Edmodo is a one-stop shop for all of your classes. The highlight of Emodo's learning management system is that it presents a clean, familiar design for teachers and students. Teachers can set up multiple classes and can connect and share documents, assessments, etc. from the iPad app or web-based interface. Any teacher can also assign and create small group projects directly in his or her Edmodo page. This allows both teachers and students to stay organized in one place and follow along with the progress of individual and group activities. Edmodo also connects teachers directly to their Google Drive for quick transfer of documents. Overall, Edmodo gets a lot of good reviews from both teachers and students. Plus, parents like this option because they can monitor what the class is doing, receive updates and stay up to date with assignments and projects. And the best part about Edmodo: it's free.
While some may argue that there are better options -- and free options -- out there, I find, along with many of my students, that Notability is the go-to application for note taking. One of the primary reasons I like this app is because of the workflows that teachers and students can create in order to retrieve, annotate and submit work. Plus, Notability integrates Dropbox, Google Drive and Box drive. If teachers set up a shared folder with their class via Google Drive, students can access their documents, annotate them and push them back to their teacher via a privately shared folder. In other words, this is a big step toward the paperless classroom. Also, students can open PDFs from any website in Notability and annotate directly on the PDF. The ShowMe application is a dynamic presentation and creation application that is free. ShowMe provides an iPad app and a web-based interface for accessing the ShowMe database as well as your own presentations. This application integrates at all levels of Bloom's Taxonomy and allows teachers an opportunity to create lessons, remediation options and accessible references for student review. There are so many ways that teachers can incorporate this dynamic tool across grade levels and content areas. And again, it comes free. Whether or not you are a Google apps for education school, Google Drive is a great place for students to begin learning how to use the cloud as well as archive and access their work in multiple places. Plus, Google Drive for the iOS has recently launched the ability to collaborate with other users on a document or spreadsheet in real time. Users can also upload (and download) photos and videos directly from their iOS device and save them in the cloud. Students can use this application to work on a collaborative project in school, take notes, and then access that same document or spreadsheet from any computer that boasts an Internet connection. |