Tech: 5/18, Literacy and Disciplines

Literacy

-  My Spelling Test:  This app provides help to teachers and students in an elementary school.  Generally, it is hard for a student to really test themselves on spelling.  Once a student reads the word they need to spell, they are missing out on that push to put a word in their long-term memory.  So students need to have someone read aloud the words they are to be tested on.  This is the best way for a student to learn how to spell, but it means that the student is not really able to have their own independent learning experience.  They are tied down by needing another person to read the words to them.  My Spelling Test frees students from that by providing an app that allows the user to create their own unique tests according to what they are learning in class.  Either the student or the teacher can simply go into the app, create a new test, voice over the words, and enter in the correct spelling of those words.  Having this kind of study aid at hand for a student could be a big step for him or her and not only the area of spelling.  Teaching diligence and individual work ethic and study strategies could mean a lot for the student in multiple subjects as well as in their every day life decisions.

-  Merriam-Webster:  This dictionary app does everything you would want it to do and more.  Of course it provides definitions from an uncountable number of words but it also has features like voice recognition if you are trying to figure out how to spell the word, and interesting articles based on the word.  For example I checked out the entry for terrestrial and learned that the words terrier and terrace find their meaning in the Latin word, terra meaning "earth."  The app also uses the word in various sentences, provides the pronunciation in a playback, and has a "word of the day" feature.

-  Educreations:  This app gives the teacher an opportunity to create small miniature lessons that can be sent to their students online.  You are given a whiteboard with drawing capabilities and the ability to voice over the lesson.  A math teacher may simply explain the unit in a terse style with a quick couple of examples.  Or a history teacher may use the app by importing an image of a map into the whiteboard and drawing on that to show the lesson  There are many ways the app can be used by various teachers but what is so great about it is that the teacher can condense some of the most vital information into a form that can be viewed multiple times by the students and studied outside of class.

-  Comic Life:  In this app, a student can create their own comic book using the templates and tools that are provided.  This app could provide an interesting learning opportunity for the students, especially those who are more visually wired.  Instead of writing out a story with only words, the students can create lively comics.  The downside is that the app doesn't seem to provide an opportunity for the students to draw, which means all of the images in the comic are going to need to be saved and uploaded onto the comic book.  I thin it would be an excellent resource if it just had that capability.  But until it has that ability I am not sure what the point is exactly.

Disciplines

Epic Citadel:  This app was originally just a level on a potential video game created by Unreal Games.  But the game was never created and so now it serves as an aid in a creative writing class.  A student can walk through the digital hallways of this epic citadel and use their imagination to create stories in that setting.  A useful exercise might be to have each of the students walk through the citadel and quietly jot down some story ideas, emphasizing the details of their story.  Then the students could come together and see how their stories all differed from one another even though they were all writing on the same setting.  Then the students will have the start of a new story for creative writing and they will have learned something about settings.  I believe this app would be fun and useful for students in a creative writing class but I do wish they had more settings.

Shakespeare:  I remember reading Shakespeare in high school and really just being lost a lot of the time.  It felt like it was difficult to understand what was happening and at times it even felt like I was studying a foreign language.  But this app provides a number of aids for the student of Shakespeare.  There are an enormous amount of resources in the pro version, but even in the free version of the app, the student has access to all of the works of Shakespeare which is significant in itself.  But I really think for this app to make a big difference in the education of the students, the paid version is the best way to go.  The paid version lets students highlight any word and get a definition of it.  It also provides plenty of studying material for students on Shakespeare's life and the theater environment.

Lincoln Telegrams:  This app has a great idea.  It provides a list of the telegrams that Lincoln sent in his presidency.  It also provides helpful summaries and context analysis of the telegrams.  This would be a great app to utilize in a classroom to get the kids to have hands on work with primary sources.  The teacher could ask the students to do a short primary source analysis in which they might string a few of the telegrams together and write about what the telegrams reveal.  However, the app seemed to malfunction on me, and I was unable to get out of loop of telegrams and there was no way to simply go back accept to go back to the previous telegram.  So the app could use some simple programming work but I think it presents a lot of good opportunities for a teacher to use primary sources in the classroom.

Maps of the World:  This app provides a series of historical maps that can be studied in the classroom.  The maps seem to be taken straight out of old atlases which is a positive and a negative.  The positive is that the maps are almost a primary source in that they are made around the time of the events that are being taught.  The negative is that there are more interesting ways of presenting the information.  But then the creators have also provided a link to the Google Earth locations of the maps as well as a link to the wikipedia entries of the maps.  So it really does have other ways of presenting the info, I just think it would be better if the map that had graphics on it was created with more interactive technology.

Your World:  This is actually a very addictive learning app.  The challenge of this app is to place the countries in their correct location on a globe without using map lines.  There is a timer and so even when a student has put all of the countries in place, they can still improve their score so the desire to play again is high.  I found that I began placing countries based on their shape relative to other countries like a jigsaw puzzle.  This is great because I began to understand even the smallest geographic features of the countries and was even surprised that some countries were so big or were neighbors to countries I did not expect.  I believe that an app like this will provide growth for the students not only in their ability to read a map but also in their understanding that the world is much bigger than just the United States.