literacy and Mobile Learning

Image representing iPad as depicted in CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase

Book Apps: A Reading Revolution, or the End of Reading?
“Even if high-quality apps do manage to change the way we read, though, it’s unclear how many current readers will respond. The mere fact that something is possible does not automatically make it desirable.”

Books vs. Screens: Which Should Your Kids Be Reading?
“Canadian author Margaret Atwood thrilled her 285,000-plus Twitter followers by defending their kind as “dedicated readers” who are boldly exploring new frontiers in literacy. Calling the Internet in general “a great literacy driver,” she defended even the most minimal form of screen-based reading as an unalloyed good – “because reading is in fact extremely interactive from a neurological point of view,” she said. “Your brain lights up a lot.””

For Some Kids, a Book Is Just an iPad That Doesn’t Work
“[Calvin] Wang designs interactive storybooks for the iPad. He was inspired, he says, by watching his daughter interact with a movable cardboard book. Since then, Loud Crow, his Vancouver-based firm, has turned an array of children’s picture books that take the pop-up concept into the digital age. Books such as Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit now respond to touch by moving, twirling, speaking and noise-making.”

Digital Lit: How New Ways to Read Mean New Ways to Write
“The e-book is changing the publishing business, but will digital technology actually change the way we tell stories, the way writers write – for better or for worse?”

ShowMe iPad App: Easily Create Online Video Tutorials

ShowMe makes it possible to easily record interactive lessons on your iPad and share them online. It’s simple and intuitive and is the type of technology that can revolutionize the way we teach, provide support, and individualize instruction. Here is a quick video demonstration.

Examples
The following video tutorials are examples of how ShowMe might be used in and out of the classroom. (Note to ShowMe’s staff: It would be helpful to teachers if the tutorials were embeddable.)

Potential Impact
I agree with TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld that was is especially exciting about Show Me is that we are getting a “glimpse of how the iPad can completely change the way people learn. Any teacher can simply record their lessons and their students would need nothing more than an iPad to learn. Add some real-time chat and maybe some video, and it is not too difficult to see how this kind of technology can turn the iPad into a classroom.” (Source)

Wrap-Up: Apple Education Workshops – @umidt

(Cross-posted from IDT News)

Apple Education Workshops hosted by the Instructional Design and Technology program at the University of Memphis was a series of ten events over three days. The more than 240 workshop participants had an opportunity to learn about and discuss the opportunities and challenges facing educators in 2011. Attendees came from public and private schools, universities, corporations, and health care providers throughout the Midsouth.

Presenters Tim Matheny, Apple Senior Systems Engineer and Dr. Barry Adams, Education Technology Consultant with Apple spoke with K-12 educators of the Mid-South as well as University of Memphis students, faculty, and administrators on various topics such as the five issues facing higher education, educational theories and practices, and future implications.

Participants had an opportunity to hear and experience with hands-on activities how Apple has responded to these current trends and issues in education and what they as individual educators could do in their own learning environments.

Instructional Design and Technology at the University of Memphis