Rumor has it!

Well it is true IOS 7 will be out this fall, but rumor has it, it will be out June 26, 2013. I have checked it out and it looks pretty awesome! I just hope they get it out before school starts so the kids (mainly teachers) can get familiar with it from day one!

IOS 7 video

To save, to grade and to share.....oh my! PART 2

 After posting about how my class shared their iPad projects a teacher friend from Roland with iPads found this post about another sharing resource.  I personally have not checked it out, but I will be looking into before we go back to school. Let me know if you have used it.





Your perfect solution for Sharing Student iPad Projects

It may be a lot of work but it is WORTH it! Creating ePub Documents!

Creating an ePub document takes a lot of strange steps at first, but once you set it up, you can turn any webpage into an epub document and store it in iBooks.

I found this very helpful this summer as I took a class which required a lot of online reading. Sometimes the ads on the sides get distracting, so I would ePub them and read them in iBooks.

For your students, this is a great way to have them find online articles about topics they are researching and get rid of all the extra distractions. They will also be able to highlight and use the features of iBooks.

From webpage to iBooks......

 

Follow the directions below to set up your iPad to create ePub Documents. Once you set it up, you only have to click button to ePub it! 

(As long as you have the ePub bookmark, you never have to follow these steps again!)

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B06hCWqHWIGPdFJMeUhSOUFwT3M/edit?usp=sharing

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To save, to grade and to share.....oh my!

To save, to grade and to share.....
One of our biggest challenges this year with the ipads was sharing projects and assignments. Students need a place to save projects and a way to share with their parents and their teachers.

Saving was easy..... the ipad saves all projects automatically without even hitting a save button.
Since all our District's ipads are associated with one iTunes account, saving to the "cloud" was not an option for us.

    

WebDav

We tried Webdav. It seemed promissing. While on the school's network, students and teachers could access and upload files of all types to share their work and teachers could grade......
Down fall #1 ......since it can be accessed by everyone, changes and deletions can be made by everyone. We did find a few ways to make it more secure but it was still out there for the whole district to access. 
Down fall #2........since everyone can see, it would be unethical to give students feedback and grades.
Down fall #3 .......if students did not take ipad home (about 50% of our students), they could not share projects with their families or complete   
                                              homework.

Solution #1:

Edmodo

Edmodo was what really began to shape my "paperless" classroom. I am able to give assignments, quizzes, polls and students can submit assignments privately to the teacher or create class discussions, like Facebook. Students can access Edmodo on all mobile devices and computer on the internet, so student can complete homework.  Although I did not use the parent part of Edmodo this year, next school year, we will use Edmodo as our main tool for home and school communication with the private messaging and calendar.




Solution #2:

DropBox

Although Dropbox was a little more of a chore to set up than Edmodo, in the last few weeks of school, we created an account for each student. They were then able to save all of their work to the Dropbox "cloud" and send a link to their teacher to grade it. Our students do not have access to email outside emails, like their parents, but with the Drop box account, they can log on anywhere and have access to assignments and projects to edit or share.