The Teacher Toolbox

Do people really want a computer or do they just want the things a computer can do? Here are 26 apps that suit the way I work. They aid my creativity, connectivity and work flow & all from the comfort of where ever I choose to be – couch, park, bed. Nice.

1. Atomic Web Browser - I like my browser to have one touch tabs and a full screen option. I spent the whopping $1.19 to buy the full version because I wanted to be able to set my homepage to my Pageflakes account. The other feature I like is the ability to save a webpage so I can read them later. Great for traveling on planes.

2. Mail ( the default) – hooks all my webmail accounts into one spot. Too easy.

3. TweetDeck – Twitter: informs me, keeps me in touch with people who are knowledgeable in my field all around the world, allows me to argue, helps me refine thoughts, entertains me, challenges me, inspires me and provides support in times of need. All for free and in real time.

4. Simple Sense – OK I’m an Adsense publisher and this app let’s me check the stats.

5.  The App Store – I especially like the free part of the store and so does my son

6. Evernote – Miss 4 has been waking between 4:30am and 5:30 for almost a year now. My partner is a midwife and my son is 11. So once Miss 4 awakes and I’ve set her up with a quiet activity, ‘…until the sun comes up’ I can work on my latest project in Evernote until the rest of the family arises.

7. Notes – Often I’m not in range of a wi-fi networks so I jot stuff down in Notes. I also find this tool handy for everyday stuff that I don’t want ‘cluttering up’ bigger projects eg I don’t want a list of apps to check out in with draft readers’ theatre scripts.

8. Stanza – Download free books from Project Gutenberg so when you have a quiet moment you can do a little light reading. Currently there is a rather eclectic mix residing on my machine – Mark Twain – ‘How to Tell Stories’, ‘The Sayings of Confucius’, ‘The Creative Process in the Individual’, ‘The Dhamapada’ and Thoreau’s ‘Walden’.

9. Facebook - I still don’t ‘get’ Facebook but there are a lot of the kids I’ve taught over the years who have accounts and it is nice to catch up.

10. Kindle – The Ipad provides a very ice reading experience so I’ve been downloading sample books from Amazon to check them out. My first purchase is not too far away.

11. NPR – This is a news app. I love the ‘Arts & Life’ section as well as the ‘Music’ section. Excellent for finding interesting stuff.

12. The Australian Braodcasting Commission - ABC – WOW!!! This is pure brainfood. Listen to radio and podcasts. Watch TV shows – ‘Media Watch’ & ‘Catalyst’ are current favorites. Check it out to see what works for you. It is HUGE!

13. Youtube – Youtube is one of the first places I turn when I want a solution to a problem. This week it has helped out with solving the Rubik’s Cube, using the Dragon Age Toolkit, getting the run down on the NSW DET blogging platform and some cartooning workshops.

14. CoolIris – for the photographer in me this is a wonderful way to view art and photographic images. Completely clutter free!

16. Feeddlerss – Hooks straight into my Google Reader account and delivers the latest posts from all the blogs I read straight to me. Quick, clean and efficient. Just the way I like it. Shame the free version doesn’t allow you to add subscriptions to blogs inside the app, you have to do that from your Google Reader account.

18. Google Earth is beautiful on the Ipad. That’s all. Simply stunning.

19. Ebay – If ever you want to buy something, check out the price on Ebay first. This week I bought a heap of rechargeable batteries for almost half the price I normally pay. I’ve also picked up some second hand books I’ve been meaning to read for for a while now. Even with the postage the books were cheaper than in our local book store chain.

20. Cloudreader – Displays comic book/graphic novel *.cbr files (comic book reader). I like to keep up with some of what is happening in kid and counter culture so I’m looking to read some Naruto, Manga and Tank Girl.

21. Dictionary & Thesaurus – so much quicker than looking for the books and then doing the whole alphabetical order thing.

23. Apps Mosaic – I don’t like the way the App store for Ipad doesn’t have a way to see the most popular free apps. Apps Mosaic shows you what is free and popular. It’s nice just exploring what’s out there.

24. Adobe Ideas (Ipad only) – hmmmmm, still a little out on this one. I love the vector graphics feel but it is a little hard drawing with your finger. Maybe pen and paper is a better option but I’ll continue to tinker.

25. Shazam – play a sample of music into the microphone and Shazam will compare it to its database and let you know the title, artist, album and sometimes a Youtube video. Shazam!

23 & 24 – Videos & Itunes – Video is beautiful on the Ipad. I use these apps to view my TED videos and listen to Utunes podcasts. NB I find the iPod is a much more convenient way to listen to podcasts.

25. Mobile Photoshop Express – a graphics manipulation program that can crop and adjust colour. I find it a handy app for if you want to drop something into your Twitter feed but I do prefer to do my serious photo editing on my laptop.

26. Wikipanion – the feature I like best in this app is the ability to navigate the article sub-headings in the side bar. Big timesaver for me.

Over the last couple of months I’ve been given a chance to tinker with the private beta of the video game making software Atmosphir. Wow! This software is so powerful and so easy! Check out the video to get an idea of what it can do and sign up to wait for the beta to go public on the Atmosphir Waiting List.

I introduced the software to a group of kids a while back and they were very impressed. In fact the woman who hired me thanked me for getting her ‘a few brownie points’ with her own kids because they loved it so much.

One of the big hits in my recent workshops has been CoolIris. Teachers like the way that it strips away all the text from around images giving a ‘gallery like’ feel to the images being explored.

I recently used the software successfully with a group of 5 year olds as we explored the work of Franz Marc together. My plan was to use Voicethread to record their responses but alas the computer had other ideas.

I’m currently putting together a collection of reflection questions for art. I’ve included many of my favourites and am working on some new ones. I’ve placed the draft of this document online and left it free for anyone to add to. Feel free to add your favourite art reflection questions to it.

Edit the Google Document Here NB no log in is necessary (I hope)

cheers

Adrian

In the coming weeks I’m flying off to Mackay to run a whole day Gifted & Talented workshop on machinima.

I’ve been working on ideas for this workshop for the last few months and am just about to launch an online image bank that will not be blocked by school filters.  (If you know what I mean hehehe).

I’ve already completed a collection of Dawn of War, Second Life and, thanks to JoKay, World of Warcraft images. I anticipate that these collections will go live in the next few days.

Call for Help - If you can help out with PG rated images from your favourite video game feel free to email them to me so anyone can have a go at this type of story telling.

Built into Google Earth is Google Mars. It works exactly the same as Google Earth ie you can zoom in, zoom out, fly over, explore and do tours. This software offers a beautiful opportunity to explore Mars in the classroom as never before possible. Wow!

Now as an architect of the children’s learning I believe the power of the software would come after you had the students explore the most interesting facts and features of the planet.  Try having the students write a readers’ theatre play where they are taking a tourist group to Mars and have them incorporate their new knowlegde into the play. This play would then be performed as a virtual tour of the planet for other classses around the school.

Tonight I’ve added a few teaching ideas for using Google Mars in the classroom to my website. Feel free to check out Google Mars in the Classroom.

I have so, so, SO! been in love with the World Wide Telescope since it was announced at TED last year. You simply must download this magnificent software and get your students to explore it. So many discussions to be had! So much exploration to be done and so much ‘awe and wonder’ to be exploited. + I’ve just added a few creative teaching ideas to you might like to explore. Check out the World Wide Telescope!

Fractals is an aspect of maths that can inspire awe and wonder in the students. This is a piece of ecphrastic poetry (where you ask questions of artwork) based on fractal geometry. The students had to ‘combine’ Fractalus, Photostory 3, Ejay and poetry. See what you think.

Adrian

PS My Twitter Network sent me a collection of ideas for using Photostory 3. See if any of these ideas work for you and your class.

Over the last few years I’ve become very interested in creative process. What is it that enables some people to have an amazing output of creative ideas? How can we teach ‘creativity’? Can we truly teach creativity? Am I creative or am I doing what creative people do?

One of my favourite creativity tools is the SCAMPER Process. I particularly like to play around with the ‘Substitute’ & ‘Combine’ part of the process to produce ‘creative’ pieces of work.

In my ‘Dora Meets Sigmund’ comic I’ve ‘Substituted’: Comic Life for paper, digital photographs for drawings as well as ‘Combining’ Dora from my daughter’s doll house & Freud from my workspace. The dialog comes from ‘Combining’ aspects of a joke my cousin and I had via email. Thanks cuz!!!

Try a little SCAMPER yourself, you’ll be amazed with what you come up with.

A friend of mine recently asked for a few ideas on using ‘synchronous communication tools’ for her personal professional development. (Ok, it’s a Uni assignment rather than a general inquiry)

Firstly she cooked up a nice lunch and poured out some wine. (Always a good start to any professional development session!!!) We signed up for Twitter as CINDY BURGE,  installed Twitterfox and threw it out to the Twitterverse to welcome her. Which they did. Thanks all!

Next we installed Second Life and I took her around the ISTE Island to check it out and do a few screen dumps. She had a little trouble sitting on the chair (not the wine) & I hooked her up with the ISTE website. We then headed off to the Discovery Educator’s Network Second Life blog for a bit of a look around. After that I mentioned Jokaydia as an excellent resource to explore on her own time.

Lastly we dropped all the screen dumps from our session into Comic Life as a creative way to demonstrate a little of her learning.

Now her challenge as a second year uni student is to build her personal learning network to a point where online tools become a natural part of her learning. AND… the same goes for ALL teachers who don’t laminate their lesson plans

Tonight I’ve added a few new software tools to my mind mapping page that you might like to explore and compare to your traditional software of choice… or coloured pencils.

When Dr Jim and I were working together in Melbourne last year he recommended the online mind mapping tool Mindomo to the punters that attended our sessions. I’ve since found that the beauty of this tool is that you can embed multimedia into the mind maps. Nice!

Recently Mindomo has added a new desktop version of the software to the site so you can work offline. This is a nice feature as oh so often a lesson can go ‘belly up’ if the internet goes down while relying on Web 2.0 tools.

The crux of my mind mapping page is still the conventions of mind mapping. At the bottom of the page I’ve included my ‘mindmap on mind mapping’. This resource outlines the most of the conventions of mind mapping and I find that the quality of the mind maps produced by people after exploring this scaffold greatly increases.

I have also included a link to a mind mapping rubric that I have found useful. I hand out the rubric and explore with the students before setting them off to work.

I’ve also included a Youtube video from the man himself, Tony Buzan as well as a few links to books he has written on the topic that I have found extemely useful.

Feel free to experiment with my mind map on mind mapping and the mind mapping rubric

Adrian