Arts Education

Over a year ago, I wrote a post about a couple of things, including some augmented reality apps that I like. I also added an augmented reality page to my blog so I can stockpile resources for using AR in the classroom. One of the apps you will find in both places used to be called ColAR Mix. In the year since the post, the app has been renamed as Quiver. It remains one of my favorite AR apps to show people. Imagine my excitement to learn that they now also have a Quiver Education app. Like the original ColAR Mix, er . . . Quiver , the app offers coloring pages that you can download online. The app brings them to life with the augmented reality experience and the objects dance around on the mobile device screen decorated in the way the artist colored them.  My children, including my reluctant to color 12 year old, were happy to oblige me when I suggested we try out this new app.  We tried out several pages - the world map, a create your own flag, a tetrahedron, the volcano,...

Lately I have been on a bit of a rubric rampage. I love rubrics for a lot of reasons. I think they make grading subjective work a lot easier. And they simultaneously help students differentiate between performance levels and work to improve. I like how creating a rubric really helps me think deeply about what I am expecting my students to know and be able to do and how I will determine the degree to which they can do it. I use a rubric for scoring the group work that my students do in the lab and another rubric for grading lab reports . This week I worked for many hours on a rubric that our instructional coaches and administrators introduced to our staff for self-analysis of our station rotations. It took a lot of hours and talking for us to arrive at a good starting point, but I know I learned a lot in the process. Today I taught some Google PD at Lake Erie College and, as part of that, I found and experimented with a rubric add-on. Then later I tweeted about a rubric tool that is ea...

I can't go to bed tonight until I write about all the great things happening with The Answer Pad . As a TAP Champion , I sometimes get to preview some features of this excellent tool before they go live for everyone. Today the features that I will describe have gone live for everyone, so please check them out. You will be glad you did! If you have read some of my other posts , you will know that I love this tool. The Answer Pad is two great services - one part student response system, one part digital answer sheet maker. Want to just ask some questions in class and see how well the students understand the lesson? The Answer Pad can help with that. Want to stop spending time grading tests? The Answer Pad can help with that too. With generous free features and very affordable premium features, this tool is one of the best values out there. This week a great tool got even better. The newest feature is a feedback loop. Send a screen out to your students for feedback. I sent out a blan...

Last month I wrote about how there are some secret tools in Keynote . That was a great find. Last week I found some more.  One of the features of iOS 9 I was most excited about was the ability to use two apps at once. When you are in an app, swipe left from the right side of the screen and a drawer opens. These are apps you can open in addition to the one you started in. It turns out that there are some limitations. You can't open just any app, just certain ones. It looks to me like the ones you can open in this reel are just the ones that are native to the iPad. That's a good start, but I hope more will be added. Now to the Keynote treasure part: When you are presenting in Keynote on your iPad and you slide open this drawer, it doesn't get projected! So I can have a slide up - maybe my students are copying some notes before we talk about them or they are solving a problem - and open these other apps so that I can use Safari to take attendance or use the timer to keep us al...