Dan’s top ten ways to use the iPhone at school

At best, this post is only applicable to those with smart phones, but is really meant for those with iPhones. To those of you without smart phones this post might enlighten you as to some of the potential of a smart phone. The iPhone 5 pictured here has more computing power then the iMac also pictured here. The iMac cost around $1500 in 2000 and the iPhone 5 can be had for around $200 in certain instances.

These are not necessarily in order of my favorites.

1. Remote Mouse is an app I use to turn my phone into a mouse so I can plug my computer into the LCD projector and stay mobile.

2. I have all my emails sent to my phone and I get a notification when I get one to my school account.

3. The Easy Bib scanner(important for a librarian) allows me to scan barcodes and get perfect bibliographic citations which I can then email to myself or students.

4. Accessing Socrative, a web-based instant student assessment and response system. Socrative can be accessed by any device.

5. It's tough being the librarian and stuck as a disorganized 13 year old boy. I use Jotnot Pro (which cost me $0.99) as a scanner to turn all papers I really need to save into a PDF.

6.  I think that more than half of the student body and staff at FHS have an iPhone. I like to connect an Apple TV with a dongle to an LCD projector. With this set up, all of us with iPhones, iPads, and Apple Air's can project wirelessly. This set up will cost your classroom about $125 but can be set up upon request. At the elementary school, you all have it!

7.  I like to use Egg Timer to let students know how much time they have to complete a task. You can also access a stop watch via the iPhone's native Clock app. 

8.  The native Notepad app is a great place to write things down. If you have an iPhone 4S, Siri or Voice-to-Text can be used to take notes with your voice. Also, if you have an iPad your notes will sync between devices.





9. iCal is also terrific. I have my Google Calendar's synced up and when I add an event on my phone it easily syncs between all my devices

10. I use the Reminders app as my to do list. Siri works with reminders and can easily set them. For example, when I am driving I can ask Siri to remind to do a task when I arrive at work or home since my Phone knows where "Work" and "Home" is!

Nearpod and Tools4Students - 2 Great iPad Apps

I couldn't decide which of these apps I liked better so I decided to tell you about both. Nearpod is an app that allows you to synchronize all the iPads in your classroom. So if you had a presentation of website you wanted to share with your students, all at once, you could do that. You can use it with any grade level. It has some pre-made presentations that you can choose them that include videos, quizzes and links to websites. You can also add your own quiz, poll, or video and see the results immediately. It is free and amazingly simple to use. Watch the short video (1 1/2 min) below to get an idea of what this app can do but be sure to visit the website to get the full picture. 

The second app is Tools for Students, an app with tons of templates that students can write into right on their iPad. 

Here is a partial list of some of the templates:

There are many other templates such as KWL, Drawing Conclusions, Fact/Opinion, Main Idea?Detail, Begin, Middle, End.

Here is an example of one of the Cause and Effect templates:

Notice that there is a place for the Topic or Book and the page number if using a book.