Tech EDGE: Mobile Learning in the Classroom
For those of you who have never checked out Tech EDGE on YouTube let me start by saying you need to. They have a wide variety of podcasts and videos that cover using tech in your classroom in every way imaginable. They have videos for using iPads to teach different content areas, for various age groups. They also have recommendations on how teachers can use different apps and resources via technology to help stay organized and work on professional development. The apps I chose to review came from the video below, Blogs for Professional Development made by Guy Trainin (make sure to follow them on Twitter and their hashtag #unltechedge). I hadn't ever thought of using blogs as a resource for professional development when your busy and can't make it to conferences or events. This is a great way to expand your horizons and is easy to access anytime. Another plus is that the videos are only 5-10 minutes long so it's easy to fit a quick video into your day or to look up ideas for a lesson. They are short, to the point, and include great, helpful information.
The first app they recommend to help keep all of your teacher blogs and websites in one, easy to access place is Flipboard. This app had me hooked from the first page, before I even finished signing up. The first step to creating your account is choosing your interests (below is an example of this step). As I scrolled through I found several things that I liked and then there it was, an entire section dedicated to education. Broad topics such as education in general to specific content areas and ed tech pages. I selected several and then signed in with my Google account. Then it gets even better. The search bar is a helpful tool no matter what you are
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doing or where you are (I recommend utilizing it every chance you get). Flipboard is no different. Simply search for a website or subject you are interested in and it will pop up with several places that word or phrase is used and give you organized results. I haven't added too many websites yet, as I got a bit distracted by the two that Trainin brought up in his video. The first is Edutopia. If you have never used this website before I highly recommend it. It has great articles on a wide variety of education topics that are well-written and easy to follow. He also recommends MindShift. This website is similar to Edutopia in that it also has quality education related articles. MindShift also has links to lots reliable and helpful blogs. I'm pretty sure you can use Flipboard to monitor just about any website you want, you just have to search it. After I was done checking out these websites I started just playing with the searching feature. Something I found that I really like is that if you just search a vague topic such as teacher blogs it gives you a huge list to choose from varying from websites to social media pages and posts. A con of the searching tool is sometimes it gives you too long of a list and it may be hard to find just what you wanted, but I have only had that happen with a couple searches.
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This app is free to use and is available on both the App Store and Google Play. Bonus? It is also compatible with the Apple Watch. I don't have one so I can't include any input on that side of the app, but it is there if you want to utilize it that way too. Flipboard has great applications as a teacher and older students could use it to help find reliable articles for research projects and papers. It would make a great tool for learning about any subject you teach or want to have students expand on. I haven't found much use for younger students, as it is a news app and I don't think there is a way to control what kind of articles they can open. A kindergartener opening a gruesome article on the fighting in Iraq may prove to be a problem. The picture to the left is what my homepage looks like right now. I reorganized my front page to have all my favorite articles and teaching pages on the first page and then when I flip to the next page it has my other saved pages and websites. Editing your app is very similar to editing the layout on your iPad. Just hold a page then drag it to where you want it or hit the little x in the corner if you want to get rid of it. You can also click the edit button on the bottom of the page and then move/delete your sites. My page in the picture is in edit mode right now so the done button would normally say edit instead. Overall, it's very user friendly and you can pick up on how to run it quickly. I would guess that most people with any tech experience ever could flourish within this app within five to ten minutes.
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If you are having some problems with running the app you can sort it out quickly with their great help page here. They have videos and pages with help for common problems for IOS, Android, the website, and the Apple Watch. It also includes several other helpful resources that I recommend you check out even if you are pretty sure you know what you are doing.
The other app I am going to focus on from this video is the Huffington Post app, which is also available for both IOS and Android devices. You may already use this app to stay up to date on all of the freshest news, but it also is a great tool for staying connected to what is happening in the teaching world. As educators we need to not only know our content and how to teach it, but we also need to be aware of what is going on in our industry. This app is a great way to know what is happening. You can select different main categories to have pop up on your main screen and then you scroll through each
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one. I personally like the versatility of Flipboard better overall, but use HuffPost to make sure I stay up-to-date on the most important education news so I only have the education section enabled. HuffPost does allow you to save articles for offline viewing which can be helpful for saving an interesting article for a later date with the guarantee you will be able to access it and read it when you have time. This app also has the option to bookmark portions of an article. A downside to this app is that there doesn't seem to be any one place to go to if you are having trouble with it. If you google or youtube your problem, however, there are several various options to try. A feature I do like is that you can control which subjects you get alerts for. This would be really helpful if you have lots of different pages saved as preferences, but only want to be notified of new updates in one or two areas (such as having news and entertainment on your page, but only using notifications for breaking news as you just like to scroll through the entertainment page as you have time).
The bottom line is, this is a good news app that can be used on any device. It's free, which is always a plus, and it works well. I wish it was more versatile like Flipboard, but it does have good news articles in a wide variety of areas. Even within a specific subject it has a good variety of article subjects. As this is another news app, teachers could use this app in the classroom as another way for students to conduct research. It runs a little differently, which may be good for certain projects and the offline/bookmarking capability may be really helpful for students to keep track of their resources.
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