For those with a significant number of iPads in your room, Subtext is a free app that allows for more of a collaborative reading environment. The basic use of it is for students to read books, articles, etc from the ipad and contribute comments and discussion to the document that then all others can see. Quizzes and Discussion boards are also available but differ little from Blackboard et al. The app does allow you to create groups to manage what different periods or reading groups are looking at which would probably be most helpful to elementary school or ESOL teachers who have a significant disparity of reading levels in the clasroom.
I'm considering using it for my Academic Decathlon classes because of Subtext's ability to read epub files and comment on them. Subtext will load books or documents from email, dropbox, and your google account. Registration is required but is free for all.
Socrative is still a wonderful tool for the classroom (especially considering that it's free) but, after using it a few more times I'm running into some problems that I need to make you aware of and that I've already alerted the app producer too.
In using it I allowed students to use their smart phones and the iPads I have in the classroom. The students using the iPads had virtually no issues, but those that were using their smartphones encountered some issues that prevented the experience from being positive. One, when viewing an activity on Socrative on their smart phones they often had to scroll up and down to see all of the questions and answer choices, and too often as they scrolled the program interpreted the scrolling as an answer selection. I contacted the app maker to suggest adding an "Are You Sure?" response to answering the question to avoid this.
The other issue that happened more with smart phone users than laptop and iPad users was questions already answered would reappear. I also alerted the app maker to this bug as well.
Considering both of these issues I've decided to only use Socrative when either all my students have an iPad in their hands or if they're working on something else and can pass the iPads I have in the room around to each other.
If you're in a one-to-one iPad classroom, then you shouldn't have very many troubles at all.
While sitting in a staff development meeting the week before school this cartoon flashed into my head and I quickly sketched it out. I don't specifically remember what we were discussing, but it had something to do with adding a new function/activity without considering the structual problems. The basic 19th century model is never questioned; just add "stuff". A teacher was told today that setting up a room for simulations, project based learning, and collaboration was not advised because it made it difficult to do standardized testing in the room. The boulder wasn't in the original sketch, but after that story- I added it.
Thanks to a fabulous educator named Joe O'Boyle and some time to kill on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris I came up with this little take on Von Moltke's quote about no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. No, I don't consider students the enemy, but I do feel like I have battle fatigue or shell shock some days. The posters are all original WWI posters.
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