Post #13 Adobe Voice • Buzz Monster • Factual Research "All About Explorers"

Adobe Voice in Action!
I was privileged this week to see seniors in Cloudcroft this week using Adobe Voice deliver amazing presentations from their iPads thru the Apple TV using adobe voice regarding the Judicial Branch of government.  Congratulations Mrs. Kelly Goss for your innovative work with technology in our schools.

10 Seniors & Mrs. Goss displaying their Adobe Voice presentations on their ipads

App of the week - Buzz Monster

Are you a teacher looking to promote good fun academic competition in your classroom? Now you can create your own Jeopardy style games and share them from 1-to-many iPads with Buzz Monster, an outrageously fun quiz game for 2-3 players.

Buzz Monster is a multiplayer game that allows up to 3 students to learn with a single iPad. When a game begins players take it turn picking questions from the various categories available. After the question is shown, the first player to “Buzz in” has the opportunity to answer the question. Points are awarded for correct answers, and if a player gets 4-in-a-row on the game board they can earn bonus points.

Play continues until all tiles on the board have been attempted and at the end of the game the player with the most points is declared as the winner.

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Here is a Web Resource You should be using.

All about Explorers

Since this site was developed as a teaching tool for educating students about how to search better on the Internet (see About This Site for more details), we have published on this page a list of the lessons, handouts, and other tools that we have used with our own students.

We encourage you to send us your own ideas. If you have created other lessons using our site, or you have suggestions or comments to make about the plans and materials included here, we would love to hear from you. Write to us atteachers@allaboutexplorers.com.

One note about the Treasure Hunts we have included here. On the main page you will see a list of links to the individual hunt pages. These are differentiated so that you may assign different hunts to students with different ability levels. Next to each is a colored dot which indicates the level of challenge:

	Basic level	These hunts contain fact-oriented questions. The answers are relatively easy to locate on the page.
	Moderate level	These hunts contain fact-oriented questions which will take some additional searching or deeper reading to answer.
	Advanced level	Advanced hunts are more challenging and may require students to use inference and logic to determine answers.

Post #12 • Kahoot • Ed Tech Understanding Trends in Technology

Have you ever had a Kahoot?
This weeks "app" is Kahoot 
Its really not an "app".  Its a Free Student Assessment tool that you should try.  It is web based, quick and easy to setup and use.  Go to https://getkahoot.com/ set up your free account.  compatible with any mobile device or computer with web access it allows you a ton of flexibility.

Create, manage and share questions

• Using our simple and speedy ‘drag n drop’ creation tool, create and manage ‘Kahoots’ in the form of quizzes, surveys or polls related to specific topics; either asking quick questions ‘on the go’ to get feedback or opinion, or more in depth questions for formative assessment. Content can be shared with educators, learners or colleagues globally.

• Answer questions through a powerful classroom engagement tool

  
  
  Launch Kahoots on the screen at the front of the room, and learners join through their personal devices. In real-time and with gaming elements to increase engagement and motivation, learners answer questions through their personal devices. Educators get an overview of the current knowledge levels of everyone in the room for formative assessment, and can adapt their teaching accordingly.

• Educators challenge learners to ask their own questions

  
  
  Either collaboratively or individually, and motivated to gain a deeper knowledge of specific topics, learners are challenged to create their own Kahoots in the form of quizzes. Through their personal device, learners think up and answer their own questions through thorough research and the collation and/or self creation of imagery and video. Their learning is reinforced by thinking up potential wrong answers to questions, as well as the right ones.

• Learners become leaders by asking their questions back

  
  
  Learners share their new found knowledge by playing their Kahoot back to other learners. Educators assess the quality of questions they are asking, whilst the other learners answer the questions through the powerful classroom engagement tool.

Web Resource this week is a cheat sheet of terminology & definitions that you may be hearing in your profession.

• Cheat Sheet

Post #11 Happy Veterans Day! • Re-Visit Adobe Voice • Digital Citizenship

I had the good fortune to be in Capitan today and attended the Veterans Day celebration the school put on for Veterans.  We were treated to a great "Capitan Tigers" Band, an equally as great "Capitan Choir" - High School, Middle School and Elementary School as well.  Later during the day I was in several classrooms and saw continued learning occurring, students still exploring Veterans Day issues.  This is a picture showing a whole school of support.

This weeks App of the week is one we featured before but they have added new features and it's worth a second look.  If you haven't tried it, now is the time!  Hurry while it's still free.

Adobe Voice

Back in May Adobe launched a free iPad app calledAdobe Voice. Adobe Voice allows you to record your voice, import pictures, and write text to create a short video. The latest update to the app allows you to customize the background colors in your story’s theme. In addition to background colors you can also customize font colors and the colors of stock icons in the app.

To create a story with Adobe Voice you start by select a story template (you can change templates at any time). After choosing a template you construct your story by recording your narration for a frame then adding an image or text to the frame. You can import your own image, take a picture, or select one of the stock images provided by Adobe Voice. To find a stock image or icon you simply enter a search word and then select from the search results. In that regard it is similar to Haiku Deck’s image search tool. If you decide to add text to a frame, the text will automatically resize as you type. Music is automatically added to the background of your narrated Adobe Voice story. You can change the music by tapping the edit option and selecting a different track.

Web Site of the week - Also ties back into your mobile device to allow digital reading.  This is from Commonsense Media.  It is a free book by grade level for digital citizenship.  You could easily add this into your daily routine and create a semester long training with your students on appropriate use with technology.

https://www.commonsensemedia.org/educators/blog/announcing-our-free-ibooks-textbooks

I'd love to hear about your technology use in your classroom, just comment to the blog and we'll figure out a nice way to share your experience with others.

Post #10 • Tiny PDF • Socrative

After a 2 week break we're back with more good technology stuff.  During the break,  I was very impressed with a lot of classroom activity from Corona to Cloudcroft and schools in-between.  I see one of the blog apps "newsela" being used in multiple grade levels.  My respect to those of you that have adopted that technology and are using it.

I've had a few inquiries about using iPads to cut down on the paper materials that are being generated and wanting to know if I knew of an App or a way to to take a scanned image that is a PDF file and distribute that to students, then allow them to interact with the file.  Mark it up, type on it, draw on it, then allow students to turn around and share that back to the teacher.

App of the Week:
This week is a FREE --  APP  called :   TinyPDF
Connects to google drive (yay!)
Connects to Dropbox (yay!)

1. Take any document you'd like to share with your students and scan it to a pdf file.
2. Up-load that file to a google drive account - or drop box / Google Drive is your easiest option.
3. Share that file with your students through Google Drive or your Google Classroom and give your students the ability to edit that document.
4. Associate TinyPDF to the google drive account you shared the document with.
5. Give students instructions to markup and type on the document as you want.
6. There is a signature option that you can have your students apply so they can sign their work.

If you'd like more information on how to get started implementing please let me know.  You can reply by commenting on the blog or send me an email.

Web resource of the week:  http://socrative.com/
Socrative is another FREE - teacher web resource -- One of those, ???HUH,, you're not using this! Its a technological way of assessing your students that will have them asking you for more.
Quick.. go sign up now! get your classes started.
Socrative lets teachers engage and assess their students with educational activities on tablets, laptops and smartphones. Through the use of real time questioning, instant result aggregation and visualization, teachers can gauge the whole class’ current level of understanding. Socrative saves teachers time so the class can further collaborate, discuss, extend and grow as a community of learners.