App Share in the Library with faculty from @the_school

These were the things shared by faculty who attended the App Share in the Library this afternoon:

LetterReflex – shared by Joyce Tsang (@jyc_nyc)

Does your child get his b’s and d’s mixed up? How about her p’s and q’s? LetterReflex provides a fun way to help overcome common letter reversals. The first activity, Tilt It, uses kinesthetic learning to teach left from right. The second activity, Flip It, allows them to practice what they learned while honing their letter discrimination skills.

iPevo document camera shared by Gina Marcel (@fpgina) allows anyone to demo stuff on their iPad (until our AppleTV is up and running)

iBooks Author also shared by Gina, though Don Buckley pointed out that when you load a book on iTunes, Apple owns the content.

Available free on the Mac App Store, iBooks Author is an amazing new app that allows anyone to create beautiful Multi-Touch textbooks — and just about any other kind of book — for iPad. With galleries, video, interactive diagrams, 3D objects, and more, these books bring content to life in ways the printed page never could.

FlipBoard shared by Hil Szanto (@hilszanto)

Named Apple’s iPad App of the year and one of TIME’s Top 50 Innovations, Flipboard creates a personalized magazine out of everything being shared with you. Flip through your Facebook newsfeed, tweets from your Twitter timeline, photos from Instagram friends and much more.

iDesk shared by Nadine Renazile (@infobirdie)

iDesk allows you to make flow charts, org charts, Venn diagrams, mind maps, take notes, sketches and do other diagrams with no constraints. Draw a shape, type a text, stylize it choosing from 50+ Fonts.

eClicker also shared by Nadine

eClicker is a personal response system that allows teachers to poll their class during a lesson. It provides teachers with the real-time feedback they need to be sure their messages are being received. Developed for smartphones and laptops, eClicker leverages the hardware already in the hands of many students providing a low cost polling solution for the classroom. All you need to get started is the eClicker Host app running on an iOS device, a Wi-Fi network, and students with internet-enabled devices to participate.

MindNode also shared by Nadine

MindNode is a very easy and intuitive application for collecting, organizing and outlining your thoughts and ideas as mind maps.

Popplet shared by Tabitha Johnson (@tabletj)

Great for work. Great for school. Popplet is a platform for your ideas. Popplet’s super simple interface allows you to move at the speed of your thoughts. With Popplet you can capture your ideas and sort them visually in realtime. Quickly and easily!

Flubaroo also shared by Tablitha

Grade online assessments in a single app (@flubaroo)

Vlingo shared by Don Buckley (@donbuckley)

Looking for a voice powered virtual assistant on your iPhone 3GS or iPhone 4? Look no further. In addition to search, messaging, voice dialing and directions, Vlingo integrates with your Facebook and Twitter accounts making it the most social assistant available. All functionality is now 100% free, so download Vlingo today to explore everything Vlingo can do for you.

Forms shared by Nancy Wong (@scampnyc)

Forms is a client of Google Forms (Google Docs). The Form you created on your PC can be viewed in the most suitable layout for iPhone/iPad.

Corkulous shared by Jenn Dare (@jenn_dare)

Corkulous™ idea board is the incredible new way to collect, organize, and share your ideas. Access your ideas anywhere on your iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch with built-in iCloud support. Share your ideas with your friends and family by storing your cork boards in Dropbox. See the demo video: http://www.corkulous.com/

Hi-5 to @fpgina for organizing another faculty iPad app share this afternoon!

Gina Marcel (@fpgina) hosted our 2nd Faculty iPad share where teachers from The School at Columbia University get together to eat, shmooze, and share iPad apps. Here are some of the ones that were shown:

Toontastic shared by Gina Marcel, K-3 Technology Integrator (@fpgina)

SymmetryShuffle shared by Amy Liebov, Kindergarten Teacher (@AmyLiebov)

SoundLiteracy shared by Ibijoke Akinole, K-2 Learning Specialist

JibJab Jr. Books shared by Tabitha Johnson, K-4 Librarian (@tabletj)

ShowMeApp shared by Aletha Haynes, 2nd Grade Teacher (@ahaynes16)

7Billion shared by Nadine Renazile, 5-8 Librarian (@infobirdie)

CharacterPad shared by Nancy Wong, K-2 Numberacy Liasion (@scampnyc)

Cube it 3D also shared by Nancy Wong

Livescribe and Smartpens in Math for supporting notetaking/alternative assessments/flipped classroom model

I met Ian Bryan (@sensiblecity) at TEDActive. We’d been Twitter contacts for a few months, and I’d attended TEDxDenverEd without fully appreciating his role or his work. (Note: Ian is now organizing TEDxPhiladelphiaEd, and I hope to attend on June 24th.)

On Sensible City’s website, they succinctly state their mission:

Our Work: To advance positive change by giving a powerful voice to the idea whose time has come.
Our Sweet Spot: Helping people converge and collaborate on transformative projects, products, institutions and ideas.

Ian recently introduced me to LiveScribe and the Smartpen. With Ian’s help, my school got hold of a few Echo Smartpens; I placed these in the hands of:

• Don Buckley (@donbuckley), my boss and the Director of Technology
• Nancy Wong (@scampnyc),  K-2 Math Liaison
• Katie Hildebrandt, 6th Grade Math Teacher
• Sabrina Goldberg, 7th Grade Math Teacher.

The Smartpen is like Polyvision’s Eno pen, only with ink. It has a camera at the tip and a microphone in the barrel, so it can simultaneously record everything the pen writes (in a special notebook) and all of the ambient audio. The recorded content is then uploaded to a computer using a cable, though the next version of the pen will be wireless. Additionally, all of your chicken scratches are synced to the audio, so you can later review your notes by scrolling anywhere on the audio’s play bar or anywhere on your writing. The Livescribe system encourages users to “write less and listen more.” Our model of pen is the 8GB Echo Smartpen, which can record up to 800 hours of audio.

David Bell posted a great CNET review of the Livescribe Echo Smartpen. In it, he wrote:

Ultimately, though, any worthwhile idea committed to paper in the digital era needs to find its way onto a computer. Notes get retyped, voice recordings transcribed, drawings scanned, and hours are lost to tedious analog-to-digital conversion.

With the paperless, human-computer singularity still a few decades off, the Echo smartpen has arrived to address the lingering analog/digital dilemma of capturing handwritten notes and voice memos in a convenient digital format.

My goal is for the teachers and the students to share responsibility for taking notes, solving problems, and posting these recordings (or pencasts) to a shared space. Also, students can be recorded verbalizing/demonstrating how they solve a problem, thus tracking their fluency with the language of mathematics and their own understanding of the learning. These pencasts can be assessed and added to the child’s portfolio. I also want the class (and/or our school) to generate a digital archive of pencasts that we can use to catch-up students who miss class for any reason, to empower kids to teach each other, to further the idea of using multiple methods for finding a solution, and to engage students in the learning process.

On the Livescribes site, you can access thousands of pencasts which reminds me of the astonishing collection of resources on the Khan Academy website. Thus, the classroom teacher can create a learning environment that embraces the flipped classroom model – encouraging students to learn at home at their own pace and free up classtime for more meaningful problem solving and projects with the teacher.