The PowerSchool Teacher app offers limited access to their account for current PowerSchool users. Since our district users PowerSchool for its student information system, it can be useful to teachers in our district. However, Please be aware that there are limits to what can be done through the app as compared to accessing the PowerTeacher program on a computer. Teachers can do basic grade book functions through the app and can enter attendance with full functionality. However, as of right now, there is no was to submit attendance through the app, so users will still need to log in to the account on a computer to do that. Rosters do show for each class assigned to a user along with student pictures and basic information like birthday and student demographics. My belief is that this app will become more and more powerful in coming releases as PowerSchool developers begin to write Flash out of their programs, making the entire program more iPad friendly. If you have this app on your iPad, be sure to update it so that new developments can be part of yr options!!

Pictures

ShowMe is an app that can be used for simple screencasts. Easy enough for the youngest students to use, the tool is useful for alternative assessments to have students write or draw and record their voices to demonstrate learning or for teachers to view for error analysis of student thought. Sharing finished products does require an account with the ShowMe web account.

Class Dojo is a web based tool with an app for easy access to your account. The accent allows teachers to build a class and award positive and negative behavior points to the entire class or to individuals within the class. Having a positive behavior support recognition program is an important step in structuring a behavior program for schools and this tool can provide that recognition. Teachers can help classes or individual students set goals for their behavior and see patterns in behavior over time. The option to automatically report out to parents is also available. While the monster/alien or bug themes available in this app may seem a bit juvenile, students of all ages could benefit from the concrete and timely feedback on their classroom behavior Class Dojo can provide.

Pic Collage is a free tool for the iPad that epitomizes creativity. Select pictures from the photo roll, arrange them in your choice of layout, then add text to highlight the contents of the photos. The end result is a project that looks like a high-quality scrapbook page that can be emailed, saved to the photo roll to be used in other apps, or shared as a Pic Collage project. Creative teachers will have no trouble thinking of ways to have students use this app to demonstrate deep learning. Everything from which selection of pictures to use, to what you choose to highlight with the limited space you have for text requires students to be intentional and thoughtful about their creativity. At the substitution of technology level on the SAMR model, this app could be used to support nearly any project teachers formerly required students to do in PowerPoint. Moving towards the redefinition level on that same model, teachers can challenge students to access pictures from primary source documents and resources found from the national archives to represent main concepts they have been studying in social science classes, and create a Pic Collage or a group of Pic Collage projects to demonstrate what they have learned.

Loser #9 from our iPad March Madness is a nifty little app called 30 Hands. You know how you always have your favorite team in the NCAA tournament who you hope makes it all the way to the finals and you’re just sick when they get out early???? Well that is how I felt when I looked at the scores from this match up and realized that 30 Hands hand been knocked out of the running!!!

This app integrates with the iPad’s camera and microphone to create a final product that is a narrated slides how that exports as a movie file. If you ever used PhotoStory as a software, it sort of reminds me of that. I have proposed using this in an “app smashing” project using Haiku Deck to create images with text (because 30 Hands does NOT do text), with good results. Here is a link to a project one of our third grade classes did creating homemade bread, snapping pics during the process and writing and recording a narration to go with it. The end “movie” product was uploaded by their teacher to her YouTube account and then embedded in a webpages shared on our district’s website.

The 30 Hands app has great potential for documenting science products, giving an end product option for research, creation of public service announcements, and lots of ways for English/Language arts standards to be covered. I’m excited to see what kinds of projects our students start to do with this app when we are fully deployed 1:1 and teachers get more familiar with it!