Hello, I'm Aaron Quigley and welcome to another addition of Teacher Tips. This week, we're going to go ahead and look at the iPad and how the iPad can be used in your classroom.Apple recently did a push for iPads for educators and put iPads in thousands of classrooms across the nation. Also, more and more schools are starting to use iPads inside the classroom.Often schools will have iPads that you can check out to use in your own classroom. Or if you're lucky enough, you've established a class set of iPads. This week on Teacher Tips, I'm going to go ahead and share a few of my favorite iPad applications for teachers.

This first one is actually the Common Core application. It was created by Mastery Connect, and it is a fantastic application for allowing us to have quick access to the Common Core standards. Here you can see that they've broken out math into both traditional and integrated.Language arts has a tab. And they've also pulled out of language arts, history and social science, and science and technology. Let's go ahead and take a look at how this works. If I click on something like language arts, here I can see that it's a spiraled curriculum and I can choose any grade level from kindergarten all the way through twelfth grade.

I'm going to go and select the sixth grade language arts standards. Inside of 6th Grade, and I can tell it's 6th Grade because it's RL.6, I see that I start off with the Reading Literature. I can then scroll down and get to Informational Texts. As I scroll down further, I'll come up to Writing.And then inside of Writing, I have Speaking and Listening and Language. From here, I can click on any individual standard. Let's go ahead and come back to the Writing section and let's click on, Produce Clear and Coherent Writing. At this point, I can go ahead and see exactly what W.6.4 is as a standard.

Furthermore, I can also see the corresponding career and college readiness anchor standard.There's also some text to describe the standard itself, as well as what students should and should not be able to do within this particular standard. I'm going to head back to the Standards home page by clicking the Standards button in the upper left hand corner. As they've pulled those standards out of the ELA place that they normally belong. I can see it's broken down by middle school, lower high school, and upper high school. I'm going to go click on the Sixth Grade to Eighth Grade Science Standards. Here I can see the standard for reading science and technical text.

I can also come down to the writing history and science standards. If I click any individual standard, I can also bring that standard up, including it's corresponding college and career ready anchor standard. In addition to be able to access the standards, I can also go into resources. Here there's a variety of resources built directly into the application for us to use.Math teachers, if you click on Math you can go to Standards for Practice. Here it is going to describe the standards that have to do with practicing and solving math problems. It's also going to give you some descriptions of how those standards play out in your classroom.

For each of the resource areas, there's also a glossary you can access. I often will hand this iPad to students and allow them to access the glossary if they don't understand part of the language that's in the objective that I've communicated to them. In addition to this Common Core application, another great application I think every teacher should check out is Explain Everything. Explain Everything gives us the ability to record both audio and visual interactions on our iPad which we can then export to videos. If you're a teacher that's adopting the flippedclassroom ideology, then this tool is a must have.

It allows you to go through and create a small video presentation of whatever it is that you'd like to describe and you can share that with your students. You can upload these videos to YouTube. You can save them on your computer and play them through your projector. It's really up to you. This application combines the ability of drawing with the ability of having slides such as in Keynote or PowerPoint. For example, here I'm on a slide. I can go in and freehand draw. Such as genetics. I can also choose to add elements like stars, and I can also go in and choose to edit those particular images by making them bigger, changing their border or color, or even changing their shape.

When it comes to adding text, I can quickly choose to create a text box and go ahead and type the text in. Once my text is in position, I can go and hit the Plus button. And I can see that I can now position it around the page. Furthermore, by clicking on the text to select it, I can also hold down the Text button on the left-hand side, and change its font, change its size, and even add a boarder to the text. If I grab the blue button at the bottom of the text box, I can also choose to resize this text box to fit my text more appropriately. If I want to, I can also insert an object.

I can actually bring video directly into this program and add an audio track on top of that video or during the video I could draw or add text on top of it. I could bring a file in, such as a lesson plan or a PowerPoint presentation. I could bring in an object from a web browser, add pictures, or even create a brand new video. The very middle of my control panel is this X button. Here with the X button, I can choose to tap various items, including whole sections of text that I've written. And quickly hit the X in the upper right hand corner of the box to quickly delete and move those around.

For example, if I wanted to delete this star, I could simply click the Star, hit the X, and delete that button. During the presentation, if I'd like the ability to have a laser pointer, I can choose to do this as well. As I move my finger around the screen, a laser pointer will appear. While you can't see the laser pointer because it's under your finger when you're looking at the iPad.When you record this video, that laser pointer will be noticeable. This is great way if you're showing video and you want to kind of circle a section of the video. You can quickly grab the laser pointer and highlight to students what it is that you're talking about. Now for any particular slide, I can also go through and change the theme of these slides.

By clicking and holding the Slide button, I can see all the slides I've created and I can change their template. Sometimes I'd like a dark background, so I can have better contrast with the things that I'm looking at. Or it might be appropriate if I had a dark background for the text or images that I'm trying to highlight. When I'm ready, I can go ahead and click the Record button.I can continue to talk as well as make movements and gestures. I can use things like the laser pointer and all of this will be recorded into a video. When I'm finished, I can hit the Record button again and I have the ability to play back that video. Or in the bottom right hand corner, I can export it as a video file, which I can then e-mail to myself or download to my computer.

At this point, we've taken a look at two very useful apps for educators. The next step is to look at a few apps that are very beneficial to students.

When it comes to using iPads with students, especially during class, Reflector is a great application. What Reflector allows you to do is to wirelessly mirror your iPad, iPhone, or IPod touch to any Mac or PC. So, for example, if I have my computer plugged into my projector. And I am projecting whatever's on my computer. I can then take whatever's on my iPad, send it to my computer to be projected on my board. That way if I have a great application that I'm working in, and I want to share that application with the entire class, I can choose to do so.

Reflector does cost money. It's \$12.99, but that's a fairly inexpensive teacher tool that you'll probably use almost every single day in your classroom. I'm currently using Reflector for this presentation, and I'm going to show you a few other tips and tricks of how to use the iPad to engage students during lessons. Here I have a really basic slide set-up in the Explain Everything application. One thing that I like to do is to bring questions up by navigating to the next slide and then actually handing the iPad over to a student and letting the student solve it.At the same time, I'm using Reflector to project this image onto the board.

That way the entire class can watch the student work through the problem and offer suggestions and help if they need it. For example, a student might come down here and choose a nice, bright blue pen and then they would go ahead and rewrite the problem. And then they could go ahead and solve the problem. In my own classroom, to make sure students are being respectful and not interrupting one another, I use a nice try, good job system. If they're doing a good job, then my students can say good job. If at the end of the problem, they think that there is a mistake that needs to be corrected, then my students will say nice try, and I will take the iPad, walk over to the student that said nice try, hand it to them, and allow that student to go in, maybe choose a different color and make any changes that need to take place.

When I'm finished with that particular problem, I can simply hit the Next Slide arrow in the bottom left-hand corner and go on to the next problem for the next student. Another great application is Evernote's Peek. In Evernote Peek, you have the ability to create notebooks for students that they can then use to go through and check their content knowledge in a particular subject. I'm going to go ahead and click on the French Words notebook to take a look at how this works. Now, it's designed to work with a Smart Cover. And if you have Smart Covers great. Your students can simply close the cover and as they peek under the cover they can test themselves.

If you don't have Smart Covers, that's okay. The application has a built-in digital Smart Cover which you can access by clicking on the color tab in the right-hand corner and dragging it down. So here I've covered my iPad with a digital Smart Cover. At the very bottom of the iPad, I'm going to click on the Smart Cover and very slowly lift up. Here I'm going to see a clue. This particular one is, Comment vas-tu? And if I know what it is, I can simply close the cover and move onto the next one. Au revoir! If I don't know what it is however, I can also come up a little bit further and take a peek at what it is.

Oh, it's goodbye! If I did not get that correct as a student, at this point I could go ahead and mark it as an incorrect answer. You know what, I need to continue to work on that one. I'll come back to it. I can close my Smart Cover and keep going on. I'll come to the next one, and if I know this one, I'll go ahead and keep it marked correct and move on. If I don't know it, I'll mark it incorrect. And when I'm all the way done with the quiz, I'll open my Smart Cover all the way up, and I can see right away that I got one correct, and two incorrect. Students can use this application in class to quickly quiz themselves to see how much of the content they've mastered.

Now while this only tests the lower-order thinking processes, such as recall and comprehension. It's still a great way for students to interact with the technology, and to test themselves on whether or not they've mastered content. I hope you enjoy finding new applications to use as both a teacher and a student inside the classroom, and I look forward to seeing you next week with the next edition of Teacher Tips.

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