Apple Distinguished Educator: One Best Thing Series

One Best Thing 

          If you are looking for great resources for the classroom,  look no further than the iBooks app on your iPad.  A group of trained and talented teachers called Apple Distinguished Educators have been writing short iBooks about their favorite digital tools in the classroom.  These books have been put into a collection called One Best Thing.  The books are typically around 25 pages, and they include lesson ideas, suggested apps and digital tools, videos, and more.  To access these books,  simply open your iBooks app on the iPad.  Tap on Featured at the bottom of the     screen.  Scroll down toward the middle of the screen, and you will see a section called Popular Categories.  Scroll over until you find Education.  Tap to open it.  Next, scroll down the page until you find the Learning Resources section.  Then, scroll until you see One Best Thing.  You can also search “One Best Thing” in the search bar in iBooks.  The books in this series are separated by subject area. There are books on language arts, math and science, art, music, and media arts, digital citizenship, content creation, assessment, and more!
          Another helpful collection in iBooks is called Lesson Ideas.  Each of the books in this collection identifies one particular digital tool or app.  The book (usually 10 pages or less) then explains what the tool or app is, how to use it, and proceeds to provide ideas for using the app with students in the classroom.  To get to this collection, go to the Popular Categories section again on the Featured page in iBooks.  Scroll to Education.  Scroll across the top featured books and collections until to find Lesson Ideas.
In the Education category, you will also find a section called For Educators.  In this section, you will find both of the collections we just discussed as well as books on teaching with iPads, tools for formative assessment, digital literacy, accessibility, and special education.  These books are so short but so beneficial!  You can sit down and read for 20 minutes and walk away with  a number of great new ideas and resources.  They are certainly worth checking out!

iTunes U Collections

          In addition to the One Best Thing Collection in iBooks, there is also an iTunes U collection created by Apple Distinguished Educators.  The collection is called Lessons for the Classroom and contains lessons for elementary, middle, and high school classrooms.  Some elementary lessons include:  Learn to Read with iPad, Retelling Story Elements, 3-D Geometry, Getting Buggy with It, Endangered Animals, and more.  A few of the middle school topics include:  Tapping into Digital Media for Storytelling, Figurative Language in Descriptive Wriring, Maximizing Volume, Pythagorean Theorem, etc.  Some of the high school topics include:  To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men, Communication in the 21 Century, Beautiful Functions, Using iMovie to Support Content, and more.

          On the featured screen in iTunes U, scroll down to the section called Learning Resources.  Tap on Featured Collections box.  In this collection, you will find collections that include:  The Civil War, Food and Nutrition, Primary Sources, United States History and Politics, Virtual Field Trips, and more.  Each of the collections includes different materials ranging from speeches and photos to iBooks and apps to explore that are related to the topic.

          The Virtual Field Trips collection offers videos of art museums and audio tours, tours, photos, and videos of historic sites, and video and audio tours of national parks in the United States.  In addition, there are also suggested apps for students and teachers.  Apps such as National Parks by National Geographic, Docs Teach, and the Smithsonian. 

          The Primary Sources collection gives users access historic films, documents, and oral histories.  Users can access the Library of Congress vaults to view early films of San Francisco in 1897, videos and photos of American presidents, and much more. Once again this section also provides users with suggested apps such as Docs Teach( National Archives and Records Administration) Congressional Moments, American History, and the Timeline apps for World War I and World War II.  

Creating Contact Lists in Office 365

   

Now that students have their own school email accounts, teachers can create a class list of those emails and send out a group message.  This is particularly helpful on eLearning days when we need to give additional instructions, or we see that a number of students are having similar questions or misunderstandings.  To create a class list of student emails, follow these quick steps below.

1.  Go to the web and login to Office 365.
2.  Click on the icon that says People.
3.  Click on the arrow next to New.
4.  Select Contact List.
5.  Name your list.  You can name it whatever you'd like.  Just make it memorable so you can find the list when you need it.
6.  Click to add members. Start typing a student's name.  If it doesn't automatically pop up, you might have to click on Search Directory.
7.  Once you are done adding members, click Save.
8.  Now, a screen will appear that lists the members of the group.  To the right, it says, "Send Email." Send a quick test email to your students.
9.  Now that you have sent a test email to your students, you should be able to create an email in your mail.  When you start typing the name of your list, it should pop up.
10.  Sending an email to an entire class is now just as simple as sending an email to an individual student!

Working with 2 PDFs in eBackpack

         

         During our first eLearning day, some students expressed that they had difficulty with some assignment materials in eBackpack.  They had two PDFs with which they were supposed to work.  One PDF was a text they needed to read.  The other PDF was an answer sheet.  Because you can't have more than one PDF on the screen at one time, it was difficult and time consuming for students to switch back and forth, closing one to open another.  One way to fix this problem is for teachers to merge the answer sheet and the text together prior to loading it in eBackpack.  To do this, teachers can go to http://www.pdfmerge.com.  Once the PDFs are merged into one document, that document can be loaded into eBackpack.  Now, students can see a thumbnail version of the document at the bottom of eBackpack and can choose which page to view.
          One of the newer features on iPad is the split screen function.  This function allows users to view items and work in two apps at once.  Not all apps allow this function, so you will have to try it out to see which ones work and which don't.  For example, when working in eBackpack, you can choose to open Notability beside it to work.  However, the reverse isn't true (at least not yet).  When working in Notability, you cannot choose eBackpack as a secondary app in split view.  So, if students want to work in both eBackpack and Notability side by side, they must open eBackpack first.  Then, tap on the right side of the iPad and swipe right to left.  Pull down on the black bar at the top of the screen to choose Notability.  Now students can work in both apps on the same screen.  While in eBackpack, you cannot make the secondary app window bigger.  However, if you are working in other apps such as Pages, Keynote, Safari, etc., you can enlarge the secondary window by clicking on the vertical white line on the dividing line between apps.  Drag the window the size you'd like. Tap on the screen when you are satisfied.  This is another way to help students who need to read a PDF and work on another one.  They can read in Notability and write in eBackpack or vice versa.