Mission US and Think Fast App

First of all, HAPPY NEW YEAR! If you check in to my blog often, thank you for following my posts this year. I hope they have helped you add technology to your classroom in a meaningful way. I have several new projects in the pipeline for the upcoming year, but I will continue to share my techKNOW with you as much as possible. Each time I take on something new, I just consider my classroom getting bigger. As I begin facilitating online courses through WVLearns, I hope to continue to share my love for connecting teachers with technology and opportunities with even more educators!

That being said...here's a great interactive website for social studies that you can use to engage your students when you come back from your winter break! Mission US has a video game vibe that sends you on a journey through history. Students get to "choose their own adventure" as they play one of two quests. "Crown or Colony" follows the trials of an apprentice in Boston around the time of the Revolutionary War. Students will learn about American Revolution events and landmarks as they help Nate make decisions about which side to join in the war. If you teach the American Revolution, introducing this to your students is a must!

"For Crown or Colony" is the original interactive created by Mission US. More recently they have added the second one, "Flight to Freedom!" This one centers around slave Lucy King and her path to freedom. It has the same choose your own adventure aspect as "For Crown or Colony," only students learn about life on a plantation and escape on the Underground Railroad.

In both games, students earn badges as an incentive for completing tasks and collect "smartwords" (vocabulary highlighted in each mission). To keep a log of your progress and to continue your games at another time, you and your students can create accounts (neither of which require you to submit an e-mail account). There are also educator guides for each mission as well.

Mission US also has a free app (both for iPad and Android) called Think Fast. It is basically two separate true and false quizzes that test you on the historical facts from "For Crown or Colony" and "Flight to Freedom." Since it's free, you have nothing to loose, and your students may enjoy racing against the clock to test their knowledge. Other that that...EH, there's not much to it! The Mission US website, however, it a fantastic way to put your students in the role of a historical figure!

http://www.mission-us.org/
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mission-us-think-fast!-about/id566607316?mt=8

APP Time: Haiku Deck

Move over, PowerPoint! You, too, Keynote!

And Prezi...I never liked you anyway, so peace out.

This has to be the easiest way ever to make a slideshow presentation, hands down. I love it, I love it, I love it. Haiku Deck, a FREE app, lets you make simple presentations in record time. Now...can you add bullets and transitions and all that other presentation mumbo jumbo that you think you need to display information? Nope...but you know what? After you use Haiku Deck to share information with your students or have them use it to display what they have learned, you'll realize how much more you can do with less.

The concept behind Haiku Deck is that you use fewer images (one picture per slide, actually) and short phrases and sentences to tell your story. You tap on the slide to start typing your text. Then, to add a background picture...well, you have your pick of images to choose from. Haiku Deck will use the text you have entered to suggest images, or you can search for them by keyword. There are oodles of pictures, beautiful pictures, licenced by Creative Commons, to choose from. In addition to using the pictures on Haiku Deck, you can use ones you already have on your iPad camera roll to make your presentation more personal.

You can showcase your presentations with an Apple TV or VGA cable directly from your iPad, just as you would Keynote. Just swipe your finger across the screen to move on to the next slide! To share your Haiku Deck creations online, just create an account with your e-mail. By doing so, you can access your presentations online via the Haiku Deck website. Once your creations are available in your gallery, you can set the privacy level to your presentations (that way if you have students who create work you would rather not share publicly, you can set it to private).You can e-mail your presentations to yourself - and they will automatically convert to a PowerPoint presentation or Keynote. You can also embed them into a blog or share on Edmodo, although it's a little tricky to get it to show up just right. I've created a Haiku Deck on my grant writing tips, which you can view on the right side of this blog. However, that's been the only place (and size) I've been able to stick it.

Download Haiku Deck (you have nothing to loose, or pay) and play around with it. The simplicity of it will engage your students. They could easily use this app to share anything from poetry to a short report about a region of the United States. The next few weeks until Winter Break are as good a time as ever to try something new!

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/haiku-deck/id536328724?mt=8
http://www.haikudeck.com/
http://www.haikudeck.com/p/y4fJV0Zvf2/grant-writing-tips