Day # 1

Today was a great first day (aside from me not dressing appropriately for the weather). I really enjoyed jumping into a Pic Collage activity right away. It was a fun and creative icebreaker to get to know new people while learning to use a new app. I liked that both Shauna and I hadn't used the app before so we learned how to use it together. This was also a great segue into our paired app smash assignment. I found that we both used similar techniques to attack the App Smash assignment. I had fun and we worked very collaboratively and effectively.

I am very excited about the OCR app Prizmo (along with a translator app). This is an excellent way to help make texts more interactive and accommodating. Some of my students this past school year would have really benefited from using this.As a staff we were given a $50 app credit and I am happy to finally find one that I feel is worth buying. It's still very affordable at $10 and it's much more user friendly compared to Kurzweil. I can't wait to show my colleagues this app as well!

From today's class I also took away a better understanding of some basic features of the iPad. I was not aware of the accessibility setting adjustments. We were basically just given the iPads as a staff without any training so I will be showing these simple techniques to my staff members also.

Poll Everywhere is a website I am familiar with but I was not aware of the word cloud feature. I had only used it as a math teacher for data collection and creating graphs. I will be sure to use this word cloud output in my future ELA classes. One thing I will caution people when using this site it to make sure that it works in their classroom long before you intend to use it. I had some issues with this site with my school's firewall last year and even once the tech support got around to unblocking the site, it did not always work properly. Ah the joys of technology!!

So far I am very pleased with the takeaways from this class as well as the hands on learning experiences. I am looking forward to finishing our iBook and seeing what everyone else has come up with. Until then!