A Look at iPads and Multimedia Sites

I have had an iPad for a while now, but I took time this week to really explore it in a way I hadn't before. (Something about looking at it for an assignment that all of a sudden forced me to stop playing Quiz Up and look at it as a whole...) First, I love the stylish look of my iPad. I like the touch screen so much; I find myself trying to touch my laptop, and I'm annoyed when it doesn't do anything. The app store is amazing. I still haven't explored anywhere near all of it. I find apps for my children, work, classes, games, and productivity.

For the last two years, I've been lucky enough to work in schools with iPad carts. In the first school, the younger children (K and 1st) mostly used the iPads for learning games. By the time they were a little older, they typed stories and illustrated them. At the second school, teachers used the iPads for things like presentations on new concepts in math (Khan Academy, learnzillion, etc.). Students were able to replay the lessons if they got stuck on their independent work.

Some other ideas for using iPads in the classrooms could be: listening to or reading e-books; accessing databases or reference websites; exploring 3D images of the heart or dissected animals; listening to podcasts; making presentations on Keynote; making movies about what they've learned on iMovie; and taking pre- and post-tests on sites like Quia. The list is endless!

iPads are also a great tool for differentiation. They help students learn in different modalities (videos or podcasts), provide support for struggling readers (with content read to them), and assist students with poor fine motor control (with the touchscreen).

In class this week, we also took at look at some great online multimedia sites. I'd used YouTube many times, but this was the first time I explored creating playlists and saving videos to watch later. It was great to have a playlist specifically for work videos. I liked TeacherTube's focus only on education, although I found it as difficult to find specific things as I did on YouTube. That might just be my lack of experience! I loved the clean, classic look of Vimeo, and think I would rather upload videos there than on YouTube.. I also looked at VoiceThread; one idea I had was to have a piece of writing put up (a student's or my own) and have commentary in different formats.

I explored podcasts on iTunes; I'd never even looked at them before. I downloaded the Podcasts app to my iPad. Even though it's hard to find something specific (I had a hard time finding podcasts for reading comprehension for one of our assignments), I enjoyed poking around, and am listening to some podcasts in my car. I wandered around on Pandora, but didn't find anything out I hadn't known before.

I made a simple animated video this week for the first time, using Jing. I chose homework as the topic - what I wish parents would know about homework. Check it out: http://www.voki.com/pickup.php?scid=9463221&height=267&width=200