Coverage of the iPod Program wouldn’t be complete without mentioning some of the apps that really make it happen. One of the biggest things we have to consider about apps to sync on the iPods is that not every student has WiFi at home. Wifi can be easily added at home by purchasing one to go with their existing internet connection. (Here are some wireless routers at MISCO for home or school use). With this being the case, we were in need of apps that will work both online and …

It’s really easy to get caught up in the excitement of purchasing your first set of iPod Touches and forget about some of the necessary hardware that might be necessary to get your program up and running. This was an area that we had to learn as we went along. With that in mind, there are at least three things that you should definitely consider having as a part of your iPod program.
The cart.
Almost regardless of the amount of units you plan on deploying, you are going to want to …

I’ll keep this post to the point and try and capture some of the unique points of our program and how it’s set up. I’ll leave the decisions behind why we’re doing what we’re doing for another post. This should give you a quick frame a reference to better understand some of the other posts.
Our trial run is running from January to May of 2010. Over the course of those months 83 students will be given iPod Touches to use in school and at home. The students weren’t selected so …

A seasoned Twitter vet will more than likely recognize #edtech(or similar) as being something known as a hashtag. What is it? A hashtag is the twitter community’s answer to categorizing posts on twitter. Often when checking a twitter feed you will see these tags denoted by the # mark. Though twitter doesn’t officially support them in it’s web app, they can easily be searched in search.twitter.com.
They work by users marking their posts with the appropriate hashtag so the other users can easily follow what’s happening. Twitterers talking about things in …

@justinreeve made an interesting tweet today about a service called Pixton, and said that he could see students using it to demonstrate knowledge. After checking it out, I totally agree. Pixton is another comic book creator type website, similar to others around. But, I like this one a lot better. It seems as if everything is a lot more customizable and simple. Clicking on parts of the body brings up tools that will help you move and animate them, while clicking on objects gives you different sets of tools. Just …

I was talking to a teacher today that adds their students names to everything they hand out. It sparked my interest enough to delve into the why and how they were doing it. As it turns out, it’s a great way to enforce some accountability. Putting each students name onto each document manually would be a pain though. Solution? One Excel sheet with all of your student names, and merging them automatically onto multiple individualized copies of your document. The process is a simple mail merge, which is usually used …

My students and I just finished a unit in which they were producing short commercials using still images and voice overs on Windows Movie Maker. We were in the process of adding audio when a student asked if I had any music they could use, and a quick Google scored this gem. http://incompetech.com/m/c/royalty-free/
Kevin MacLeod over at www.incompetech.com has produced tons of high quality music segments that served as a priceless resource for adding great music to each of the projects. Since scoring films/commercials etc… require fitting music to the …