Special Blog Assignment Due July 1, 2015

   For this special blog assignment, we were asked to review Dr. Heidi Hayes Jacobs's comments from a workshop at Gulf Shores Elementary School, and to review six things that she has shared on her website in the Clearinghouse section.

iPad Learning Studio
   The iPad Learning Studio is a Google Slides presentation on what is possible using iPads in the classroom. This describes the different ways you can organize your apps on your iPad to accommodate specific subject areas. It provided examples for science, math, history, reading, and photography. It basically organized tools that could be utilized to produce a more productive learning environment through a tablet. The benefits for having this device in the classroom is evident with just reading about it. This presentation also listed links to the apps and their prices.

100 People: A World Portrait
   The second source I chose was 100 People: A World Portrait. This is a website source with information on problems people face throughout the world, varying from famine, drought, war, and education. This site provides statistics on all of the world problems that they talk about. It also provides videos and pictures of these things as well. There are ways for schools and individuals to donate to this cause. It also provides lesson plans for teachers to use in their classrooms to teach their students on global issues. This is a great source for science or social studies to use in project-based learning assignments. It is very enriching.

Visual Thesaurus
   The third source I looked over was Visual Thesaurus. This is a site that provides adjectives to words that you search by providing a word map. Another great source for ELA to use, especially in the elementary and middle school ages. Here is an example of what this program generates.

TechnoTales
   The fourth source I checked out was TechnoTales. This is a wiki page on digital story telling in the classroom. The creator Michael Fisher describes digital story telling as this: "Digital Storytelling is a fantastic way to engage students, teachers, and just about anyone else. There are many different definitions of "digital storytelling," but in general, all of them revolve around the idea of combining the longstanding art of telling stories with any of a variety of available multimedia tools, including graphics, audio, video animation, and Web publishing." His page has resources on making book trailers and video tutorials on how to do your own digital story telling. For the teacher looking to engage their students in reading their class reading assignment, this may just be the ticket you've been waiting for.

Tag Galaxy
   The fifth source I looked at was Tag Galaxy. This is a really cool tool. What you do is you type in a word and the program searches related words or tags that are attached to that word most often. Once it does that, you click on the related word or tag, and it shows you pictures from the internet. Basically, it is another image search engine. The graphics are really cool for this one, so I could definitely see kids wanting to use this all of the time. He are the results for the word "beautiful".

Atlas Curriculum Management System
   The last source I chose to look at was Atlas Curriculum Management System. This is a system ran by Rubicon that allows teachers to share the curriculum being taught in their class with other teachers in different grade levels, subjects, schools, and regions. This is definitely a useful source. It is great to be aware of what students are doing in their other classes. It is also great to be able to compare your curriculum to other schools' curriculums to see if you are teaching at the same pace or not. All I can think of are benefits to this program being used.