Back to Work After the Holidays

Hope your first week back from the Christmas Break was fruitful. Here is another excellent iPad app for creative teachers with iPads. 

"Millennia ago, all you needed to get a point across to your buddies was charcoal and a cave wall or a pointy stick and some sand. Now, we sit for hours crafting passive-aggressive emails to make a point that once was communicated with an arrow and a grunt. There’s beauty in that simplicity. Let’s return to it."

image source: http://blog.evernote.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/skitch_ipad_screens4.png 

The iPad 2 is a great tool with a cable connected to your data projector with the Skitch app. The iPad 2's mirroring feature allows teachers to use maps, diagrams, scanned pages, document, pdf and annotate and highlight important points. Students can share their mastery of concepts with a quick presentation using Skitch on the teacher's iPad. Nothing new in this strategy. However, when teachers can post this illustrated lesson on their wiki or in their digital locker for students that missed the lesson or for review before the EOG this helps students and even parents. In the classroom, Apple has a device called Apple TV that wirelessly connects the iPad and a data projector, interactive white board, or a classroom HDTV. They use AirPlay which is a slick feature of iOS on the MacBook, iPad, iPod Touch, and iPhone. This seamless integration is what makes it a classroom tool-- when the wifi works and your battery is not dead. Students can create presentations using this "tactile annotation"tool. Skitch is also available for MacBook.

To share the Skitch documents, Evernote can be used. Evernote is another app teachers like using to share learning and organize their digital library of documents.  

Read more about Skitch for iPad on Andrew Sinkov's blog post http://blog.evernote.com/2011/12/21/skitch-for-ipad-is-here/

Continue the conversation on Twitter by following @cmshelpdesk and Like my "Central Middle School Center for Digital Learning" Facebook page.

Edublog Updates- Moving from Good to Gooder

I have been using EduBlogs.com and noticed James Farmer's latest blog post:

The more discerning of you may have noticed that there’s something a little different about your Edublog backend as of today.

In particular I suspect you’ll rather like what you see when you visit your Presentation tab (uploadable, ahem, croppable, headers anyone… 20 new themes, perhaps?)

Or check out the multi-blog management drop-down menu that your blog name (in the admin area) has become.

Then, you might enjoy the extra helpful links in your Dashboard… and notice that the site is swanning along at quite a nifty pace.

And, while you’re at - upload an Avatar… you’ll be happy you did (and there’s even a widget to pop it in your sidebar).

More information (and funky functionality) coming very soon… told you we’d make this worth your while, didn’t we!

I have spent hours tinkering with my P2LS blog Changing the header photo is a real snap. In my iPhoto program, I setup a custom crop that previews photos that I might use on the blog. Changing the photo may cause some confusion, and change the look of the blog, but who cares. No one visits you blogs anymore. If I want to read what Steve Dembo is thinking about, I follow his Tweets on Twitter.com. David Warlick uses his smartphone and texts messages to Twitter. If he sees a quote in a presentation, he twits it and Twitterrific pops up and I can read it instantly. The Chris Pirillo shots out twit posts like a machine gun. As for blog posts, I use RSS readers to aggregate them. I have been trying out NetNewWire, but keep coming back to Bloglines. I tried Google Reader. GR is just not easy for me to read for some reason.

I never take time to visit the blog sites. Today, I took the time to edit my Blogroll. I used the links on several blogs that I enjoy reading and using their lists of blogs, and the WordPress javascript linked them to my P2LS blog. Now that was a cool activity for a hot summer day. I should have been out working in the garden or trimming the hedge or heck no!...it was too hot outside.

I do not remember who posted the question, but someone asked what bloggers cut out now that they are spending more time reading and twitting all the time? I have cut out reading DIGG. I have deleted DIGG from my RSS readers.

I digress- Edublogs.com has updated their multi-user site. It was good, and now it is "gooder". Sorry about that- I am not a scholar.