PLAY and PLN

After an inspiring PLAYDATE13 teacher created conference in February, the teachers at my school have been continuing the learning in a similar exploration setting. We have committed to a once a month mini-PLAYDATE in which we pick one technology tool to explore together. We started with Twitter and we have established "Twitter Tuesday" with teachers and students tweeting, this month we moved onto book creation.

The group gathered and explore two big ideas in book creation: teacher creation for students and student book creation. We used Meg Wilson's book creation reccommendations to start. All of the paid app book creators were very generous to give codes so our teachers could test out the apps in our session. Teachers spent time working in pairs or groups to explore how these apps and see how they could best be utilized in our classrooms. Here are the results from our exploration. The big winners were Book Creator and Story Creator.



Having a group of teachers learn together has been a refreshing change from our usual staff meetings. The mini-PLAYDATE has a book club feel with a technology slant. It is teacher driven and teacher inspired. We already know that next month we will be looking at movie making. Have you thought about asking teachers to learn together in your school? We would be happy to Google Hangout with other likeminded teachers if you are up for it. Will we see you in April?

Class Flipsnack of Lab Reports

I blogged before about using Flipsnack to create digital books of student work to share student work. One of my goals with technology is to allow students to see and share their work with each other easily. Flipsnack is helping with sharing! I have created a digital book of the students' lab reports from a class water cycle investigation. I put the digital book as an embedded file on my homepage so students can individually locate it on my class website and see each others hypothesis, data collection and conclusion!

Check it out, this is three page preview or click here to the full "book!"

Using Flipsnack for Virtual Books

After working with my students using applications like Mental Note to create multimedia science journals I wanted to venture into using the student work to create an e-portfolio for individual student's work using the website Flipsnack. Flipsnack.com allows for any document that is a PDF to be transfer onto the site and combined into a virtual book with selected backgrounds. Each book can be downloaded, emailed, embedded, tweeted or posted to Facebook. I really appreciate all the ways to share the work!

Because almost any iPad app that has email capabilities then has the possibility to be turned into a PDF using the print function, it makes almost anything Flipsnack-able. The flipsnack books are also special because they do not require flash, so even as they are created with a bit of a work around from iPad to computer, they are easily viewed on iPads.

For easy viewing, embed these books to your homepage for your students to view. I also decided to take one project and put all the student work into a project book. This allows for students to see how others attempted and worked on the same project, which could lend well to student getting and giving feedback.

Here are a few key features to making a Flipsnack book:

On the Flipsnack.com site you can easily upload PDF files from both URLs or from files you have saved, even from places like dropbox!



This next section allows you to personalize the book background. I also checked the "merge all documents into one" to have a bit more flow to the book.



Check out my two Flipsnack books I made using some student samples. I really think a cool project would be a class comic book using Kabaam.