Technology Week C

This week when students were done with their projects I had them try coggle ( http://coggle.it/). This is an online mind mapping tool. You do need an account but I had my students sign into my account so they were all saved under my name. Students were able to create a mind map of their choice this first time. Students had to think of a topic for the center and then coming off of that were items related. You can make it as big as you want with as many layers as you want. I can definitely see this being use for a brainstorming tool, organizing tool or collaboration tool. Multiple people can open up the same coggle and work on it at one time so you could incorporate group work with this. I hope to try it with more academic topics soon.

I've also been talking with another 5th grade teacher who has 1-1 Ipads in her room. Her and one of her students showed me 3 tools they use all the time. She said they are a must if I am going to use the Ipads more often. The first one is dropbox. She uploads pdfs, articles, worksheets etc to the dropbox and sends them to her students. Then her students log in and are able to pull up that sheet. If they need to write on that sheet they then open the sheet in adobe reader. The students are so quick to do this now it if a quick process. Then if they need to turn it in they open showbie (I think you need to go to the website and sign up for it). They can save their pdfs that they wrote on and upload them to showbie which sends it right to the teacher. This is a great way to save paper or to share items someone finds without printing everything. I can imagine scanning part of a book or paragraph and then having students use that in some way. These are all tools I will be looking into more.