iPad Whiteboard Recorders and Video Makers

UTube. Even my spell checker recognizes it as a real word. It’s a huge resource of videos of all kinds and one of the major catalysts for house-holding the phrase ‘gone viral.’

For beginners, making a video appears to be a daunting task. But it doesn't have to be. iPad has a number of user friendly apps specifically designed with the time-crunched teacher in mind. With these apps, creating a video is as simple as pressing the record button and then talking to yourself as you work.

Educreations Interactive Whiteboard turns your iPad into a recordable whiteboard. You create a video tutorial by simply touching, tapping and talking. Features include voice recording, digital ink, photos, text, and the capability to share tutorials through Facebook or Twitter.

ShowMe Interactive Whiteboard is another great interactive whiteboard. You can record voice-over whiteboard tutorials as you work. It is very easy to use and intuitive. Teachers can use it, but it also makes a fantastic tool for students to create instruction videos to share. ShowMe.com has several sample tutorials which can be viewed without an iPad.

ScreenChomp is a simple doodling board with markers and sharing tools for creating sharable videos. With its friendly, uncluttered look, this one is great for beginners and/or younger students.

There are also online sites that facilitate creating videos from a series of photos. In minutes, you can achieve great results for open house functions, family reunions, or a book trailer. One of the easiest to use is Animoto. Upload your photos, select options, and the site will generate your video for you. There is an Animoto app available as well.

For sharing these creations, use the resources within the app or site, upload to UTube, or utilize a version of UTube just for educators called Teacher Tube.

Making videos can be lots of fun and slightly addicting! And who knows? Maybe someday soon you’re video will make the ‘gone viral’ list. 

Tech Tip: Finding Apps

iPad app searching can take hours before you find exactly the perfect app for you. Many times I get sidetracked from my primary goal because I've stumbled across something I have to have, but never knew I had to have until there was an app for it. To streamline my app-finding (and keep me focused), I've used the following two apps.

AppsGoneFree.

AppsGoneFree is as simple as it sounds. Each day it will temp you with from eight to fifteen apps that are free for a limited time only, sometimes just for the day, sometimes just for a few hours, as a means for app-developers to promote their products.  If there is an app you’d like to see “gone free”, you can recommend it to AppsGoneFree for inclusion on their list.

 WeWantApps!

WeWantApps! (the exclaimation point is part of the name) will help you search for an app based on the parameters you select. It’s a great tool to help you find apps suitable for children and preteens. Parameter settings include age, topic or subject, and cost.

Tech Tip: Story Starter Apps for Writing across the Curriculum

Story Starters – Ideas for Writing (an aptly named app) is published by Jarrod Robinson and costs only ninety-nine cents. This app features intriguing pictures to help kick start the creative writer within us all. Use it as a springboard for a short story, a mathematics word problem, or a discussion in any subject area.

For example the picture below could be used to:

• Write a story explaining why the crate is there.
• Write a math word problem to find the volume or surface area of the crate.
• Imagine and write about the world surrounding the crate.
• Come up with a list of practical uses for the crate.

Oflow, another ninety-nine cent app, lists over 100 methods to get your creativity flowing. View one a day whenever you need a bit of inspiration, or scan through several until the right one fires your writing neutrons into action.

And since the Oflow image mentions it, Idea Sketch, a free app from No Sleep Software, is a simple mind map making tool. Use it to:

• Brainstorm
• Free write on a topic
• Flowchart a process (order of operations)
• Categorize terms or objects (equations, quadrilaterals, fractions and their equivalents)

Have fun with these idea generators. Be inspired and imagine greater than ever before.

Techie Tips: Teaching Probability

I've used colorful candies, number cubes (aka dice), spinners, random number generators and more to hammer the concept of probability into my students’ heads. Apparently not an easy idea to grasp for most people, otherwise Vegas would go broke. Technology can provide teachers with many of the manipulatives mentioned above and more to help students conquer this concept.

Apps

Undecided, published by Deadmans Productions LLC is a free app. It includes a dice roller, coin toss, spinner, drawing for the short straw, rock/paper/scissors, and a random number generator.

Dice, published by Benoit Layer is also a free app. It allows you to customize it to roll anywhere from one to twenty dice at a time. The total for the dice rolled is shown in the background. Settings include dice color, sound, and background.

Websites

Marbles Probability (Shodor)

http://shodor.org/interactivate/activities/Marbles/

This site simulates the random selection of from 1 to 3 marbles from a bag. The chart shows all possible combinations, the percentage that a theoretical likelihood of a combination will be drawn, and the experimental outcome as a percent of each combination.

Adjustable Spinner (Shodor)

http://www.shodor.org/interactivate/activities/AdjustableSpinner/

The default spinner has four equal sections, but as the name implies, this can be adjusted. Just click and drag the slider next to each color, or type new percentages into the white boxes next to each.

Experimental Probability Spinner (Shodor)

http://shodor.org/interactivate/activities/ExpProbability/

As each color is spun, a tally is kept for each color. There are several pre-designed spinners or you can design your own spinner.

The Sum of Two Rolled Dice & Graphed Results (Saint Anne’s School)

http://www.saintannsny.org/depart/math/misterg.htm

This site will roll two six-sided dice and then graph the sum of the two dice. Click anywhere on the dice to begin, then press the space bar to roll the dice. The graph updates after each roll to reflect the sum of the two dice.

The Sum of Two Rolled Dice & Tallied Results (Shodor)

http://www.shodor.org/interactivate/activities/ExpProbability/

This site will roll two six-sided dice and tally the sum of the two dice in a chart. The dice rolls are displayed as a regular dice and as a net. You can also click the New Dice or Make Dice button to use a dice that repeats numbers.