Smartphones

I will just tell you that I am partial to the Iphone, but the Android system has some great features as well.

Pro's-
I have a foreign exchange student that has an ap to translate meaning of words to help her with assignments.

Purdue has a program called Hotseat. It's where the students can give the instructor immediate feed back and chat with other students about the discussion, in real time.

Polleverywhere.com is a great way to get feedback on a question.

Wiffiti is an interactive whiteboard for the class. Students can add comments or make corrections to other students work.

Many of the aps that came up on my research were education games for younger children, but I am interested in the high school age.

My high school is looking at opening up the wifi to free access for everyone and every device. Students will be able to bring their tablet, laptops, and phones to school and use them for their schoolwork. This is an exciting prospect to me. I think students want to get the information in the easiest way, and many times that just can't happen in school. In that case students get frustrated and give up on trying to get the information.

Cons-

Multiple aps running, some of the android phones get bogged down by having everything on and running at the same time. There are ap killer aps out there but the jury is still out if that is effective.

Wifi connectivity, if you need to install a new ap you may need to use your computer or at least be connected to wifi. This actually happened to me last week. One of my high school students had installed an ap on her android phone for some animal sounds for her preschool lesson. Her phone was about out of battery so I offered to use my phone for this activity. I found the ap and tried to download it and the phone would not download until it was connected to wifi or my computer. Planning for future lessons was needed at this time. If you have an ap that you want your students to get on their phones, you need to assign that at least the day before the activity planned.

There are more aps than I can mention in this blog for the smartphone. The staples of Wikipages and Dictionary are always needed. Depending on your content there are many more. Most of the aps that I found for Child Development were pay aps, which I am not sure how to handle that. If you are using one at school and requiring student to have the ap, I think it needs to be free.

One other thing that I find exciting about education is that our district is going to pilot two classrooms going paperless. They will get ipads and work pretty much just on them for all of their classroom work. The ipads will stay in the class and the teacher will use them throughout the day. This is a whole new side of teaching that I just haven't thought about. I use technology, but not exclusively, very exciting. Education is changing, stay current!