Friday, April 26, 2013

Ipad App Review: Book Creator for iPad





Ipad App Review: Book Creator for iPad

Book Creator / Simple Yet Elegant
Select A Size
Combine Text & Images
Add Video Or Record Your Voice
Include Video
Publish As PDF


Review

Book Creator allows anyone to create their own books using images, text, videos, and audio recordings. You can arrange your book in three different formats; portrait, square, or landscape. Each page in your book can include pictures and videos from your iPad’s camera roll and or from your iTunes library. In addition to the pictures and videos you can include as much as text as you can fit on each page. In fact, if you just want to have text on a page you can do that. If you would like to narrate your book you can tap the record button to add your voice to each page of your book. Every page in your book can have a custom color scheme…Book Creator could be a fantastic tool for students to use to create short stories or to create longer research papers that include multimedia elements.

The latest version of Book Creator allows you to combine books that you have created using the app. In fact, you can even combine books from multiple iPads. What this means is that you could have students work on the creation of a book together from separate iPads. Have each student work on a chapter then combine all of the chapters into one book. Click here for complete directions on combining books.

With the latest update to Book Creator you can now include hyperlinks in your books, style individual words in your books, and import books. But to me the most exciting option is the option to combine books. To use the latest updates you will need to be using iOS 6.

Sunday, April 14, 2013

IMovie Insights


IMovie Insights


 

IMovie is a very capable tool to use in the classroom to record, in documentary style, any event.  It would also be very easy to use by students to record a simple and perhaps choreographed script based on classroom assignments.

The fact that you cannot cut a selected video track while leaving the sound track unaltered shows up its limited bag of tricks.

I wanted to import video/audio already collected with a camera and possibly already edited in another more powerful program such as Vegas. The first issue was what format. I tried .mov, but ITunes said it was unreadable. Then I tried MP4. Eventually I found the right MP4 settings.

The next issue was how to get the MP4 file into The Ipad’s camera roll. Email and DropBox didn’t work. Finally, I used ITunes to sync the video in the photo tab.

Once into camera roll I used an app “ReelDirector” to import the file, render it and compress it. I then was able to save that file to “camera roll” in a format that IMovie could see.

Once in IMovie I could easily trim the file and then upload to YouTube.

IMovie is a great classroom tool for teachers and students who want to create a simple record or perhaps a more ambitious project which would need to be pre-planned to avoid excessive editing. It can also be used to incorporate different files originating from a variety of sources and mashed up on the Ipad itself.

Sunday, April 7, 2013

Sock Puppet / Beginning Indonesian Sock Style


Sock Puppet / Beginning Indonesian Sock Style



It took awhile to get the hang of the recording and how to change the imported backgrounds. Once again it pays to work in front of the tutorial to understand how the buttons work. I also paid for an additional 60 seconds, although I don’t think I needed it.

I see this as an interesting way to incorporate oral language into the classroom and a way to have the students practice simple and short exercises.  You could build up an extensive range of short sessions over time and students would be free to review topics. I think it would be very handy as a second language developmental tool although pronunciation would have to be clear.

Saturday, April 6, 2013

Strip Design



Strip Design



Quite a handy tool! I had some issues trying to organize the template. Eventually, reading the tutorial as I worked helped. I think I would have to start mentally organising the pictures in the template so that I could make sure the subjects would fit where I wanted them to fit and there would be sufficient space for the speech bubbles. Definitely a template planning tool would help organise the image capture process.

 I could see the students using it as a comic strip process in just about any subject. I would like to see my students produce health posters and perhaps scenarios around ways to solve social issues in the classroom or playground. 

I had no issues importing images into the camera roll from Dropbox. I exported the finished poster via the PDF email option

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Thursday, April 4, 2013

IPHONEOGRAPHY

IPHONEOGRAPHY

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Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Gaming In Schools.



Calytrix decussata Myrtaceae


Gaming In Schools.

The kids like the technology. It’s their medium. They get engaged. They are good at multi-tasking, especially talking while they compute. They become much better at keyboarding skills. They read a lot, especially cracks or cheats. Computer kids certainly understand computer logic better and become much more able to use shortcuts and diagnose and fix computer related issues which stump casual users. Casual users constantly require help fixing problems which they inadvertently cause by not really paying attention as they push keys that become an entangled and complex backtracking map to reach the place they started. Restarting the application might help unless they have altered the environment like removing the ribbon in Word and are unable to display it again. Mind you, I have had to Google many a problem to find the solution myself. Computer kids do not expect everything to work straight out of the box, and are willing to modify the application environment to suit their working habits. Students certainly prefer to word process rather than try to edit with traditional tree-ware.

Gaming is an interesting issue. Most of the educational apps look like an educational app, walk like an educational app and talk like an educational app. Although, some of the Informational sites, like National Geographic offer some very entertaining and interactive (almost game like) activities. I have found it difficult to find ways to incorporate games except incorporating traditional tasks like publishing, or graphing, around the outside of the application. Simulation games, with some type of real world written activity have worked on a limited basis. I used a game called Myst (a window into a very interesting otherworld) to stimulate and develop narrative text. But these games together with teacher made activities, do not compare to the excitement of a full on Lan multi-player combat game like Halo.

Typing, spelling and grammar applications come equipped with interesting game options. These applications are best run from a server, as keeping track of individual records in very difficult if you have to check each and every CPU. You need to have control of a server to deploy the application to each workstation and print-out the groups records. Not very practical with departmental management of school servers.
Some of the Ipad apps such as the AbiTalk Educational Apps allow you to manage individual accounts so that one Ipad can serve many. Six Ipads could allow 24 students to circulate every 80 minutes based on 20 minutes per story. Once again you have to access each Ipad to discover the results.  No convenient group profiling. However, with the style of non-fiction applications rolling out, such as National Geographic For Kids and Time for Families, which combine beautiful graphics, interesting text and multimedia, better educational apps must surely be just around the corner. Teachers have been able to use hyperlinking to achieve similar results, but never approaching the slickness of current Ipad nonfiction presentations which allow the user the power to manipulate the program.

More and more schools are supplying technological tools and expecting innovations in technological use by teachers. Today, teachers can select a range of more easily managed applications (low cost apps combined with quick learning curves) to the end that a somewhat larger market now exists for educational programs, especially orientated towards tablet usage.   This growing educational market will hopefully provide an incentive for programmers to develop more gaming apps  which specifically target educationally orientated goals without losing the motivational component expected by school-age consumers of technology. 

Until then, teachers interested in using gaming will have to work out a myriad of ways of incorporating gaming into their programs with the probable result that their students, in most cases, will have to put up with the educational style tasks in order to play the more enjoyable game tasks. In the end, do we really have the time to use non-educational materials that do not target educational goals to perhaps entice students to “clean their plate before they eat their dessert”. With the spurt of new and interesting educationally orientated tablet apps it might just be possible for us teachers to “get our cake and eat it too.”