Today, I had the opportunity to spend a day at the Apple Learning Tour 2012 in Regina.
Engage students. Explore apps, interactive books, and Multi‑Touch textbooks.
Discover amazing interactive iBooks. Immerse yourself in the world's largest online catalog of free education content in iTunes U. And experience some of the thousands of education apps for iPad. Learn how to create your own interactive Multi-Touch books with Mac and iBooks Author. Discover how a course is built with iTunes U Course Manager using interactive learning materials. Then see how it all comes together with an overview of ownership and deployment models for content.
In this hands-on session, you'll learn how to build a course by exploring all the capabilities iTunes U Course Manager has to offer. Experience the ease of pulling together content such as audio, video, iBooks textbooks, and over 500,000 resources in iTunes U into an organized syllabus. Make available all the assignments, quizzes, and materials for your students or anyone who's interested in the topic — whether in your class or anywhere in the world.
Apple TV to turn your projector into a sharing screen where students can use airplay to share what they are working on from wherever they are working in the classroom.
Exploration of accessibility features on an iPad such as speaking, guided access, mono audio to make the device meet the needs of students and their different learning requirements.
Explain Everything: (iPad) Allows students to record a voice over, edit photos, write text. Project idea is to give the students a slide deck (or have them create a slide deck) and each record their understanding of a concept or explanation in 60 seconds or less. Interesting demonstrating of learning idea.
Doceri: (iPad) Allows you to use an interactive whiteboard similar to Explain Everything recommended by another participant.
Book Creator: (iPad) Allows you to create your own book with photos, text, voice over and drawings. Students could even create their own book for their demonstration of learning.
CloudOn: (iPad) (Thanks to Jim Swan for this one) Awesome app that allows you to use the Office Suite of products to create and use documents but save them to your Google Drive or Dropbox.
Life on Earth (Edward O. Wilson, Harvard University)- Saw features like including video and interactive maps and materials. Also saw how highlight parts of the text and allow students to create their own study notes and cards based on their highlighted information. There are also accessibility features that allow the student to have content read to them.
As I read new and interesting content online, I tend to use Twitter on a more regular basis to share new and interesting articles and media that I find online. I know I have written about this before on my blog, but there seems to be a new uptake in using Twitter by my colleagues lately and I hope it continues to be a growing trend. It is one of the easiest ways to connect and grow as a professional online and isn't complicated to learn. Plus, there are lots of us on Twitter already and we are always happy to help you out if you have questions or need help getting started!
I also found this article interesting on Edumatic: The Teacher's Quick Guide to Educational Twitter Hashtags, most likely because of my new obsession with infographics as it contained a good one.
And don't forget to follow me @MmeSanders (and I will do my best to follow you back) so we can share and learn from each other. It is one of the best places or online tools that has let me grow and connect as a professional and has impacted my practice immensely.