ALA Best Apps for Teaching and Learning 2013

The American Library Association, always a trusted source for recommendations, provides a list of apps that it considers “of exceptional value to inquiry-based learning . . .”  These are apps that encourage students to be innovative and creative as they engage in collaboration with others. Categories on the list include: Books, STEM, Organization & Management, Social Sciences, and Content Creation. A few of the apps on the ALA Best App List are: Shakespeare in Bits, Got to Have Music, Operation Math, SimplePhysics, Tinkerbox, Dropbox, Evernote, Socrative, News-O-Matic: Daily for Kids, GarageBand, and Educreations. There are links to all the apps on the list.

Coursera Has 80 New Courses

The best teachers are always learning, be it on their own or through credit courses. One of the most convenient ways to learn what you want when you want at the right price (free) is through Coursera. Maybe you or your students want to jump into songwriting, explore digital signal processing, take on quantum physics, learn about comic books, or discover if plants have senses. You’ll find courses on these topics and more in the new Coursera catalog.  Check it out because you won’t believe how much is there for you and your students—cryptography, nanotechnology, Common Core, Surviving Your Rookie Year of Teaching, genetics, critical thinking, bioelectricity, Latin American Culture, Malicious Software, English Composition . . .

Miss Humblebee’s Academy

Miss Humblebee’s Academy for Pre-Kindergartners, Preschoolers, and Kindergartners offers a safe online learning environment free from pop-ups, advertisements, and links. Designed for young children, the Academy features hundreds of lessons, mobile access, and progress reports. Using the program, students study topics in core subjects such as math, science, social studies, language, art, music, and literacy with Miss Humblebee and her four “amazing” friends”.

Family and educator memberships are available as a free one-week trial.  Songs and albums are priced at $.99, $8.49, and $8.99. Classroom licenses ($299) are available as are monthly memberships ($7.95 first child; $5.00 for each additional child) for families. You can preview Miss Humblebee’s delight songs without signing up.

iTunes Virtual Field Trips

Open new worlds of knowledge by going to iTunes Virtual Field Trips. There, you’ll find “trips” to museums, historic sites, historic site apps, National Parks, National Parks apps, Libraries, Library apps, Performing Arts, and Performing Arts apps. There are Mummy Chamber videos from the Brooklyn Museum, Musee du Louvre HD app ($2.99), Beyond New York Sight (audio, Manhattan), Garden Grounds New York Botanical Garden (free, audio/video), Guggenheim app (free), Smithsonian Mobile app (free), National Parks by National Geographic app (free), Treasures of the New York Public Library (audio), Today’s Document from the National Archives app (free), MoMA Audio: Kids (free), A Jazzy Day: Music Education Book for Kids app ($4.99), and much more. By the way, A Jazzy Day has garnered great reviews.

Guide to Free Online College Classes for High School Students

Online College Courses.net offers a list of free online courses for students in Grades 9-12. The courses are categorized by topics such as Arts Open Courseware, (art, music, and theater); Business Open Courseware (economics, finance); English and Communication Open Courseware (poetry, grammar, literature, cultures); Humanities and Social Sciences Open Courseware (U.S. History, Politics, Public Policy); Math Open Courseware (calculus, statistics, complex numbers, patterns & formulas); and Science Open courses (physics, biology, astronomy, oceanography). The courses listed are provided by universities such as Cal Berkeley), MIT, Michigan, The Open University, and Utah State.

If you are interested in free (non-degree) courses for your students, you should also browse the MOOC (Massively Open Online Courses) Directory, which lists available courses for higher education and Kindergarten through Grade 12.

Exploratorium Apps

The Exploratorium in San Francisco is a fun place to visit both online and offline. This wonderful science museum now offers two free interactive books for the iPad, one featuring sound and one featuring color. Sound Uncovered lets you “hear with your eyes, see with your ears,” check your hearing and experiment with “things that go bump, beep, boom and vroom.” Color Uncovered lets you and your student explore with color via illusions, video, and text.

Like Pinterest? Try Learnist.

Learnist helps you share resources (audio, video, Weblinks, text, images, photos) with other teachers. It’s similar to Pinterest, but its target audience is educators. With Learnist, you create and share your own “boards” that are organized around topics you cover in your curriculum, collaborate with others to create boards, or use the boards posted by other professionals to help you and your students. If you’d like to try Learnist, go to the site and request an invite. Because the application is still being developed, you can become one of the first to add content to Learnist.

What Can You Do with an iPad in the Classroom?

Tom Barrett, in his 103 Interesting Ways to Use an iPad in the Classroom, has developed a presentation with tips and ideas for teachers. You can browse his tips and tips contributed by other educators through a Google Docs presentation, and you can add your own ideas if you wish. Barrett wants to keep track of how people are using the resource and urges you to email him or tweet him @tombarrett.

Teacher Morale at 20-Year Low

The MetLife Survey of THE AMERICAN TEACHER, completed between October and August of 2011, talked to 1000+ teachers K-12 by telephone, to 100+ parents and guardians of students in Grades 3-12 online, and almost 1000 students in Grades 3-12. According to the Executive Summary of the report, only 44% of teachers are satisfied with their job and many feel that their job is not secure. Twenty-nine percent of the teachers interviewed said, “They are very or fairly likely to leave the profession.” Why? Answers given by those in the survey included problems of school budgets; layoffs; larger classes; lack of salary increases along with higher insurance costs; reductions in programs in art, music, foreign language, and physical education; reductions in health services; lack of up-to-date technology; and pessimism about student achievement. In 2008, the MetLife Survey showed that 62% of teachers were satisfied with their jobs. 

Anime Studio 7 from Serif

Serif is offering its Anime Studio Debut, an all-in-one 2D animation software program for Windows computers, for $29.99. With it, your students can create their own cartoons and animations. The program is designed to be used by everyone from beginning animators to those who are already adept at the skill, so it includes a beginner’s mode, ready-made artwork, timeline animating, animation tools to bring photos to life, and more.