BrainPOP

An image from BrainPOP's Simple Machines Animation

BrainPOP is a educational website which creates animated, curricular content intended to engage students, support educators, and consequently increase student achievement. With its ability to be incorporated into traditional, blended, and "flipped" learning settings, BrainPOP supports individual, team, and whole-class learning by introduce new topics and complex concepts in language which students are easily able to understand.  At its most basic level, BrainPOP is a great educational resource for teachers which allows downloads of pre-determined free content however if you choose to subscribe be warned it is not cheap (making it out of reach for most pre-service educators). If you are like me and prefer access to the animations for without the cost then you can download BrainPOP or BrainPOPJr's movie of the week app via iTunes and watch some for free. I do love the content of this website, it is just a pity the cost makes it so far out of reach.

 

QR Codes In The Classroom

 

I have always been curious about using QR Codes in education, so I decided to have a little search on the internet and came up with a wealth of information. To provide a quick explanation quick response (QR) codes are visually scannable data matrices that can store up to 7,089 numeric characters or 4,296 alpha-numeric characters – up to 590 times the information possible in a standard 12 line UPC barcode. This data capacity means that QR codes can store almost anything – URLs, text, math problems, etc. While examining the versatility of QR codes I discovered that there are many creative ways to use QR codes in the K-12 classroom. These include creating interactive scavenger hunts, serving as writing prompts, and guiding student learning to online resources. In a library they can be used on the inside cover of books directing you to other works by the author and similar books on the subject. Two fantastic articles about how QR codes can be incorporated into the classroom can be found here and here and are certainly worth reading - enjoy!

Air Server

I was wanting to show the content of  my iPad to the children I was teaching on prac and I was lucky enough to be told about Air Server by my brilliant husband. Air Server for those who are not familiar with this nifty tool is a AirPlay receiver for Mac/Pc which allows you to receive AirPlay feeds similar to an Apple TV, so that you can stream content or Mirror your display from your iOS devices. In education the benefit of Air Server is that it allows you to show content to your class to provide a highly engaging experience using an iPad. It also allows you to wirelessly beam content to SMARTBoard - which is one of my favourite features. Having the ability to not only be able to move around the classroom with an iPad in hand as well as display multiple iPads on one screen means that the applicability of Air Server for education endless. I have a love affair with Air Server and would highly recommend it being part of any teachers toolkit.

Xtranormal

("Robots Go Gaga" by Linda Cahill)

I was recently taking a look at what some of my fellow educators had produced for their first technology assignment and came across an inspiring blog by Mrs Karen Willis which can be found here. In Karen's blog she wrote about the beauty of collaborating to produce her first animated movie using Xtranormal and she did a fantastic job. Xtranormal for those who don't know is a movie creation tool that uses text to speech technology. Users can create a video by choosing characters, a background, and then typing the dialogue to be read aloud by the computer program. Additional animations and sound effects can be easily dragged and dropped into the text boxes to add to the dialogue. This site allows for movies to be shared to popular social media sites, provides embed codes linking directly to your own movie, and allows for easy publication to YouTube. As a tool within the classroom students could easily use Xtranormal to create narrative stories, recreate scenes from a novel being read in class, or they could use it for reflective learning to share what they have learned. A fantastic site which list some of the uses of Xtranormal according to specific content area's can be found here, and another site which provides an overview of how Xtranormal can be incorporated within the classroom can be here. Wanting to try out Xtranormal, I created a short movie with my children based on a popular pop song for fun. I hope you enjoy it!

ICTs - Connecting People All Over The World

A fun example demonstrating how ICTs connect people all over the world.