DIGITAL LEARNING

"Here are 16 of my favorite presentation tools for teachers and students! Which ones are your favorites?"

"Imagistory is a neat iPad app on which children can narrate picture books. The app provides children with a wordless picture books. Children are free to record themselves telling a story about the pictures in the books. Children can record and re-record stories as often as they like."

"During this coming academic year, the iPad will celebrate it’s 5th birthday. I decided to take a look at my own iPad and what systems, apps and activities fill up my school day as an iPad teacher 5 years on. I’ve produced a breakdown of my home screen and realised it can be summarised in 5 points.

Being relevant as a professionalBeing relevant to my studentsCollaboration with studentsCollaboration with teachersProduction of Interactive material."

When talking about the iPad in education, the tendency is to think of it as a tool for the ‘end user’. Or ‘pupils’ as they are often known. As a tool of consumption, the iPad is pretty special – easy to use and driven by apps, it’s a great way for pupils to research, read, watch and learn. It’s no wonder that many schools have taken to it, and take to offering ‘an iPad on every desk’ as the new status symbol of schooldays.

The iPad also has its uses for teachers – as a way for them to drive their professional lives. With some attention to the app store, and some experience in selecting the quality tools from the ‘me-too’ apps, digitally adept teachers (and we’ve talked about them before) can use it to show pupils the tools they’ll need to accelerate their learning; to manage the classroom and projects the pupils do; assessing students’ work, and interacting with them; creating new media for pupils to learn from; and learning things for themselves (imagine that!).

There’s plenty of ways that the iPad can greatly improve your productivity in the classroom. You just need a route map, such as this, from LearninginHand.

And once you’re up and running, you can do a lot worse than refer to this list of apps for educators too.

Over 3000 STEM (Science Technology Engineer Math) activities for kids compiled by top science museums in the country, all are free.

Need an app? You don’t have to look far—There really IS an app for that, whatever “that” may be. Need help taking notes or staying organized? Do you want an on-demand guide to coding and computer p...

There are hundreds of thousands of apps in the Apple App Store right now. Tens of thousands in the education section alone.

"Many obstacles that iPad cynics attempt to put in place when discussing a roll-out are based on untruths, poorly research and/or out-of-date information. I was delighted when my Canadian Twitter friend and fellow iPad blogger, Steve Lai decided to join forces, as we’ve done before, to combat this dis-information that floats around the education profession worldwide."

"If you sync your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch on your Mac, you know that the first thing iTunes does is back it up (unless you've told it not to). Depending on the size of your device and how much data you have stored on it, this can gobble up dozens of gigabytes of space. Did you know you can move those backups to an external hard drive? You can, and we can walk you through how. "

"We have come to a point in the education technology journey where it seems rather dull to still be asking if the iPad is the right device for the classroom. The answer, in case you’ve missed the last few years of debate is that it is a great option, but this is not universally accepted and never will be. Nonetheless, one of the attributes you’ll hear put forward is that it is easy to use because of the intuitive nature of iOS. This is absolutely true; you can put the iPad into the hands of almost any child and within a short period of time they will have mastered it.

So does it then follow that you can out the iPad into the hands of teachers and expect the same results?

No."