Category: Publications

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Students Publish “Tech Tips for Teachers”

Book cover - Tech Tips for Teachers

Here’s our final course showcase iBook – Tech Tips for Teachers – available free at iTunes. You can see our book as a PDF: Tech Tips for Teachers 14mb pdf.

In their first lesson students were introduced to Adobe Spark post and asked to design a meme and use it in a post on our WordPress blog. Both apps were new to them, but there was no direct instruction. Only short YouTube videos to guide them. By lessons 11 and 12 – they were split into teams and given three apps for creating the product. They worked in teams to figure out the app and then report back to the class on it’s utility. Afterwards each student picked one of the apps to produce the product and explain it’s pros and cons. 

Students were asked to pick an app and design a showcase chapter for this book. We used iBooks Author to create both the multi-touch book and PDF version. Chapters are in roughly the order we used the apps in class.  

  1. Michael Birkhead: Adobe Spark Post
  2. Nick Krautscheid: Google Apps
  3. Margaret Buzard and Melissa Sta. Maria: MyMaps + Google Forms
  4. Madison Hughes and Bridget Ponzetti: Padlet
  5. Jordyn Geenty and Kiana Okino: TedEd
  6. Lauren Yount and Dylan Hite: EdPuzzle
  7. Laura Barros / Hanna Knouf: Toontastic
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Fight Fake News with Critical Thinking

Lessons in Critical Thinking is now available free at iTunes. It includes critical thinking lessons in science, math, literature and media literacy.

During our discussion of digital literacy and “Fake News,” we realized that our middle and high school level students need more practice in the critical evaluation of information. Using some of our favorite edtech tools, we developed six engaging lessons which promoted critical thinking skills in a variety of content areas. Then, using iBooks Author, we compiled the lessons into this iBook .

For more work by this fine class visit our students page.

Student-designed critical thinking lessons include:

  1. Dihydro-What? Science Lesson by Kristen Turner
  2. Using TV Ads to Teach Persuasive Writing by Jennifer Upchurch
  3. The Choice is Yours: integrating a “choose your own adventure” into math class by Eli McElroy and Tamalin Salisbury
  4. How to Read Between the Lines of Research by Hannah O’Brien
  5. Do You Believe It To Be True Or False? by Jeremy Jon Reyes Pingul
  6. Civically Sublime by Kurt Anderson, Bekah Kolb, Ryan Greenberg