musingsontechnology

Well I got my new dongle and I’m up and running with my iphone or my boss lets me use his ipad to show kids apps on the Smartboard and then they take turns using the device. I even went out and bought headphone splitters and earbuds to get 4 on at a time, but so far I’ve only tried with two kids.(Smart tech has not figured out a way to keep the touchscreen feature of the Smartboard activated with these devices plugged in yet so we are limited to demo mode for now but I’m sure there’s a team of experts in a room somewhere working out this glitch.) I’m discovering new things every day that can be used in the classroom. These are exciting and terrible times people! Kinda like the invasion of the body snatchers. Who knows where we’ll end up? But we’re all coming along for the ride…

Okay well I went and got myself an iphone this month and I have discovered and downloaded about 10 free apps for education that I can use with my students if I am willing to let them play with my phone  (which I pretty much am). There’s stuff for phonics, spelling, vocabulary building for ESL students and basic math facts. Who knew you could slice fruit with a sword while you learn new words? However I am quickly realizing that my nearly 50 year-old eyes would have preferred an ipad and that this would have been way better for teaching purposes. Duh. So this will be the logical next step. Now I am out to find a longer dongle (well what girl isn’t?) for my ceiling mounted projector. Wish me luck!

Hi everyone. I was looking at an ipad over the holiodays and considering all the great apps that could be used for teaching. Then I wondered if I could hook it up to my Smartboard. James Gill put me in touch with our Smarttechnology consultant, who sent the following e-mail. Apparently this is a relatively new idea and they are just getting a handle on it. I still don’t know what a dongle is, but it sounds interesting…

What you can do is to hook up your iPad (needs to be an iPad 2) with a dongle & you can project the iPad onto the SMART Board. There will be no touch on the board, but your iPad can be projected. I talk about iPad integration & which dongles you can get from Apple in one of my blog posts here:

 http://sharpsav.com/blog/ipad-integration.html

If your iPad has also been updated & you have Apple TV and a projector with an HDMI port, you can project/mirror your iPad that way – and then it would be wireless. I have a You Tube video of how to do that here – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6ErfZ26DGs&list=UUWUitrNZZF2TO0UTWJ-JlhA&index=1&feature=plcp

Let me know if you have any more questions…it’s certainly an awesome way to engage the kids with technology! Thanks, Sasha Žekulin Education Consultant

I have set up access to several websites for my students to use under my teacher/ class  profile where they also have their own log-in.  Now they want to continue exploring the site at home. I am wondering if I should insist that they make their own separate account for home use or if I should let them use the same log-in at home. Any advice people?

Check out the attached link in the blogroll sidebar to see what Surrey district is doing with their technology budget. They have created 12 teams of teachers using ipads in the classroom. A representative from their district spoke about this at our most recent Pro0D day. Exciting stuff! But quite expensive of course…

My colleague showed me how to use the gallery pictures to create a virtual storybook this week. First she had the whole write a collaborative story through discussion. She just used the search window to find simple objects that she wanted in her pictures, such as “house”, “girl” , “dog”. She used the paint tool to make it nice and colorful.  This seems like a great idea that I am going to try now, but I would do it in reverse order. I would create the images first and then have my students write the text to go with the pictures. Do you have any Smartboard writing tips to share?

Do you recommend a Smartphone (which kind?) or an iphone or something else for us teachers? What features do you like?

I am finding that having so many irons in the fire I need a little booklet to keep all my usernames and passwords for all the different websites I am using. What is the best solution for this people? Do you keep them listed on your phones? Am I missing something obvious here? I try to use the same one as often as possible but on different sites I have to create new ones because mine are already in use. What’s the best way around this please?