Curriculum and Educational Practices
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- Category: Curriculum and Educational Practices
Student Tools
In this section, I'm looking at apps that students can use besides the other apps I've listed in the resource section.
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DayOne - Record life as you live it. From once-in-a-lifetime events to everyday moments, Day One's interface makes journaling your life a simple pleasure. It’s easy to enter your thoughts and memories quickly and have them synced and backed up in the cloud. iCloud or Dropbox syncing to the beautiful Day One Mac desktop application and the iPhone and iPad apps. Day One is well-designed and highly focused to encourage you to write more. Two plans are available: Free and $34.99/year.
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Photos for Class is where you can search millions of FREE and SAFE Creative Commons licensed photos and pictures. It is a place to access safe images available for use in the classroom and for educational purposes. Plus, you get accurate image citations. Age-Appropriate Images - All images are appropriate for the school setting, thanks to Pixabay SafeSearch and their proprietary filters. Automatic Citation - Downloaded images automatically cite the author and the image license terms. Creative Commons - Creative Commons licenses all photos shown for public use.
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Room Recess is dedicated to providing children with free educational games. The games reinforce essential skills vital to elementary students and their learning process. The goal is to reinforce fundamental learning concepts in math, reading, spelling, language arts, and basic problem-solving. Because our educational games are free, students do not have to sign up or hold an account with us.
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Tocomail is a fun email for kids featuring a drawing board, customized avatars, instant messenger, audio video messaging, and a colorful design that all children will love! It is a great first messenger and email for kids with an easy-to-use interface designed to make it simple to stay connected with family and friends. Tocomail offers safety with effective yet straightforward parental control of the kid's email through a supervised contact list and quarantine box. After a one-week free trial, the service cost is $2.99/month or $29.99/year. You do not pay for the email account; you pay for parental control service, which provides safety for your kids and peace of mind for you. They do not show ads to kids and parents or sell your data to others as free email services usually do. This makes your subscriptions the only source of our revenue to support this service.
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Write-on Video is a user-friendly tool that allows you to annotate and animate videos and pictures. Arrange photos and videos into a stunning slideshow with free-hand drawings, text boxes, stickers, audio, and sound clips. Write-on Video automatically organizes each annotated frame into a storyboard so that you can add comments and information beside each scene. All text in the storyboard is accurate and can be edited in reader apps. Three options are Free, $29.99/year, and $59.99/year.
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Zoom Notes is a note-taking app with smooth ink in eight different pens, text, unlimited zoom, sub-pages, linked sound recording, automatic palm rejection, and much more. Unlimited zoom means that mind mapping, tree, and flow diagrams have never been more straightforward. Shapes, symbols, lines, and arrows all facilitate visual thinking. Saving all your files to iCloud means that they are available on all your digital devices, and you’ll never lose them again.
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- Category: Curriculum and Educational Practices
Science
You would expect science and technology to go together like peanut butter and jelly. There are so many apps and web-based apps related to science that this list could go on for a long time. I've narrowed it down to a listing covering a variety of fields within science. Hopefully, you'll find this list useful.
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Cozmic Zoom will take you on a journey through the world of particles and atoms, the cells of the human body, the planet Earth and the Solar System, the stars and the Milky Way, the distant galaxies, up to the edges of the known universe, with a simple swipe of the finger. While enjoying the trip, you can also learn amazing facts and improve your knowledge of astronomy, biology, cosmology, physics, space, and more.
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Earth Science Explorer - Discover fascinating information using the Interactive Earth Science Explorer. Select the topic you wish to explore and then hit the power button to whiz off views of the Earth that lead to even more interesting facts. When you arrive, a myriad of interesting facts await you. Tap a button to access interesting data about each topic, including the interior layers of the Earth, the structure and formation of volcanoes, and types of rocks, continents, and oceans- all presented in an interactive format.
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GoSkyWatch is easy to use. There are no buttons to press or modes to select; point to the sky to start exploring. Designed specially for efficient outdoor use. Touch-free identification — Information pops up on the screen as you move. Great for those cold nights with gloves on! Planets are shown with relative brightness to stars — No oversized graphics that prevent you from distinguishing a planet from surrounding stars. Popup images — No need to keep zooming in and out to see what is out there. Full 180-degree display — See at a glance what is in the sky and where without having to pan around.
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Human Body - Explore a working model of the body. Every part is animated and interactive: the heart beats, guts gurgle, lungs breathe, the skin feels, and eyes see. Designed for kids ages 4+ to discover what we’re made of and how we work.
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iCell gives students, teachers, and anyone interested in biology a 3D view inside a cell. Examples of three cell types are animal, plant, and bacteria. Learn about the various parts of the cell, which biologists, biochemists, and DNA researchers at the HudsonAlpha Institute study and use to advance the limits of biotechnology. |
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iNaturalist - Explore! Learn! Record! iNaturalist helps you record your observations from the natural world and contribute them to iNaturalist.org, a naturalist social network. iNaturalist lets you track the plants and animals you've encountered.
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Leafsnap is the first in a series of electronic field guides developed by researchers from Columbia University, the University of Maryland, and the Smithsonian Institution. Leafsnap contains beautiful high-resolution images of leaves, flowers, fruit, petioles, seeds, and bark. Leafsnap currently includes the trees of the Northeast and will soon grow to include the trees of the entire continental United States. Leafsnap offers LeafSnap Premium unlocks unlimited smart plant identifications, full access to plant info, plant care reminders and guides. Ads are also removed for Premium members. You can access everything through the LeafSnap app. The Premium subscription includes: 1. Identify plants without limits 2. No ads 3. Step-by-step plant care guides 4. Plant care reminder without limits 5. Advanced Identification 6. Access to a database of over 30,000+ species.
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Marco Polo Ocean has five build-and-play activities that bring the language and the images of the ocean to life. Ocean is playfully narrated and animated to reinforce vocabulary, physical attributes, and ocean concepts.
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Marco Polo Weather allows you to explore the fascinating world of weather! Create rainbows, thunderstorms, blizzards, and more as you learn about nine major weather types. Weather controls allow you to change atmospheric conditions such as temperature, wind speed, precipitation, cloud coverage, etc. Every choice and combination creates a new weather experience!
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Molecules is an application for viewing three-dimensional renderings of molecules and manipulating them using your fingers. You can rotate the molecules by moving your finger across the display, zoom in or out by using two-finger pinch gestures, or pan the molecule by moving two fingers across the screen at once. These structures can be viewed in both ball-and-stick and space-filling visualization modes.
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Periodic Table of Elements + - A quick Mendeleïev's table using a little space. Accessible with VoiceOver, it is a useful reference for students and people interested in chemistry. It reports many data related to chemical elements that you can select and copy. With this app, you can create the molecular formula by long-pressing the symbols and computing its mass. The app also includes links to the Wikipedia pages of the elements for extensive information. |
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Planets is a 3D guide to the solar system. Sky 2D: locate planets with a flat view of the sky. Sky 3D: planetarium-style view of the sky. Visibility: shows times when planets are visible. Globe: rotating 3D globe of planets and moon.
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Project Budburst - Mobile BudBurst is a great tool for entering your observations of plants from anywhere you happen to be. Think of Mobile BudBurst as your digital datasheet for reporting observations. Mobile BudBurst uses your device's built-in GPS function to automatically capture the latitude and longitude coordinates when describing your site location, eliminating the need to look it up or bring a GPS. If you aren't standing right next to your plant, you can still use Mobile BudBurst to identify your plant's location when you make your report.
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| Project Noah is the best way to share your wildlife encounters and help document our planet's biodiversity. Project Noah is introducing Nature School, a creative and dynamic new nature learning platform from Project Noah! Nature School's curriculum includes visual nature lesson infographics; species spotlight class videos, interactive conservation challenges, a nature calendar and more! | |
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NSF Science Zone - Whether you're a teacher, student, or just fascinated by science, the NSF Science Zone app will ignite your imagination. Featuring hundreds of exciting videos and high-resolution photos from a dozen areas of science, you can spend hours absorbed in discoveries that take you from the depths of space to the wonders of the unimaginably small to the far corners of our own planet. |
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Virtual Frog Dissection is suitable for middle-school students learning about organs and organ systems as part of their life science curriculum. Students can try dissecting a virtual specimen with all the trappings that come with the real procedure, the mess, of course! Besides a virtual chloroformed specimen, the app has all the dissection tools and detailed instructions to complete the procedure. Once dissection is complete, the frog’s organs are exposed for further study.
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ZooKazam is an educational AR App that allows you to learn about animals and witness a giraffe popping out of a flat piece of paper in a photo-realistic 3D animation. ZooKazam uses the most advanced algorithms to provide users with incredibly real content. There are 16 new animals and a visually detailed info-graphics page about each animal.
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- Details
- Category: Curriculum and Educational Practices
Math
When researching Math apps, many different apps have come and gone since I did a presentation on apps in 2015. I've listed below some of the apps that have endured the test of time. If you utilize iPads or Chromebooks, you can easily find additional apps by doing your own search. There are also some web-based apps listed below that are available as apps. One of the websites that I really like is MathTrain.tv. As you will see, I used the idea of student-created tutorials along with a math teacher to create their tutorials. The teacher and the students enjoyed the process and were proud of their creations.
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Gridlines: Ordered Pair Game is a math app for upper elementary and middle school students that helps students enjoy practicing plotting ordered pairs on a coordinate grid in all four quadrants. The objective of this game is to score the highest points by using ordered pairs and drawing a line that passes through or touches shapes located in all four quadrants of the coordinate grid. Grid Lines is a Battleship-style math app that teaches students the coordinate plane. Students will get practice plotting points on a coordinate plane by playing a game similar to Battleship.
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HoodaMath is a free online math games site. Founded by a middle school math teacher, Hooda Math offers over 700 cool math games. The mobile app has 20 math games taken from HoodaMath.com.
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Mathtrain.tv features student-created tutorials. With a “kids teaching kids” model, students at Lincoln Middle School in Santa Monica, CA create video math tutorials. You can watch and listen to their step-by-step explanations of math problems. As a technology coordinator, I used their model to work with a math teacher wanting to utilize technology to help students improve their math skills. What we wound up doing is mixing groups in a way that each group had one student who was struggling with a math concept in the beginning. The goal was to create their video explanation in a way by the end, the students struggling now understood the concept.
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Matific develops mathematical excellence and problem-solving skills through playful interaction. The app features hundreds of math games and activities for ages 4-11, organized according to national math teaching programs and popular textbooks. It is designed by world-class early-age math education experts and is based on vast experience with math teaching and research. Teachers receive a 30-day free trial. Subscription costs $9.99/month or $78.99/year.
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Probability Toolkit provides teachers and students with a collection of virtual mathematical devices to simulate probability experiments. The experiments use popular math manipulatives to help students better understand probability theory and statistics. It is perfect for elementary and middle school classrooms. Enrich your mathematics curriculum with the Probability Toolkit. Probability Devices: Coin Toss Experiment, Gumball Machine Experiment, Dice Roll Experiment, Random Numbers Experiment, Spinners Experiment, and Binomial Machine Experiment.
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Prodigy Math Game is an educational fantasy massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) The player takes the role of a wizard, who, whilst undertaking quests to collect gems, must battle against the Puppet Master. These quests usually involve battling monsters in different areas of the in-game map. Prodigy's Memberships are paid subscriptions that unlock extra in-game features and student benefits. These engaging and fun incentives can help boost the time spent learning and answering math and English questions. Members can also become more motivated to spend extra time playing Prodigy and level up their math skills. The more students play, the more insight teachers can get into their progress and learning. Parents also benefit from a Membership too. If a student already has one, their parent or guardian will automatically be able to get the following features in their parent account:
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Speaking Times Table learn and then be tested on times tables, with fantastic speaking sums. Simple, making it easy to understand. Fun and engaging sounds with a cute monkey theme across the app. Tell your child when they get a sum wrong, showing the correct answer to ensure they remember it. - Final scoreboard with results to show kids if they went wrong.
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Teachley: Mt. Multiplis teaches complex multiplication strategies to students in the 3rd to 5th grades. Mt. Multiplis is an engaging game that teaches multiplication using commutative and distributive properties. Mt. Multiplis scaffolds learning to promote conceptual understanding, efficiency with multiplication strategies, and fact fluency.
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TowerStorm for Math & Literacy is a competition-oriented, real-time, multiplayer action game for Elementary, Middle, and High School students. The app is free and requires a valid DimensionU user account.
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