Thumann Resources

This past Friday I attended the end of the year monthly meeting for NJECC. Members are asked to bring guests with them to present success stories of technology integration from the school year. We saw some great projects spanning the WII Fit to Scratch to Tablet PCs to the folks I brought from North Plainfield School District who spoke about their iPod and Podcasting initiative.

I Tweeted some new links while I was there. But what I couldn’t summarize in 140 characters or less was what Dave Marra from Apple demonstrated for us.

Among some other amazing tips and tricks Dave shared, he took us through a tour of iTunes U. I admit that I wasn’t as familiar with it’s offerings as I thought I was because I couldn’t wait to get home to starting searching around.

When you get the chance, take a look at these areas in iTunes U to see if there’s anything you’d like to subscribe to and remember – it’s all free.

·         Under the Categories section on the left, you’ll find a link for “Teaching and Education”
Within this category you will find so many wonderful things to view and listen to as an educator.

1.    Teaching and Learning – UMBC’s Hybrid Teaching Workshop

2.     Educational Policy from Stanford University

3.     Duke’s Digital Initiative

4.     Tech-Ease: Classroom Tech Help includes video podcasts on Inspiration, Wikis, Blackboard, podcasting as well as many others.

·         Under the Categories section, you’ll find links for Science, Mathematics, History and Fine Arts as well as other areas of interest. Check them out too.

·         iTunes U is SEARCHABLE!! Try it. I typed “Twitter” in the search box and got back 50 related podcasts.

·         Scroll down to the bottom left and you’ll find a link for the “Beyond Campus” category. Take the time to check these out. Here’s a few.

1.     Little Kids Rock – nonprofit organization that provides it’s curriculum and musical instruments to schools in need. They have guitar and drum lessons posted in podcast format as well as other videocasts.

2.    The New York Public Library – provides literature podcasts from the author visits as well as a business series on credit management and marketing.  They even have a teen program called “Turn It Up @ The Library” which you can subscribe to.

3.     American Public Media – offers a podcasts on the 2008 Election Issues

Take some time to explore and sync some these podcasts to your iPod or MP3 player. Have fun.

I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to get to my third post on the iTouch. June has been a crazy month of professional development, getting ready for NECC and playing with new toys.

On to the focus of the post - science. As I did with my post on iTouch music sites and iTouch math sites, I’ve published a Google Doc with the websites I tried on the iTouch. Not all of them were worth posting here either because of the layout, appropriateness in the educational setting, or because I just couldn’t access them, but you might want to see them, so you can through this Doc.

I tried to divide the sites into categories as I had with the math sites, but there would have been too many categories, so I’m going to list some converters and some miscellaneous.

There were several great science converter sites for the iTouch/iPhone.

- iConvert - has 26 categories including torque, density, and clothing sizes. (I’ve never been able to convert US shoe sizes to European shoe sizes and now I can!)

- Comoki Converter (only viewable on the iTouch/iPhone) - This one is AWESOME! It’s divided by categories (angle area, energy, temperature, time, length, speed, pressure, power, volume, weight ) You could spend hours here.  BTW - Thanks @Riptide_Furse for the suggestion.

- Temperature Conversions

- Culinary Calculator - weight converter

There were a couple of dictionaries for the iTouch.

• Chemistry Dictionary
  
• Biology Dictionary

There was a also a fantastic site that would be helpful for students working with the Periodic Table of Elements.

As I mentioned in my iTouch post on math sites, you’d probably start to see me repeat some of the websites. But that’s just because as educators, we are creative in how we use our resources. This time, I’ve used iFlipr to create a set of flipcards to review an insects unit my preschool-aged daughter is studying in school. You’ll see she doesn’t need much guidance from me on how to use the technology - or how to identify the insects.

Again, iFlipr comes with decks you can download, or you can make your own. Any suggestions for decks to create? Right now this site is free, but I’m thinking it won’t be for long. Already, one of my favorites, Mogopop, seems to have vanished from the internet. So you never know what’s going to happen.

Next time - iTouch the Future…I Teach - Social Studies

Sorting through the insane amount of applications and mobile websites that are available for the iTouch has proven to be a time consuming task. But I am having a great time. There are so many that can be applied to classroom practice and of course, so many that can’t.

Again, I’ve created a Google Doc, that I’ve shared with you here. You’ll see that all the apps didn’t make it to this post. As I did for my last post, I used the Google Doc to access each of the links from my iTouch. Some of the reasons many of the links didn’t make it here are due to the advertisements on the site, the site was down, or I just didn’t think the layout on the iTouch was student friendly.

As promised, the focus of the second post in this series is Math. I’ve divided the links into four categories; Flash Cards, Converters, Calculators and Reference Tables.

You’ll start to see me repeat some of these sites as they should be listed in more than one category. I’ve posted below a video of my 6-year-old using one of the flash card applications on my iTouch. iFlipr has preset flash cards that you are welcome to use, or you can generate your own decks. I’ve created two as of the day I posted this. The first I create for simple math and subtraction reinforcement and the second you’ll see in an upcoming post (it uses pictures of insects).

Flash Cards

• My First App - Kids Study Cards - Prek-1 pre-set flash cards -  for numbers, colors, alphabet and shapes
• http://iflipr.com - It’s FREE (right now). Easy to use.  Check out their demo video below.

 Calulators

• Compound Interest - easy to use - lists the result for the end of each year, but not monthly
• Car Payment Calculator - great for high schoolers talking about realistic expectations when buying a car
• Lifeware Kitchen Calculator - Great, easy interface
• Grocery Price Caluculator - Compare advertised sale prices with and without coupons (not including sales tax)

Converters

• Comoki Converter (only viewable on the iTouch/iPhone) - This one is AWESOME - divided by category (angle area, energy, temperature, time, length, speed, pressure, power, volume, weight )- You could spend hours here.
• Currency Converter - Easy to use
• iConvert - 26 categories (a few more than Comoki) including torque, density, and clothing sizes. I’ve never been able to convert US shoe sizes to European shoe sizes and now I can!

Reference Tables

• Units of Dry and Liquid Measurement & Metric Units of Measure for Volume and Weight -Converting Measurements for U.S. and Metric
• Weights and Measures Equivalents 

Please leave a comment if you know of any others and I’ll add it to the Google Doc. Or just to say you’re finding this information useful.

Next time - iTouch the Future…I Teach - Science 

“This I Believe” meme started by Barry Bachenheimer is patterned after National Public Radio’s “This I Believe” and is an opportunity to share one’s philosophy of education.

I’ve been tagged by my friend Liz Davis. Thanks for the invite Liz.

Before you read my list, check out this video from the author of The Digital Sandbox on TeacherTube called “Introducing the Conceptual Age of Web 2.0“. I really like how the creator lays out the differences between what was accessible to us on the Internet then and now.

I believe…

• it’s better to identify the objective of the lesson before selecting the type of technology to use.
• schools need to relieve teacher isolation by opening doors and loosening filters.
• we need to nurture all learners – our students, teachers and the community – always encourage the opportunity to learn and grow.
• one of our biggest barriers in education is time. Use it wisely.
• that we should allow students to use daily supports when being assessed at a comfortable and appropriate stage of difficulty.
• subjects should not be taught in isolation – when students can relate to the content they will be more engaged and committed to learning.
• as CAST says, “Motivation is the essential engine of learning”.

There’s so much more I believe. But that’s where my thoughts bring me to now. In the meantime…

1. Karen Janowski
2. Kevin Jarrett
3. Christy Tvarok

YOU ARE IT!!!

We know that Christa McAuliffe was not referring to the iTouch when she made that famous statement during her training for the early 1986 shuttle mission to the moon. Technology had come so far and she was preparing to be the first teacher to set foot in space. It was an exciting time. Ms. McAuliffe’s words have stuck with me all these years that I’ve been teaching and I revisited many of the articles written about her as I was waiting for my 32 gig iTouch to arrive. 

I’ve been teaching a session called “iPods in Education” for the Center at Rutgers University now for about a year. I’ve brought it into many New Jersey school districts as well as they begin buying iPods for their teachers and utilizing the iPods that their students already have from home. I love it! There are so many things we can do to integrate iPods into the classroom.

We spend the day checking out Discovery Education, Mogopop, iWriter, iTunes, RSS, Google Reader, Bloglines, Flickr-Storm, and many other sites and applications. But I’ve noticed over the last couple of months that in each of my sessions, there’s at least one person that either has an iTouch or an iPhone and I was unsure as to ALL the differences except the obvious - how they looked and the access to wi-fi.

Pictured to the left is my white, 30 gig iPod Video Classic, which I love. To it’s right is my new, black, 32 gig iTouch. Each stores music, video, pictures, will sync with my Outlook contacts and will store information in the notes section. Theoretically both should allow me to attach a voice recorder to record and store audio directly to the hardware, but my iTouch is not recognizing my Belkin TuneTalk Voice Recorder. Read here.

So…..there is an awful lot you can do with the iTouch that you can’t do with the Classic. Too much to write in one post, so I’ve decided to write a series, categorized by subject area. Since one of the teachers I worked with this year on podcasting and using iPods in the classroom happened to be a music teacher, I’ve decided to start with the category of music applications:

• iPhone Guitar Tuner 
  http://iphoneguitartuner.com/ - WITH SOUND  - Using Quicktime, asks the user to select from electric bass, guitar, the ukulele and a couple of others to tune your instruments
• Guitar Web App 2.2
  http://guitarwebapp.com/index.php - easy to navigate, includes key signatures and chord charts
• Guitar Chord Library
  http://www.mdmalin.com/webapps/chords/ - hold your iTouch upright to select and see finger placements for a guitar chord, turn it sideways for help
• Waterstone Chord Library 
  http://modguitars.com/chords/ - select the chords that you would like, and the iTouch will display the finger placements
• Digital Guitar Archive
  http://www.digitalguitararchive.com/mobile/-  Searchable database, but you really have to know what you are looking for. You can search by author, title or keyword, great if you are teaching music history or theory on the high school level
• MooCow Music
  http://moocowmusic.com/ (MooCowMusic:Band is still in Beta-test, and is not yet publically available.) The links listed below take you to a 3rd party app that you would need to download onto your iPhone or iTouch - but boy is it worth it.
  Drums: http://www.appsafari.com/utilities/3479/drummer-native/
  Guitar: http://www.appsafari.com/utilities/3478/guitarist-native/
  Piano: http://www.appsafari.com/utilities/2863/iano-native-piano/