https://standout.adobe.com/slate/

Slate by Adobe won me over as my new favorite app that I have used this semester. I can’t see myself using too many PowerPoints or Prezis after discovering this Adobe presentation app.  Slate is of course a free app that creates very sleek and clean looking presentations. They don’t require a significant amount of navigation as you can slide through an entire project like it is a webpage. You can add photos as full backgrounds or just for a small break from too much text.

For my Slate about bildungsromans, the photos made it very easy for me to present the novels I chose in a way that was pleasing to look at.

Author: Richard Byrne
Website: www.freetech4teachers.com

This blog covering educational technology had quite a few things that I can see helping me as an educator. It mainly covers ways to incorporate technology for collaboration and productivity, as well as occasionally covering apps and other sites for teachers and students alike.

What I took away most from the blogs was the use of clouds, drives, and other databases that can help make technology an effective part of our classroom. As a language arts teacher, I can use Google Docs or Microsoft OneDrive for students to save work on. This can be effective for groups projects, making collaboration and organization easier for each group of students.

Despite seeing how well those features can help me, I didn’t see much more to brag about. For one, the layout of the page is much messier than some of the other blogs I have seen this semester. Also, there are too many examples of others using the websites suggestions rather than Byrne’s in depth coverage of the apps and other technologies. Even with its somewhat lackluster layout, the website shouldn’t be totally written off. There are teachers out there who would greatly benefit from this website’s resources.

www.educreations.com/lesson/view/packaged-play/32430204/?ref=link

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/educreations-interactive-whiteboard/id478617061?mt=8

Price: free (upgraded version for $11/month)

The Educreations app was the screencasting app that I chose for this assignment.  I have done language arts themes for every assignment so far; and while I enjoy doing language arts projects, I haven’t gotten to do anything relating to coaching over the last couple of years.  In the app description, it says that it would be a great app for diagramming sports plays; so that’s what I did!  I used a scenario where our football team would be adding in a new wrinkle to attack this week’s opponent.   I could see a lot of ways to do language arts lessons with this app.  For in-class assigned novels, you can use the videos as outlines for what happens in chapters or certain sections.  You can do grammar lessons by voicing over and correcting words/sentences with the red pen feature.

It was easy to use and had enough features even for the lite version.The upgraded version is $11 per month.  From what I can see, the only feature that really makes me want the upgraded version is the ability to save videos to your camera roll. With the lite version you can still join groups, share assignments with others, and save drafts.  The only real problem was that for the life of me I could not embed the actual video into my blog post.  The link takes you right to my profile, though.

To show how world clouds can be used in the classroom, I used a poem I read in high school called “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I remember that when we studied the poem, our teacher instructed us to go from stanza to stanza and choose words that were important, appeared frequently, or both. For this, I used the first stanza of the poem and punched it into the app.

TagCloud was only 99 cents and I chose the app for a couple of reasons:
1) It was the first one that popped up.
2) It had more than a few good reviews.

There are many options that make this easy to use. For the poem, I just copied the first stanza and pasted it into the text box. It then gives you some options to filter what words and how many of them appear. It automatically excludes common English words like and, it, and the so that they don’t get featured as common words. You can, however, change that feature if you do want to see those words. It also automatically excludes numbers, even if they are written out such as “seven.” You can change this, too.

Once you are done, it allows you to just save it to your camera roll for easy sharing, messaging, or embedding.

I can really see this being used for English classes. For example, they can punch their essays into it to see which words they are overusing or underusing. I think poetry and other literature is a great use for this app. A lot of times, the words that pop up the most can show what kind of message authors want to get across.

After getting over the initial confusion of this app, I was excited to see the possibilities of it. As we all know, PowerPoint presentations can kill morale. These presentations, however, provide a faster and more interactive way to give a lesson. No switching from page to page: just using one home base for any media you need to teach the lesson.