This post first appeared on Edudemic.

Rapidly approaching the dog days of summer (give or take a few days or weeks), I felt a need to share a power packed suitcase of tools that could be used to archive your summer highlights and memories. Many educators never really go on vacation. While they may appear to be leisurely sipping daiquiris on the beach, let’s be realistic… their brains are constantly running, reflecting, and mentally archiving away ideas for the next school year. To meet both the recreational and curricular needs of educators, I have concocted a special blend of FREE web tools and apps, highlighting both extracurricular as well as instructional integrations for each. Hopefully, these tools will exceed your souvenir quota and prove to be true digital treasures for the 2014-2015 school year as well.

iOS Only

Bubbli

Create 360 panoramic bubbles of the sights and sounds of places you visit that others can explore by clicking on a shared link.

• Recreational: Share 360 views of your favorite destinations in a weekend photo challenge. (Examples)
• Curricular: Compose a 360 bubble of a classroom remodel to share with parents and the community. (Example)

Photo Mapo

Transform photos into mapped masterpieces.

• Recreational: Blend textual anecdotes, pics, and actual maps of places you visit. (Explore this post for user examples)
• Curricular: Create Augmented Reality postcards detailing facts about countries and landmarks, research habitats and compose a digital artifact, or document a field study (in Swedish).

Flowboard

Create an interactive photo album.

• Recreational: Explore 10 Places to Visit Before You Die and Summer 2012 Photo Album
• Curricular: Create a Flowboard to highlight renewable resources.

Bill Atkinson PhotoCard

Send a digital postcard with text, photos, and even links.

• Recreational: Everyone enjoys receiving postcards… whether it be by snail mail or electronic. While most postcard apps allow users to share only one photo, consider sharing additional travel photos with friends and family via a Photo Stream link which can easily be pasted into the text portion of a digital postcard.
• Curricular: Descriptive Writing, Imaginative Stories, Reflective Writing, and Physics Challenges using digital postcards.

Strip Designer

Create a comic of your adventures.

• Recreational: Create a comic to reflect and share your learning and experiences from an event. (Example using Comic Life)
• Curricular: Use comics to recreate a chapter of a book as a graphic novel, engage in a pattern hunt, explore a virtual city, display their knowledge of onomatopoeia and vocabulary, explore bat conservation and landforms, and give key figures of the Enlightenment relevance.
• Curated Curricular: Explore 120+ EDU examples integrating comic creation iOS apps.

Device Agnostic

These 4 tools were featured in a recent post, “5 Tools for the Device Agnostic Classroom”. While they clearly have sound curricular connections, they can also be extended to transform and archive your multimedia memories into a digital depot that can be shared with friends and family.

Snapguide

Highlight Each Day of a Trip with a Multimedia Guide.

• Recreational: How to Have An Awesome Time in Copenhagen, How to Do the Great Ocean Road from Melbourne in 4 Days, How to Have a Great Vacation in the Pacific NW
• Curated Curricular: Explore 250+ EDU Snapguide examples

Haiku Deck

Publish a Slideshow of Trip Pics and Anecdotes

• Recreational: San Antonio Summer Vacation and My Summer Vacations Haiku Deck
• Curricular: Research Projects and Showcasing a Year in Poems
• Curated Curricular: Explore 3,000 curated examples

Tackk

Create a Multimedia Travelogue!

• Recreational: Vacation in Switzerland, My Roman Holiday, and Hola Espana: Sangrai and Tapas
• Curricular: Share resources for professional development or have students create a Tackk for a particular research topic or presentation.

Thinglink

Augment a Photo, Map, or Collage!

• Recreational: Places I’ve Been Interactive Collage, Trip to Rome Travelogue,Trip to Rome Augmented Itinerary, Tropical Vacation with Soundbytes
• Curricular: Explore Liberty and Famous Structures of the World or Augmented Global Impact of the Cold War
• Curated Curricular: Explore 500+ EDU Thinglink examples

As the true intent of these applications is to blend engaging extracurricular artifacts of summer with ideas for integrating these digital gems all year long, let the learning and sharing continue all summer long. Share your digital creations with your social and personal learning network and keep the learning rolling all summer long and beyond.

To learn more from Lisa Johnson, you can hear her at the July 28-30 EdTechTeacher Summit. She will also be teaching a three day iPad Classroom workshop in Austin, TX this August. Lisa Johnson is also the author of the TechChef4u blog and curates multiple ed tech and technology integration resources on her popular Pinterest boards. 

This post first appeared on Free Technology for Teachers.

The year may be winding down, but you still have your students for a few more precious weeks of school. If you have access to iPads in your classroom, a great end of the year activity with your students is to make pictures talk, create animations that anthropomorphize objects, or use personification to demonstrate understanding. It’s actually a great activity anytime of the year. You can create with your students and keep them engaged and learning right up until the last day.

Two fantastic sets of apps for creating talking pictures on iPads are ChatterPix / ChatterPix Kids and YakIt / YakIt Kids ($.99). With both sets, the non-kid versions provide additional sharing features such as uploading to e-mail and social media sites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, while the “kid” versions only save to the Camera Roll.

ChatterPix Kids & ChatterPix

ChatterPix Kids and ChatterPix from Duck Duck Moose are simple, elegant, and useful apps. Both allow students to take a picture or use an image saved to the camera. With a swipe of their finger, students can draw a mouth on any image. There is one button to press to record, and the mouth then animates with the recording.

Features:

• 30 seconds to record.
• Add stickers, frames, or text.
• Send movie to the camera roll.

YakIt Kids & YakIt

YakIt Kids and YakIt from Freak’nGenius are similar to ChatterPix Kids but have a few more features which make them slightly more complicated to use but add more to the final product.

These apps have the same features as ChatterPix Kids and ChatterPix plus:

• Several different types of mouths. Spend a little time aligning the points of the mouth and chin to create an interesting effect.
• More stickers. Create different types of faces on imported objects.
• Change the pitch of the voice. Instead of a standard recording, make some audio tweaks. While this may seem like a very simple change, I have found that being able to change the voice brings out more from our introverted students.
• Multiple scenes. Rather than just one taking image, string together several different talking pictures.

Since all of these apps save to the camera roll, they are great for app smashing or building and blending with other apps to create something that exceeds the possibilities of just one app.

Here are some examples:

Face On Coins Booth + ChatterPix Kids

Garageband + YakIt + iMovie

Creating talking pictures or animations offer amazing possibilities in the classroom. These two apps are so easy to use, students can complete a simple project in a short amount of time or make more complex projects that can lead to collaborative videos, ebooks, or websites. Not only are these apps fun for students, but they also allow them to think, create and demonstrate understanding.

To learn more about teaching with iPads and other technologies, EdTechTeacher will running Summer Workshops this summer in Austin, Berkeley, Cambridge, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Samantha will also be presenting at the July 28-30 EdTechTeacher Summit.

What do Texas, California, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Illinois, Iowa, and Ontario have in common? We had workshops or presentations in all of them this week!  Shawn McCusker and Greg Kulowiec continued our Summer Workshop Series in Chicago with The iPad Classroom. Then Tom Daccord led Teaching History with Technology at the end of the week, and Samantha Morra led The Flipped Classroom & Innovative Instruction. Next week we have 4 workshops in Chicago and 4 workshops in Cambridge. Space is limited, but still available, so find the right workshop for you this summer at edtechteacher.org/summer.

Aside from our Summer Workshops, EdTechTeacher instructors traveled to a number of other summer events:

• Beth Holland was in Lafourche, Louisiana to kick off a new Full Year Program.
• Lisa Johnson delivered the Keynote, “Cooking Up a New Recipe for Learning” at TIC2014 in Dubuque, Iowa followed by three hands on break out sessions.
• Carl Hooker’s iPadalooza drew edtech leaders from across the country, including EdTechTeacher’s Tom Daccord and Lisa Johnson, for 3 days of keynotes, hands on workshops, and even an APPmazing Race! Check out the most popular sessions.
• Holly Clark presented on Digital Portfolios at iPad Schools, a 3 day retreat for school leader teams to explore solutions for integrating technology into their schools.
• Doug Kiang was also in California at Hillview in Menlo Park and spent two days teaching iTunesU.
• Lisa Dabbs is at EdCamp OC in Santa Ana, CA raffling off a Chromebook from us today!

ETT Summit Update

Pre-Conference workshops are filling up! Tom Daccord will now join Justin Reich for Leading towards Learning Futures: School Leadership and Technology Integration. To keep up with the demand, Greg Kulowiec is now working with Samantha Morra in Google Apps Integration & Advanced Workflow Scenarios for Middle and High School. Space still available in all of these hands on workshops:

• Advanced Topics in iPad Integration with Shawn McCusker
• Google Apps Integration & Advanced Workflow Scenarios for Middle and High School with Greg Kulowiec and Samantha Morra
• Using Google Apps to Redefine the Elementary Classroom with Holly Clark
• Day of Code with Douglas Kiang
• Creativity & Curation with iPads in the Middle and High School Classroom with Patrick Larkin
• Leading towards Learning Futures: School Leadership and Technology Integration with Justin Reich and Tom Daccord
• Creating Learning Centers in the Elementary Classroom with Beth Holland

Summer Workshop Agendas

We publish all of our Summer Workshop resources under the Creative Commons license. These sites are full of great resources, and we are happy to share. All workshops agendas are linked from our Course Catalog.

• The iPad Classroom Chicago - with Shawn McCusker and Greg Kulowiec
• Teaching History with Technology Chicago - with Tom Daccord
• The Flipped Classroom & Innovative Instruction Chicago - with Samantha Morra

These sessions – and more – will be repeated in other cities this summer, and we still have space available. Find dates and locations on our Master Schedule.

Articles from the EdTechTeacher Team and Guest Bloggers

Just in case you missed some of our more recent posts, here they are!

• A Solution To The Cross Platform Classroom Problem – Guest Post from Jennifer Carey
• The Global Search for Education: Which Digital Device Is Best? – via Carl Hooker
• A Look At Using 3D Pens In The Classroom – Guest Post from Martha Slack
• Thinking About The R In SAMR – from Patrick Larkin
• Why (& How) to Teach Coding in your Classroom? – from Kate Wilson
• iPad Hieroglyphics- from Greg Kuloweic
• Photo Mapo for Archiving Summer- from Lisa Johnson
• The Future of Learning- from Beth Holland

Other Great Resources

• History resources: We have given a facelift to our Teaching History with Technology website. Check out the Resource of the Week!
• “I want my students to….” Read? Write? Present? Find apps for any device rated by the EdTechTeacher team and organized by Learning Activities.
• Do you know what GAFE is and how to use it? Check out our Google Apps for Education section for more information.

Connect with Us This Summer!

Now we have even more ways to connect! Tag your Tweets, Instagrams, Google+ and Facebook posts with #ettipad, #ettsummit, and #ettsummer to connect with us and others!

1. Sign up for Weekly Blog Updates (right side) - get a digest of our posts delivered to your inbox
2. Follow Us on Twitter @EdTechTeacher21
3. Like us on Facebook
4. Join us on Google+
5. See us in action on Instagram
6. Watch great videos on Vimeo and YouTube

This post first appeared on Edutopia.

We have always struggled to envision the future, often superimposing new technology over our current views. Remember the Jetsons? Though they lived in a futuristic society marked by flying cars and advanced technology, the students still learned in a lecture-based system with the teacher (albeit a robot one) directing the process from the front of the room. The challenge of imagining the future of learning can seem daunting. However, snapshots already exist. We just need to look beyond our current classrooms to identify some of the key tenets for our learning environments of the future.

In the future, students could learn in flexible, customizable environments designed to best meet their needs and choose from a virtually unlimited quiver of tools and devices. Teachers could continually assess and adapt curriculum to best support their students. And with ubiquitous access to mobile technology, learning is no longer constrained by an arbitrary time period or even the physical dimensions of a school. In the end, we could create resource-rich, student-centric, active learning environments for our students.

>> Read the Full Article on Edutopia

To learn more from Beth Holland, she will be presenting at the July 28-30 EdTechTeacher Summit in Chicago and leading a number of Summer Workshops.

This post first appeared on Free Technology for Teachers.

While gathering resources to share with campus teachers, I stumbled upon the Photo Mapo app and quickly added it to my list of tools for summer archival. The intent was to provide a repository of tools and applications that educators could utilize in the midst of their staycations and vacations that could also be extended to the classroom. Photo Mapo is a FREE app that does just that.

Applications for Recreation

Transform your photos into mapped masterpieces with textual anecdotes, pics, and actual maps of places you visit. While map styles and formats change, each Photo Mapo masterpiece can include a photo, a textual blurb, and a map highlighting location data. As much of my summer is devoted to speaking engagements and delivering professional learning app-ortunities to educators, I thought it only fitting to include a sample to promote one of these events, The EdTechTeacher Summit, where I will be leading an exploration of S.A.S.S.Y. SAMR.

Applications for the Classroom

Research origins of famous people, historical figures, or events, and create a Photo Mapo to capture content in a visual manner. Consider assembling all student-created Photo Mapos in Book Creator FREE and add audio narration to create a historical travel guide or class travelogue. Take app-smashing to the next level and use Photo Mapo to create Augmented Reality postcards detailing facts about countries and landmarks. Visit EngageTheirMinds.com for additional classroom integration ideas for this little digital gem. Truly, the instructional app-lications are endless. Imagine using this app with World Language students to practice contextual vocabulary in different languages or English teachers mapping the travels of a character from a novel. For more inspiration, scroll through Photo Mapo’s Facebook page.

Lisa Johnson is the author of the TechChef4u blog and will be keynoting Keystone’s Technology Integration Conference with Richard Byrne June 18th, 2014. To learn more from Lisa Johnson, you can hear her at the July 28-30 EdTechTeacher Summit. She will also be teaching a three day iPad Classroom workshop in Austin, TX this August.