Everyday Math Apps are Free!

McGraw-Hill publishers is offering their Everyday Math apps for free right now. They are usually $1.99. Check them out.

App Smashing with Weather

Weather Underground or WeatherBug are great tools for teaching your students to look at the current weather conditions and the forecast for the next few days. Take the learning one step further by having the kids screenshot the weather forecast and drop it into another app to show what they have learned. Here are a few ideas for you.

Annotate

Popplet - make a concept map showing all of the data that can be collected from the weather app.

PicCollage - drop a screenshot or two into PicCollage and add text to show what you know.

Doodle Buddy - Insert a screenshot as a background and draw and type over the image

Track Changes

Timeline - Capture screenshots of the weather over a period of time and add them to a timeline.

Voice Over

Screen Chomp - Add a screenshot, click record, and record your voice and your drawings to show your learning

Tellagami - Add a screenshot as a background and record your voice to make the gami give a weather report

PixnTell - Add a series of images, record your voice as you swipe through images to create a video.

New eBooks

We just added some new eBooks to the library. Go to Follett Shelf to check them out. Log in with your username and lunch number. For more information on checking out ebooks, read the earlier post, I have ebooks, and I'm not afraid to use them.

We have 15 ebooks of the 20 Bluebonnet picks for 2016-2017. Get a head start on your reading so you can vote next school year. Read 5, and then decide.

Acceptable Use Policy

Welcome to the new school year! With a new year, brings new responsibilities. More homework, more reading, more independence, new technology devices. Let's go over your responsibilities as a student using technology.

The district has an Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) for all students and staff that use district technology resources. In fact, your parents have already agreed to and signed your AUP when they registered you for class this year. An AUP is a contract between you, your parents, and the district about how and when technology will be used. It outlines appropriate uses and consequences for using technology inappropriately.

Basically, you need to know what is expected of you. It all boils down to this:

General Guidelines

• Do not use a computer to harm other people or their work.
• Do not damage the computer or the network in any way.
• Do not interfere with the operation of the network by installing any 
• software, shareware, or freeware. Students are permitted to save 
• their files on the network in their personal directory.
• Do not violate copyright laws.
• Do not view, send, or display offensive messages or pictures.
• Do not share your password with another person.
• Do not waste limited resources such as disk space or printing 
• capacity.
• Do not trespass in another’s folders, work, or files.
• Do notify an adult immediately, if by accident, you encounter 
• materials that violate the rules of acceptable use.
• BE PREPARED to be held accountable for your actions and for the 
• loss of privileges if the rules of acceptable use are violated. 

Each student should read through these guidelines and discuss them with their homeroom teacher. Here is the link to the parent/student agreement that can be signed after the classroom discussion or you may want to make your own with more specific classroom rules. 

Remember that MacBooks and iPads are school property, and on the Intermediate campus we do not allow students to go into settings and change wallpaper, screen savers, dock positions, etc. Sometimes changes are accidentally made in settings that are hard to detect and cause the computer to not work in the way that it should.

Quick and Easy Valentine's Day Research

Are you looking for a quick time filler today? Mrs. Wheeler and I came up with a quick and easy research project for the iPad using Google Images and the app PixNTell.

iTunes Store

1. Research Valentine's Day and write 5 facts you learned.
2. Do a Google Image search and find 5 pictures that match your facts. Save them to your camera roll.
3. Open PixNTell and import the pictures from your camera roll.
4. Record your voice reading the facts as you slide through the 5 pictures. 
5. Save your movie.

More ideas and examples at Free Technology for Teachers.