App Smashing

The past month has dragged on with issues from my surgery, Internet problems here at home, and trying to redo lessons for my sub to do without using as much technology as I normally do when I'm there at school.   It's been a catchup game for me.

The last few days are finally being much more productive for me.  I'm working hard at catching up, am starting to find the tools I need for my career project that I plan on using with my CCE students at school.   As a PC teacher, I've been learning a lot relating to the best use of iPads with students. 

I struggled a while trying to get my week 4 project instructions to go into the upload area.   Moodle totally reformatted the text which I hadn't thought of before trying to copy and paste from my Word app.  I finally stripped out the formatting and pasted it in again and it appears readable.  I decided to brave the elements and embedded a sample project and writing prompt as well (crossing my fingers they appear the same to each of the students in our class as they do to me here at home).

I enjoyed the app smashing assignment.  I learned it's definitely something to practice with ahead of doing it with my students.   I wonder how many of them have already done app smashing before.  App Smashing allows students to use several apps to create one product.  It inspires creativity and thinking outside the box.  I'm finding it very helpful as I start to piece the parts of my project together for my CCE class.   Right now I've been looking at Mind Vector, Google Earth, PicCollage, Tellagami, and am looking for an app that allows students to get historical or tour-type details to embed within their projects.


My challenge is going to be figuring these things out here at home without the advantage of being face to face with my students to gauge their interest and understanding of the long-term project.  I've been watching a number of YouTube videos about some of these apps I'm thinking of using but it's not the quite the same as actually being at school with students and other teachers to work through the ideas.

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Now that I'm back in school I have had students download a number of possible apps to use in my final project including the ones above.    I quickly found that Mind Vector is not the app I will use with them for making a graphic organizer for their project.   Within minutes, students became confused with how to do more than one topic to branch off from .... it ended up being the free version will do one topic.   There is a sample included that can be deconstructed with several topics but it would take too much time for students to undo all the text and replace it with their own for the graphic organizer.  I challenged my students to search out other graphic organizers and for us to do a sharing session this Monday and Tuesday on what we found as a possible alternative.