Tools, Sites, Apps and Stuff you have to read w/c 17th March 2012

Each week my Flipboard app, Twitter responses and Google reader deliver a collection of new web tools, apps, books and must read articles.

Here is this weeks Stuff I have seen:

Bible Buddies App

I love Puppet Pals and have enjoyed using it to bring play scripts alive this year. By chance the boys and I discovered Bible Buddies, which is made by the same people who brought us Puppet Pals. Bible Buddies is basically Puppet Pals but with Biblical Characters, though it should be said most of these are in-app purchases. Here is Leo and Charlie’s versions of Jonah and the Whale made with the app.

Jam with Chrome

If you have seen digital music in action on Garageband on iPad but you don’t have iPads, then Jam with Chrome maybe a viable alternative. You have a broad range of instruments, collaboration with others, autoplay and funky effects all via Chrome. Another reason to ensure your school machines has Chrome installed as well as Internet Explorer.

Whitecap – Visuals for your Disco

Last Saturday, I helped a friend out by resurrecting my old DJ skills and DJ equipment. Though things have moved on since my hey day behind the decks. You can see in the picture what my set up used to look like, last week the CD players were replaced by 2 iPads, Spotify playlists and a laptop running Youtube. I had a projector to show video clips, but when these were not running we used Whitecap. I had not seen this Windows download before and I was really pleased with how well it worked. Essentially Whitecap produces visuals in response to music it detects via your computer microphone. Think the fractals you get from Windows Media Player visualizations, but with more control by you.

Hackasaurus Video from Ian Addison

I love Hackasaurus and the more I use it with classes the more risks they and I take with it. If you have not seen it before then take a look at Ian’s video which gives you an idea of how to use it. Hackasaurus works as both an insight into html and an uber writing frame, which is how I have been using it, presenting children with a BBC News web page and asking them to change the news to fit in with a local or topic based story.

Anyway here is one of Ian’s under ten minutes videos which make tools like this more accessible.

Raspberry Pi and other unofficial Manuals

Makeuseof.com have created another one of their fantastic free help guide/manual thingys. This time they have created a guide about the Raspberry Pi. Aside from this guide you can find a range of other helpful guide on their site including Google Analytics, Gmail and Evernote.

Related articles

• Tools, Sites, Apps and Stuff you have to read w/c 11th March 2012 (antsict.wordpress.com)
• IPad supporters tout student engagement, but effect on achievement unclear (islandpacket.com)
• Puppet pals 2 (ipadschurchdown.wordpress.com)
• Puppet Pals 2 (engagetheirminds.wordpress.com)

First (V rough) Look at an App for Primary School Programming – Hopscotch

http://www.gethopscotch.com/ 

Coding, Computer Science and iPads – My Current View

Photo Credit: flickingerbrad via Compfight cc

I have spoken a lot recently about my frustration with a lack of apps that help teach children to code. Largely this frustration is centred around the resulting perception of ICT and edtech this limitation gives our schools. If a school invests wholesale in a set of iPads  then the ICT curriculum for these children can be based largely around internet research, movie making and a collection of multimedia authoring apps. And though I love my iPads and iPad lessons the aspect of struggle or challenge for children using these devices is not always apparent or indeed talked about.

There are exceptions though: Creatorverse, Garage Band, 123D Monsters

iPad Gripcase – wrap it round your iPad and you can safely drop it

A number of people have asked me about the casing we use around our iPads in Foundation Stage.  I have recently bought one for my eldest son, whose Autistic needs mean he may well drop or throw his new iPad. So, with that in mind we are about to enter into another stage of very rigorous testing of this case/holder thing, but where do you get one from?

Gripcase is an American Product, but I managed to find one at Primary Technology.co.uk on Sunday. It was delivered to me by Tuesday, now that is excellent service. Here is another video of the case in action, except this one is the cutest video I have ever seen about an iPad.

Related articles

• Training Day at South Woodford/ Redbridge (antsict.wordpress.com)
• Best iPad accessories (reviews.cnet.com)

 

123D Monsters – Create 3D Monsters with Scary 3D Struggle Ware

Yesterday I came across the 123D Monsters app from Autodesk Inc. Of course it ticks many of my boxes as it a creative app and with monsters at its heart it means it has an almost Doctor Who theme. But putting that aside another reason to love and download this app is because though it is creative it is actually quite challenging. It would almost be what John Davitt calls “struggle ware”, i.e. it takes some perseverance to get your head around the tools and workings of the app and produce a scary looking creature.

Many apps give you almost instant results; take a snapshot, whack it through a filter and job done. This app however, requires you to spend time pinching, dragging and repositioning the virtual clay until you are ready to “bake” your beast. Don’t expect to dive right in and get instant results, it will take you some time to gain familiarity with how it all works, but it is worth it when you see the finished creatures. Once your monster has been “baked” you can then add paint or texture such as skin or feathers. Your finished monster could be printed via 3D printer or exported as a 2D image with custom effects and backgrounds.

I’d like to give this to my Year 6 pupils and ask them to create a Martian species as part of our Mars topic. It could also lead to some very descriptive and rather scary creative writing

By the way this is only my first monster, below, so I have yet to come up with a name for him. If you have a suitable name for the creature, then please let me know in the comments box.

Related articles

• 123D Creature From Autodesk Makes Monsters Real (makerbot.com)
• Autodesk’s 123D Creature lets you design and order 3D prints of monsters you design (boingboing.net)
• Carve quality 3D-printable monster creations on with Autodesk 123D Creature for iPad (phonearena.com)
• Autodesk 123D Creatures lets you create monsters on your iPad (engadget.com)
• Design, Paint and Print Monsters With Autodesk’s ’123D Creature’ [iOS Blog] (macrumors.com)

 

Teachers Pet App – Like the Argos Catalogue for Teachers

For busy teachers who need quality resources, there are probably two sites we turn to. One is Teaching Ideas and the other is Teachers Pet. Though, if I am honest I have them both on separate Chrome tabs when I am on the hunt for something for my classroom. In the past, I was probably quite snooty about sites that offered labels, word banks, posters and the like to teachers. I though teachers should make their own. But, that view was held when I was working as a consultant and I actually didn’t have my own class.

And now I am a teacher again, marking and planning take up most of my time, as indeed they should. I don’t have the time to make my own posters about parts of speech,magnets, materials, space travel or story writing. Though I may create a very interactive whiteboard file or Powerpoint on the topic, it can often be a very ephemeral resource. I often find I want to return to a topic or a teaching point a few days after I first flashed it up on-screen. Having effective and well placed visual descriptions in the room can offer a longer term reminder of key facts for my class and an aide memoir for me. They help and prompt me and my pupils during lessons on a mostly daily basis.

The resources I use from Teachers Pet are bright, colourful and very clear. I use them around my classroom and point them out during teaching, particularly at the moment when we are focussing on strengthening our understanding of parts of speech.

So, now it is even easier to browse for these resources. Now we have an app, or at least a soon to be released app from the TPet Team. I was asked to test a version of the app last week and I have since spent some time playing with it. As I was testing I was looking for bugs and glitches , but there weren’t any that I could see. Pages turned smoothly, buttons behaved, screens rendered very quickly and search boxes delivered as they should. Perhaps I had missed something.

This app is effectively a regularly updated index of thousands of useful and essential classroom resources.But then so is their website. However, I am struck by how much more natural it feels to flick and browse through these on a tablet. For regular iPad and IOS users like myself it feels so much less like work to pick up the iPad on the sofa and skim through for a space poster or writing targets , rather than powering up the ageing laptop or PC. Yes there is so much here, but the app still feels clean and tidy with lots of white space and not a hint of advertising or distraction. I think I’d like to see a similar app offering from the TES Resource bank and the collected works of Pie Corbett and then I may not have to power up my computer very often at all.

Download the app from here