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Screen Chomp is a free app put out by Tech Smith. They also are the makers of Ask3, which I blogged about recently . Screen Chomp is a nice way for teachers to create quick and painless tutorials/instructional videos. (Don't worry, it only records your voice and markings on the screen. No faces!) Once the teacher makes the video, they can send the link off to their students through email, Edmodo , or their blog for viewing. Some students like the idea of being able to watch the video (or specific parts of the video) to ensure understanding of a topic. Students can also use Screen Chomp. They can use it to import pictures to share knowledge, demonstrate understanding, or even make a full fledged presentation for the entire class to view. Check it out for yourself. Practice first with a few mathematics problems. Learn to import pictures so you can draw diagrams and make captions. I'm sure you can think of many ways Screen Chomp can assist you in your classroom. Update ...

Scribble Press has not been a secret to East Noble teachers. However, the app has changed a little since last year, and it is terribly difficult for teachers to remember all the different features there are available on it. I made this tutorial for Mrs. Gaines' second grade classroom. I was not able to meet in person with her class to show them all the different features of the application, but a video tutorial worked out as a substitute. Feel free to use it as you wish.

Sock Puppets: You get 30 seconds to record your voice and move a sock puppet around. It then changes your voice according to which sock puppet you have chosen. I think this could be a lot of fun for students to record book recommendations, reenact a favorite scene, make a prediction, talk about cause and effect…you get the idea. The only drawback is that the free version only allows you to upload to Youtube and Facebook. That is the only way to export the video. So, you’ll need a Youtube account if you want to keep the videos. However, you can set the videos as unlisted so that random people surfing Youtube will not be able to come across it. View the example above.

InfuseLearning.com is an interactive tool for multiple devices. Students can use iOS, Android, and PC/Macbook devices. In many ways, InfuseLearning reminds me of Socrative.com with a few more bells and whistles. You can send pictures to students, and students can draw on the examples as a response to you. Your computer collects the data so that you can see each students' response. Like Socrative, it also includes multiple choice, true/false, and fill in the blank responses. I have yet to try this version with an entire class. I have done some trial runs with a few students on their laptops just to see how things went. It is a little tedious for the students to draw with their laptops if they are not using a mouse. If you are interested in attempting to implement it into the classroom, let me know. I will be happy to assist you.

These are the current results of the Sumdog contest taking place this week. Let's get our East Noble students going on Sumdog this week to bump a few more of our schools into the top 10! The contest ends Thursday!

Wordia.com provides students with spelling and vocabulary practice to compete against their peers or any Wordia user. It reminds me of Sumdog.com except with a focus on words. You could use it for specific subject areas such as science, social studies, and even mathematics vocabulary. Check out the video tutorial below:

Motion Math: Hungry Fish Motion Math: Hungry Fish  is not only educational, it is a lot of fun. I really like this application for math practice because it provides more critical thinking than the average "skill and drill" app. The user has to combine multiple numbers to hit a target number. Strategy is involved because they only have so many numbers available to combine. If they are hasty, the student may have to wait longer to get the needed numbers to continue feeding their fish. It is also nice because the difficulty level is completely adjustable. One thing I would like to see different about the application is that it would automatically adjust the difficulty level according to student performance. You will always have those students that look for the easy way out. They will leave it at a difficulty level that is not challenging them for the sake of winning easily. Download the app for yourself here.

Placing this link to a Khan Academy blog post under the mathematics is probably the most appropriate location due to the vast amount of videos pertaining to the subject. This is a reminder to teachers in East Noble that you may not have to do near as much work trying to "flip the classroom" with resources available such as these. I have a couple of ideas of how Khan could be a great resource for teachers. A resource for meeting the needs of students that are above or below grade level. These materials could easily be emailed or posted on Edmodo within small groups of students as supplemental materials. This would allow students to move at a more appropriate pace. A resource for spiraling. Students could always find videos to match the skills of which they need a refresher. This is available on the iPod and iPad as an application . If your students are using laptops, just use the Khan Academy website.

Free Technology for Teachers: Teaching Objects - A Lesson Planner That Integrates Google Drive . Regardless if you are a Google Drive user or not, Teaching Objects provides a great location to organize your lesson plans and easily share them. Google Drive is just the icing on the cake. Any pictures, documents, or presentations you have stored away in your Google Drive are easily integrated into your lesson plans. You also have the ability to take Youtube videos and list them under your resources for your lessons. If you are a Google Chrome user, it gets even better as it is an app available for Chrome. I'm personally going to start using this for technology lesson plans to share with the East Noble School Corporation Staff. Let me know if you want a quick tutorial on how to navigate through the site. It is pretty simple and easy to use. Click on the link above to see the review given by Richard Byrne from Free Technology for Teachers.

New from TechSmith: Ask3 App for iPad . I would recommend taking a look at this blog review of Ask 3. We have several teachers in East Noble School Corporation that are already implementing it. How one teacher is using it is to record a lesson on the Every Day Math math boxes. There are usually one or two questions on the math boxes that cause the students quite a bit of frustration and require extra attention. By recording them before the math lesson, the teacher is able to field a lot of questions. The students can also replay the video if there is a misunderstanding.  She feels it makes her more efficient as a teacher. As far as the students actually responding to each other's questions, that has not happened yet. I will keep you posted as I meet with teachers using the application.

Really good points made in this blog post. Math seems like an ideal place to implement Edmodo in a differentiated manner. Follow the link and see for yourself.

Free Technology for Teachers: Use Edcanvas in Edmodo for Visual Organization and Sharing of Resources . This is a great tool available for free in Edmodo. I have not tested this on an iOS device, but I'm pretty sure that it is flash-based. This allows students/teacher to make a collection of content in a neat slideshow format. This would even be handy for times that you as a teacher have a group of online materials that you would like the students to use for research. It puts it in a neat and orderly format. The link provided shares a little more about it. It even has a nice video tutorial.

iTunes U provides a wide variety of educational materials all in one location.

Class Dojo  is a classroom management tool. It is designed to primarily monitor behavior; however, it is customizable so that you can specify your needs. Teachers are able to create multiple classes and can customize the skills monitored within each class.   If you are interested in trying Class Dojo, I would highly recommend trying it with a few students you would primarily want to monitor. You will need to create an account from the Class Dojo website. There is an  iPad app  available; however, you only use it for recording.  

PixnTell is a presentation app for both the iPod and iPad. It allows the user to take or choose pictures in their camera roll, draw and caption the pictures, and record their voice in a presentation video. I see a lot of potential in this app as it is fairly easy to operate, and contains so many functions within it. It could be used in any subject area. Students could explain how to solve math problems, correct sentences, discuss a book, share knowledge about a subject, etc. [youtube=http://youtu.be/u97gVUWKgiQ]

I love the Trading Card app because of the wide range of posibilities it contains. Students can create their own trading cards about anyone. This includes real people and fictional characters. This gives students the opporunity to really think about what they know about a person or character within a text. I imagine that in mathematics it would even be feasible to have students describe mathematics terms using this app as well. Tons of possibilities!

Word Mover is a free app from ReadWriteThink.com. It has words that students can already use, or student can input their own. I like to think of it as a virtual refrigerator magnet activity where students can move words to make sentences, or they can categorize words according to spelling patterns. For Words Their Way users, they could input their words into the app instead of cutting it out on paper.

A great opportunity for students to publish writing digitally.

H ere is a great opportunity for students to publish writing digitally. East Noble School Corporation's membership to Big Universe also includes a writing tool. However, we as a district have unfortunately not taken advantage of it as it is not available on our iOS devices. However, teachers could utilize the computer labs, or have students publish from their home computers. Prior to becoming a 1:1 school district, I had students publish from their home computers frequently. Many teachers would be surprised by how many students actually have access to computers at home. Please make students aware of this opportunity even if you are not making it a whole class activity.

Kidblog Map helps younger students remember how to post their digital content from the iPod touch.

Many teachers are starting to utilize Kidblog as a digital resource in their classroom. It happens to be one of my favorite digital tools yet. One idea is to use it as a digital portfolio. Kids could take pictures of their work and post it using the Kidblog App . They could also save pictures of their digital content that they create and post it. The Kidblog map I created is intended for younger students to know how to post their work that they have saved in their camera roll. So if you are interested in using Kidblog and are dealing with younger students, this may be a good resource to show to your kids, print off and display in the classroom, or even send a pdf version to them so that they can look at it on their own device. Here is the link.

I posted about Perfect Captions in  Presentation Tools  last month. However, I wanted to revisit it because some other ideas are starting to come to mind as I visit classrooms. My most recent visit using this app was with Mrs. Crabill's first grade classroom at South Side. In fact, it was just this morning. Mrs. Crabill's desire was to make this app a part of the kids regular routine with Daily Five literacy instruction. The purpose of this activity was to have the kids write their interesting words and email it. To make it more engaging and creative, we used Perfect Captions. The students took a picture of the book they were to read. Then while the students read, they made a caption on the picture and recorded the words they found interesting. Interesting words could vary from unfamiliar words, to large words, or just words that were difficult for them to decode. When they were finished, they emailed the captioned picture to their teacher. This allowed the teacher to see the b...