Once Upon a Digital Time

I had the opportunity to present at the ISTE conference last month and share my Once Upon a Digital Time symbaloo. It has several websites and apps bookmarked for digital storytelling and interactive writing. I will be presenting an overview of some of them this week at the Lone Star TIA conference. Some of the apps are paid but often go on sale or free; that's when I download them. However, most all the websites are free and have education versions. The symbaloo has something for all grade levels. If you get a chance, take a look and explore a few of them. Let me know your favorites!

https://edu.symbaloo.com/mix/onceuponadigitaltime2

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Story Chimes: Interactive Book Apps

Story Chimes are one of my absolute favorite apps for reading. Story Chimes are interactive children's books that are brought to life with narration, music, and activities. They are perfect for teachers that integrate technology into their classrooms because the books can be played on an iPod Touch or iPad; they are also available on Androids. What a great idea to engage students during literacy center time! Kids have the option to read independently or read along with the narrator. Best of all they have tons of FREE full version books that you can download (with ads). If you want the ad free version then most of them are only $0.99. I think I have pretty much downloaded every interactive app they have on the App Store. Now, every time my 5 year old niece stays with me I let her choose a story for us to read at bedtime. She is always asking to go back and reread them! One of our favorites is The Princess and the Pea.

You can search "Story Chimes" in the iTunes App Store or Google Play to see all the different interactive books available for download. Here are a few titles that I took a snapshot of from the iTunes Store.

If you haven't discovered the interactive books already, I recommend checking a few of the stories out!

Alphabetimals

This is a fun little website that has an interactive alphabet book, ABC song video, name typer, free printable resources, and even an app you can download to your iPad. Super cute for the primary grades.

www.alphabetimals.com

I have to be honest and say I absolutely love creating words and names with Name Typer! This can also be an engaging way for your students to practice spelling words and typing skills at the same time. You have the option to print it out or share by email. I also like creating cute names like this for myself and using it as my email signature. It is amazing how many more teachers read my emails when I have something cute on it!

 

You can also have students read the interactive alphabet book. There is an animal that is shaped like each letter of the alphabet. Students can click to hear an audio sound of what the animal sounds like or hear the word pronounced.

 

Remember to also check out the ABC video song, free printables, and iPad app. Also, if you are lucky enough to have an interactive whiteboard, this would be great to project and have students interact with it.

I took a little break from blogging this summer so check back often because I'll be posting a lot more fun, interactive websites for the beginning of school. I have so many I can't decide which ones to highlight first :)

QR Cubes

I stumbled upon the idea of QR cubes a while back and thought there were so many possibilities of how they could be used in the classroom, I just wanted to share. They are so simple to make and it is a great way to bring technology into the classroom. 

I have actually built quite a few now because they have been quite addicting. For example, I created one for writing prompts. The students would roll the cube and then with a QR Reader (I'll list some below) scan to see what prompt they would be writing about. Some other ideas you could make cubes for are:

• Content questions for review
• Warm up questions
• Wrap up questions
• Story elements that a student would have to identify after reading a story
• Quick Facts
• Rewards/Incentives
• Positive sayings
• Vocabulary
• As a way of grouping
• Math problems for students to solve

Here is a link to my Writing Prompt QR Cube if you would like a copy. All you would need to do is just print it out and assemble the cube!

Directions to make your own

If you would like to make one, I have detailed out the steps below. I suggest creating all of your QR codes first and saving them to your documents. My favorite QR generator is QR Stuff but you can use any QR generator you prefer to create them. I just love that QR Stuff allows you to change the color of the codes, whereas a lot of others only create in black.  

1. Go to QR Stuff and choose plain text for the data type.
2. Enter in your text you want the students to read when scanning.
3. Choose your preferred color.
4. Then under the preview box, click download QR code.
5. Choose the location where you would like to save it, name the file (for example my naming scheme usually is writing 1, writing 2, and so on because it'll make things easier later to locate and identify) and then of course save!
6. I repeat the first five steps until I have all six QR codes created for the cube's sides.
7. Next, open up the cube template. Click HERE if you would like to use the one like mine. However, any cube template will do. (For some reason they file looks blank on Google Docs until you download it but it's really there).
8. Now from the template (opens in Word), choose insert picture and navigate to your first QR code.
9. I simply resize and move the QR code to fit the template and continue the steps until all of my QR codes fit nicely on there.
10. I then save the file and print the QR cube file out on card stock. You can do it with plain paper but I find card stock holds up so much longer and it's easier to glue together.
11. Voila! You have your QR cube.

Also, here are a few QR reader apps I recommend. You can search for them on iTunes or Google Play for Android.

i-nigma

QR Droid

NeoReader

RedLaser

Flash Browsers for iPad, iPhone, and iTouch

There are some really great interactive websites out there that would be great for students to use on the iPad. However, it’s disappointing when they are flash-based sites and they are not compatible with the iOS platform. Rover is the perfect solution. It can be downloaded free from the app store and supports flash websites. So now you can use all your favorite sites right on your iPad!

There are a lot of other flash browser apps that can be downloaded from the app store for a relatively low price. Rover is currently only for the iPad, so it is worth checking out some of the other apps.

Splashtop remote browser is one of my favorites. It allows you to control your computer directly from your device; you are actually using your own computer's browser. This gives you the freedom to access all of your files and software programs directly from your computer. One reason why I love it is because it works awesome with the interactive whiteboard. Instead of having a slate to control the board, students can launch the Splashtop app and interact from anywhere in the room! If you get a chance, definitely check it out. Just click on the icons to find out more.