My Favorite App...

There are so many apps out in the world that help us to do just about anything that you want to do!  It is truly hard to pick just one, however when I was practicing my flipped classroom with students over the years, there is one app that I wouldn't have been able to do without -- Explain Everything.
Explain Everything works in a very similar way that ShowMe does, but comes with more bells and whistles to make it a teacher's and students' best friend.

Explain Everything allows you to record your writing and speaking in small chunks, so that if you mess up, you don't have to redo your whole video.  It then takes each of those little chunks and stitches them together into one video.  And my absolute favorite part of Explain Everything is how you get your movie.  You can send it to your camera roll, directly to YouTube, or Dropbox, Google Drive (my personal fav), and the list goes on and on.  It will connect to just about any platform that you could be using.

I would offer this as an alternative for formative assessments with students.  I would simply give them an iPad with Explain Everything on it and tell them to show me what they know.  I did learn the hard way that it's good to give a time limit, otherwise you could get an chatty student who makes you a 10 - 20 minute video.  I usually capped it at 5 minutes.  It was a great way to hear in the student's voice of what they actually understood and misconceptions stood out.  You could understand the depth that they knew by how much detail they went into to explain the concept.  Since I only had 5 iPads in my room (we were not 1:1), I had each of them logged into the same Google account and had the students upload their videos into a shared folder, making it easy for me to access and grade.

Even though it's not a free app, at $2.99, it's well worth it.

3-D Printing from NASA

3-D Printing never ceases to amaze me.  And quite frankly, I hope it never does.  I'm totally fascinated by the videos on YouTube about 3-D printed arms.  Have you seen this one featuring Iron Man?

It gets me every time.

3-D printing can make amazing impacts on people's lives, but as an educator sometimes it's difficult to figure out ways to incorporate it into our classroom in relevant ways.  Never fear, NASA is here!  NASA has recently released 3-D printer files of great space related artifacts.  This can be a great way to incorporate 3-D printers into a space or math unit.  You can discuss scale and examine what some of these space artifacts look like up-close without having to schedule a field trip to a museum.

Check out all that they offer at http://nasa3d.arc.nasa.gov/models/printable.  We printed the wrench they sent up to the space station and it turned out great.

Opening Doors...

I came across a really eye-opening article in this month's NSTA Reports titled, "Drifters Take Students on Scientific Ocean Journey."  It's a fantastic read about a geometry teacher who is not letting his subject confine him to only teaching right angles.  This teacher has an obvious passion for science and technology because he has his students design, test, launch and track devices on the ocean.
Being from land-locked Iowa, I am immediately jealous that he has the opportunity to offer this experience to his students and that he wasn't my geometry teacher.
I wish more teachers would open their definitions of what their subject could contain.  Science and engineering are such important life skills that transfer and could breathe life into any subject.  I wish that you have your administration's support not to be confined by the textbook or the test.  And, then maybe, finally we can answer the question student question of "When will I use math in real-life?"
I would highly encourage you to read this article and check out the work that these students are doing at studentdrifters.org.   Plus, if you go there, you can learn from their experience, they've even posted lesson plans - Bonus!

#teacherslovefreebies