iPads, MakerEd and More in Education

I recently wrote to the Ontario Ministry of Education to obtain female and male enrollment information for Ontario’s high school Computer Studies courses1.

Considering the number of Computer Science (CS) initiatives in K-12 education and the desire to ensure equity within these initiatives, educators, policy makers and researchers should be considering these numbers in an effort to uncover the causes and impact of the profound under-representation of females in high school CS.



I have shared the enrollment numbers below, but before scrolling down, I would encourage readers to first explore some research and perspectives surrounding gender and computer science enrollment. It is a complex issue that includes a number of influences spanning economical, historical, political, psychological, and social domains.

This is the second post in a series of posts dedicated entirely to educational apps to use with high school students. The previous list was about math apps. Today's collection features a number of useful apps for teaching/learning history. While most of these apps cover world history in general few of them  are US specific.  You may want to go through the list and see which ones work for you. Links to the apps are under the visual. If you have other suggestions to add to the list, please share with us in our Facebook page.

Getting to teach economics lessons is one of my favorite things about being a social studies teacher. In economics lessons high school students start to see how many of the math concepts, logic concepts, and political theory they've learned can apply to them in the "real world" after high school. Econ Ed Link is a great resource for lesson plans, videos, and interactive activities for teaching economics concepts. They recently published an updated list of their Math In the Real World lesson plan library.

Math In the Real World lesson plans include activities to teach students how to analyze business profit and loss, how the stock market works, and how distribution of income can influence government policies. The Math In the Real World lesson plans also include activities that have a more personal appeal to students. Those lesson plans include building credit, building a savings, and the dangers of payday loan schemes. The payday loan lesson plan is one that has previously been featured here on Free Technology for Teachers.

This is our first post in a series of posts which will be dedicated entirely to educational iPad apps to use with high school students. Today's list, we curated from iTunes app store, is about math apps. We included apps that cover five main areas: algebra, geometry, calculus, graphing and calculation. We invite you to check them out and share with us your feedback. Links to the apps are under the visual.

Today we spent sometime going through iTunes App Store collections for high school students and curated for you the apps below. These are some good applications high school students can use to help them with their math. The apps are arranged into three main categories: Algebra, Geometry and graphing and calculation apps.  We invite you to check them out and share with your students. The visual below is also available for free download in PDF format from