At 1000 a.m. GMT, 1400 in UAE, Vance Stevens gives a presentation at the TESOL Arabia conference in Dubai UAE.
Extending Google+ Hangouts to way beyond 10 participants
At the conference I intend to set up a Hangout live and invite conference participants to join it. Of course anyone in our online PLN is welcome to join us as well.
The live stream will be set up during the presentation, which was proposed as a workshop to be held in a computer lab setting, starting at 1000 GMT (2pm in Dubai).
Where I work we have been anticipating imminent delivery of iPads for the cohort of young freshmen college students air college pilot cadets where I teach. Last Sunday March 2 we had a discussion during our regular weekly Learning2gether time on how we could go from teacher professional development to boots on the ground: suddenly your students each have iPads in your classroom, and what do you do?
and I asked those present if they had heard Valenza's "Wizard of Apps", a skit done by students and filmed on location in the library where she works, which debued at the 2009 K-12 Online annual asynchronous presentation conference http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=443:
The iPads did not arrive last week but they appear to be even closer over the horizon, maybe in days, so I've called for another brainstorming session and decided to blog it here so that we can invite comments from those who might benefit from some of the resources listed here and who might, in comments, add more. Please do!
Of course, as we develop our expertise we'll be able to hold more Learning2gether sessions that are less about "what do we do now?" and more about what we did and what we learned.
Meanwhile
Here are some other resources my colleagues where I work have been looking at:
For fresh out of the box, there's a free (and Pro) app called Tips & Tricks -- iPad Secrets, recommended by a colleague at work to get us started. A pleasing app, you reveal the secrets by swiping in the manner of turning the pages of an iBook.
There is a pointer here to iPads in the Classroom at http://www.schrockguide.net/ipads-in-the-classroom.html that seems to give resources geared toward practical "what do I do now?" situations, and then a set of links at the bottom to add to the fire hose :-)
"mLearning: Using smart phones, tablets, and apps" is a set of resources from Oxford University Press available here https://elt.oup.com/feature/global/mlearning/?cc=ae&selLanguage=en; including
These are the apps that our students will download onto their iPads during the setup process. Any suggestions for using these?
Apps Store
Calendar
Camera
Clock Contacts
Face Time
Garage Band
iBooks
iMovie
iPhoto
iTunes iTunes Store iTunes U
Keynote
Mail
Maps
Messages
Music
Newsstand Notes
Numbers
Pages
Photos
Photo Booth
Podcasts
Remote Safari Siri
Video
These apps are recommended for our students as "must have" to download in addition to the above bundle
DropBox Free
Tense Buster Free
Spelling City Free
Road to IELTS Free
Showbie Free
Lockdown Browers Free
BBLearn Free
HCT Mobile App Free
PDF Reader Free
Adobe Reader Free
Neu Annotate PDF 10AED ($1 U.S. = 3.68 AED) Dictionary Apps
Google Translate Free
Collins Mini Gem English-Arabic 20AED
Oxford Word Power Dictionary for
Arabic Speakers Learning English 115AED
Wordflex 50AED Note Taking Apps
Penultimate Free
Mobile Notetaker Free
Notes Plus 38AED
Noteshelf 22AED Webclipping/Notetaking Evernote - http://www.edudemic.com/the-evernote-experiment/ Free
One Note Free
Sling Note 11AED
Photon – Flash Browser 20AED
These apps are specified as "Recommended" for our students as opposed to 'must have'
Explain Everything 12AED
British Council (series of Apps)
Educreations
Popplet
Socrative
Quizlet
Flashcardlet
Haiku Deck
Grammoropolis
Action Words
Opposites
Flipboard
Nearpod
Voice Record
Socrative
Prezi
My colleague at work gives the following advice about using DropBox
Use http://dropbox.com on the web to manage DropBox (on a PC or Mac) rather than doing this through the app
You'll work in two spaces
A folder in your DropBox which you share with groups of students
You put documents here that all students can access
Any student can erase documents here so be careful; keep backups
You can easily copy from back up space back to here to replenish everyone's shared DropBox despite what anyone might inadvertently delete IF you keep a mirror backup handy.
Folders that individual students share with you
Students submit work to you through their individual shared folders
Such folders are private only to the student and anyone s/he shares it with (i.e. the teacher)
How to start your students off in dropbox
make a list of their e-mail addresses, one per line, ready to paste
create a folder where you can push items out to students
Share the folder with them as shown in the screen shots below
Students will now get an email inviting them to set up their dropbox at the email address you have sent their mail to.
Presumably this is an email address where you can easily identify your students. If they are not using DropBox at this address already then they can set up a DropBox account dedicated to their class work. This will create ideal conditions for working with them (pushing files out and getting files submitted back), but I haven't tried it yet, so I'll let you know the pitfalls (I've been told they lie in wait for the unwary).
Once this is set up you can send PDF files to the folder shared with all students, and they can use Adobe Reader to mark them up and then share them with you through their teacher share file. You can then mark them up with your corrections and feedback. Paperless!
Wait, there's more
Nalini Malhotra gave colleagues and I a series of PD sessions on apps she finds useful for the following skill areas. The trick here is to check out each app and discover its affordance for that skill. There are some duplications in from the list above, but categorized by Nalini in her lists: Assessment and course management
Socrative
Bb Mobile Learn
Showbie
Edmodo
iFiles
Grammar
Tense Buster
Grammaropolis (not free)
Action Words
Elementary Pearson Grammar app
ESL Tests
Make Dice Lite
Vocabulary and spelling
Vocabulary Spelling City
Notability
Word: 4 pics 1 Word
Opposities
Bluster
iSpeak Word Wizard
Listening and speaking
Haiku Deck
Natura ...er HD
Voice Recod
British Council LearnEnglish weekly radio show podcasts
Reading
Oxford Bookworms
VocabKitchen (processes online texts)
Writing
prompts
Think About
Write About
Mindmapping
Mindmeister
Popplet lite
Timeline
My Journal
T-Charts
Venn
Book creator
Ask3
IELTS
AWL Builder
IELTS writing
IELTS Skills
Writefix
Tools / Utility apps
TedEd
Knowmia Teach
Educreations
ShowMe
Explain Everything
Outline
Skitch
Side by Side
What else should they have? (comment to suggest more apps please) Rehab Rajab reviews a few apps and lists sources where she replenishes her information on the topic here: http://plato.iat.ac.ae/edtech/blog/myfavoriteipadapps/ The apps she reviews are iMovie, Notability, Explain Everything, Socrative, Nearpod, QRafter, BookCreator, and ThinkLink, and these resources are copied from her post:
There are plenty of websites that review Apps and sources to get information about new Apps and what teachers are doing with them, here are a few that I really like:
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