Newsela

As a continuation of a few of my favorites that I learned about while at the iPad Summit, Newsela is at the top of the list. A huge component of Common Core Standards is reading nonfiction text. Sometimes it is hard to find relevant nonfiction text that your students can read, let alone want to read.

Newsela steps up to the plate by providing daily news articles in a variety of Lexile levels. Teachers can create an account and then set up a class. Students join the teacher's class by going to the site and joining by entering the class code. Both teachers and student have binders that will hold articles and quizzes assigned to the class. Teachers can see the student results right within the binder. Not all articles have quizzes, but many do. They even provide a daily email highlighting some of the daily news articles. You can simply click within the email to assign the article to the class. Sweet!

Even though I first learned of this at the iPad Summit, Newsela is web based, so it will work on any device.

You really need to check it out! Let me know what you think.

Favorite Session from iPad Summit, Boston, MA 2013

Greg Kulowiec

I developed an interest almost an year ago on helping teachers develop "app-tivities" for students. You may know it as "appsmashing." Basically, you begin with what you want your students to learn and then combine (or mash) content and apps for them to use to create a product showing their learning which is then published on the web. So naturally, one of my favorite sessions was with Greg Kulowiec called "App Smashing--Unleashing Creativity."


Of course his session was focused on iPad apps (it was an iPad conference), but the concept is not limited to a device (think of all the great Chrome apps available for those Chrome Books!) A couple of big take aways for me were:

1. Limit the apps to a one screen of core apps that are content enabling. We get so caught up in the fact that there are so many apps out there, that we clutter our devices and narrow our minds to what the iPad (or Chrome Book) can be used to do. So think along the lines of iPad apps like Explain Everything, Tellagami, iMovie, Skitch, Book Creator, DoInk, Google Drive, and GarageBand. Google Chrome apps such as PowToon, Google Drive, WeVideo, PixlrEditor, and Loupe Collage would also be content enabling apps.

2. For the iPad, the camera roll will serve to be the hub as content gets saved to the camera roll where it can be pulled into images for the next app. For the Chrome Book, the hub would be using Google Drive to store images that can be pulled into the next app. And don't limit yourself here. Real world applications such as crayons, clay, etc can be documented with a camera and used as well.

I like to put into practice things like this especially when I see the sound pedagogy behind it. So this summer, we introduced the idea of apptivities to our year 2 Pinnacle Leaders. We used an elementary example for our curriculum since our students study about our community. Click here for the example apptivity we created. Feel free to use it or modify it to suit your needs, but let me know how it goes.