My Favorite Evergreen Apps

iPads are wonderful tools, but in order to use them to their full potential, it's important to look at evergreen apps. Evergreen apps are "non-subject apps useful throughout the year for speaking, writing, listening, drawing, annotating, curating, collaborating, sharing, and more." (Daccord, 2013.) I find evergreen apps more convenient than content-specific apps, as students (and I) can use them for a variety of projects, regardless of the subject or grade level.

Here are my favorite evergreen apps:

1. The "does everything" app:  Seesaw (free) or Explain Everything ($3.99)

If you teach elementary school, Seesaw is the app for you. While I've seen high school teachers use Seesaw, Explain Everything might be a better bet for the secondary crowd. (Secondary peeps: if you prefer a free app, Educreations is good -- it just doesn't have all the features Explain Everything does.)

Both have a whiteboard feature (among many other components!) that allows students to draw on the screen with their finger or a stylus and a recording option where students can record their voice over a project. This link will show you a series of blog post I wrote on my technology blog about Seesaw.

2. The tutorial app: Shadow Puppet Edu (free)

Users can string several photos or videos into one slideshow, and then record their voice over the entire presentation, adding text, music, and drawings where needed. The Shadow Puppet website has great examples from classroom teachers on how to use the app.

3. The poster app: Tackk (free)

Tackk (available in both an app and on the web) allows users to create online posters with a variety of media inside. Tackk is much like Smore, except Tackk allows users to create an unlimited number of posters per account, and teachers can easily create lesson plan template for students. Click here to learn more about Tackk.

4. The interactive images app: ThingLink (free)

ThingLink (available in an app and on the web) allows users to upload a photo and then apply "tags" -- in the form of plain text, links, or other embedded content -- across the photo. Click here to learn more about ThingLink.

5. The mind map app: Popplet Lite (free)

Popplet is a brainstorming app that allows users to create bubble maps. You can save bubble maps as PDFs or image files, and then import into another app such as Canvas or Seesaw to share. Click here too see a popplet my students made when discussing science tools. Click here to view public popplets for more ideas.

6. The assessment app: Socrative (free)

Socrative (available in an app and on the web) is my favorite paperless assessment tool. Teachers can ask questions on the fly, give students a pre-planned quiz, or engage students with a "space race" competitive assessment before receiving data quickly in the format of their choice.

7. The brainstorming app: Padlet (free)

Padlet (available on the web and in a brand new app) lets users create a central hub for collaboration. It's great for discussion questions, mind maps, virtual "parking lots," and much more.

8. The collection app: Google Forms (free)

Technically, users can only create Google forms from a computer. But since finished forms are accessible from a mobile device, I'm throwing this one in the mix. Google forms are so versatile! Once you create a form from the computer, send students the link or attach it to a QR code for students to scan at their convenience. This blog post tells you how to create a Google form and suggests ways for using it in the classroom.

9. The collaborative drawing app: Whiteboard Lite (free)

On the surface, this just appears as a plain whiteboard app, but there's an awesome feature that will help students write/draw collaboratively from different devices: users on the same WiFi connection can draw on the same whiteboard simultaneously, and the other person's drawings appear in real time on your device.

10. The note-taking app: Paperport Notes (free)

This is a nice alternative to the widely-hailed but expensive (for an app) Notability. Paperport Notes lets users add blank or lined pages, camera images, files from cloud services, web snippets, and clipboard contents to digital notebooks. Users can then type, draw, or highlight with their finger or stylus, and/or record a voice over each page.


Tweet This:

• 10 awesome evergreen apps for iOS via @ckarasedu

References

• Daccord, Tom. "The 'Evergreen' iPad: Why All Your Apps Should Fit on One Screen." eSchool News: Daily Tech News and Innovation. 28 May 2013. Web. 1 Oct. 2015. 

How to Customize Your Own Image for ThingLink

I'm in the process of adding some new tutorial videos to the database, so check there if you're a video tutorial fan. 

There were a couple of questions about how I made the image for "my digital self" in the #TLChallenge, so I made a little tutorial about it. It's super-easy -- I promise! 

Here's the video {or click this link to view the video in a different screen}:

ThingLink Teacher Challenge

ThingLink is hosting a teacher challenge this summer, and it's not too late to join! Not only do participants earn 3 months of ThingLink Premium for free, but it's free, online professional development and a great opportunity to learn your way around ThingLink so you'll be ready to use it when school starts in August. Learn more about the #TLChallenge by reading this post on the ThingLink blog.

Completing week 1 of the challenge means creating your digital self...here's mine:

  Even if you've used ThingLink before, this is a great opportunity to practice with the premium features like media-rich tags. The star is supposed to show our admin building on Google Maps, but fellow CISD employees may notice that I'm still working on fine-tuning that. :) 
Want more information on ThingLink? Check out this blog post of mine. 

Interactive Images on ThingLink

Happy summer break! I'm always torn at this time of year -- do I take a break or use this time "off" to start exploring ideas for next year?

For those of you on board with the latter idea, here's a tool you might want to play with over the summer: ThingLink. 

logo via the ThingLink website

I've known about ThingLink for a couple years now but didn't start using it until this year....and I wish I had started sooner. :) It's such a unique tool with so many possibilities!

What is ThingLink?

ThingLink describes themselves as a way to create interactive images. Basically, you upload a picture and then add "tags" to it. Adding a tag creates a bubble that pops up when moused over; this bubble can provide a link and/or text. 

via the ThingLink website

Free Features

• Access via the web, iOS app, or Android app 
• Create 1 group of up to 100 students by registering the students under your account (so kids don't need an e-mail address in order to log in) OR students can log themselves in with their existing Google account
• Tag images and videos with text and links
• Create slideshows with your ThingLinks
• Students who are logged in can only see other students' and teachers' ThingLinks

Premium Features -- $35/year for the teacher (my fav capabilities are italicized)

• Advanced tagging tools (like these rich media tag options)
• Create up to 30 groups with up to 1,000 students
• Students who are logged into their student account (under your name) have the same abilities as you do (except they can't tag videos)
• Ability to present your ThingLink full-screen 
• Replace the image on your ThingLink without losing any of your tags or other information
• Access to wider variety of tag icons (100+ options)
• Ability to make icons always appear (so that people don't have to mouse over the image in order to see the tags)
• Upload custom tag icons
• Use the rich-text editor on tags (include bold/italicized text)
• Make images private
• Customize the bubble and text color of your tags
• Add multiple interactive images to create one slideshow (unlimited images can be added to a show)
• Google Drive links work directly within the image (see the feedback form embedded into the bottom, right corner of this presentation ThingLink)
• Remove the ThingLink logo at the bottom, right of your slides or replace with your own image

Gettin' Fancy

You can upload any picture to create a ThingLink, but I like to upload images I've created on my own. Click here for an example of a ThingLink where I created the image.

You can create your own image in basically any photo-editing site or app, but I actually just use Microsoft PowerPoint to create my images. This post reviews how to edit and save pictures in PPT. I just use a colored shape for the background, import the pictures I need, group it all together, and save as a picture. This post has a video tutorial that shows how I use PowerPoint and digital scrapbooking elements to create an image. 

Ideas for Use

• Teachers (for students): give your students a paperless or flipped lesson (like this, this, and this) -- works really well if you're incorporating a lot of media (like a Blendspace + EDpuzzle or YouTube video + Prezi + Socrative quiz, etc.) 
• Teachers (for other teachers): create a professional development session/workshop in ThingLink (like this)
• Students (any subject): ask students to create a ThingLink as part of a culminating project to show their learning
• Students (any subject): create a mini-research project 
• Students (back to school): tag a personal image to create a "getting to know me" ThingLink at the beginning of the year
• Students (ELA): upload a student-made illustration, and then place tags that tell a story all around the illustration (Ooh...could you do a "choose your own adventure" story with this?! My wheels are turning...)
• Students (ELA): tag the image of a book cover to give reviews on the book, favorite quotes, descriptions of characters, and/or examples of literary elements
• Students (geography): tag a collage of land forms with a student voice recording explaining what each land form is/looks like and can be found
• Students (geography): tag the capitals on a map 
• Students (history): tag a map where each battle in a war took place (describing each battle and telling who won)
• Students (history/social studies): tag an image of a person as a mini-biography (this would be particularly handy if students were using lots of different tools to display facts about the person -- like a video or audio recording of the person from YouTube, a mock Facebook page for the person, a Voki depicting what that person might have said about x issue, an iMovie with photos from the person's life, etc)
• Students (science): tag a collage of the steps or results of an experiment with a student voice recording explaining what's happening in each picture, a website or video explaining why the results occurred, etc.
• Students (science): tag a diagram -- say, of a cell or a flower -- with labels, and explain each part's function