Everything iPads

Apple has finally realized that kids using its devices need their own section in its app store. Alongside the recent introduction of iOS7, Apple has quietly rolled in a new category in its app store dedicated to app selections curated by Apple editorial staff. Parents and teachers now can have a reliable place where they can access a wide variety of apps particularly geared towards young learners.

The graphic outlines the different steps teachers and educators can follow to apply SAMR model to iPad apps used in the classroom. " This graphic is not intended to be an exhaustive list but it will give you an idea of how you can integrate the SAMR Model into your teaching and learning.

Using the hashtags below will enable you to stay updated about the  latest releases in the world of educational apps.

As teachers are seeing more and more iPads in education and either using their own devices or being given a teacher iPad or a class set, it is important to realize what the iPad is and what it isn’t.

Snap! Digital Reading Program is a set of interactive leveled books that can be printed, viewed on iPad, Android, Kindle Fire, interactive whiteboards or classroom computer.  All of the books in the program have been developed to help teachers meet requirements in the Common Core Standards in vocabulary and comprehension through the use of direct instruction, close reading, modeling, guided and independent practice, and text-dependent questioning.

In this excellent 3 part article series, Principal David Mahaley shares lessons learned from the 1:1 iPad program that he has overseen in his role as Principal of The Franklin Academy. He shares the perspective of the Administrator, the Teacher, and the Student, after nearly 3 years of experience with integrating the iPad into the Academy’s curricula.

The importance of students being aware of what they share on social media websites. Obviously, pictures are the most shared digital content on such platforms. In Facebook alone millions of pictures are uploaded to it daily. Given this explosive growth of online  photo sharing, we are hard pressed to teach our students and kinds about the ethics behind online photo sharing.

Word clouds-It is the best way to deconstruct a piece of text with students. It lets you start that conversation about language, text types, literacy and the power of the written word. It is also a great way to do a text analysis. Marco Torres talks about using them to compare two political speeches to analyse the types of words each of the candidates use but this idea would work just as easily with characters in a book, types of poems or even a series of artists you are studying.

This visual interpretation of a recent Edudemic article is a simplified but extremely useful visual for teachers who just got iPads.

Announcing Graphite by Common Sense Media. Teachers, meet Graphite. Our new, free service is designed to help educators discover, use, and share the best apps, games, websites, and digital curricula for your classroom.

Hooray! You have a brand new, shiny iPad to use in your classroom this year. 
Boo—there's only one iPad and 35 eager kids ready to use it. 
No need to worry—there are lots of amazing things you can do with a single iPad in your classroom, and it doesn't have to be a classroom management nightmare either.
Here are 15 of our favorite apps that work great with a one iPad setup AND help to keep kids on task and engaged with what you are learning.

Doodlecast for Kids is an iPad app that allows kids to draw on a whiteboard and record their voice while drawing; a kid's version for creating animated videos. Doodlecast for Kids has also a gallery of more than 20 story prompts to help struggling students. Students can either pick out one from the prompts or start from scratch.