a.+Introduction


 * Welcome to ** **"Apps for the Classroom" **

Heard a rumour? ....iPods? ... iPads? ... laptops? ... Yes it is true! School District 68 is going digital.

Want to join our conversations and explore how these tools can be integrated into our classrooms to go beyond just “playing games" and engage our students in creative, multi-modal, critical thinking experiences? Yes! Then come along for the ride. It’s all new, so expect a few bumps along the way, but hang on for a whole lot of excitement as **together** we shift the way we plan, communicate and create!



This site has been created as a starting point. Its intent is to provide support, ideas and suggestions for schools and teachers ready to come along for the ride and jump into the driver’s seat of technology integration; but it is also for those of you who'd rather sit in the passenger seat and take it all in for a while. This site is very young in its development. As we travel down the technology highway together, it is my hope that this site will develop into a place where we can ask the important questions, share ideas, and celebrate our successes.

As a starting point, this wiki brings together in one place - the advice, experience and resources from our global community, but also Coal Tyee's iPod/iPad experiences and reflections from 2010/11.

media type="youtube" key="cXZYbg7wKRQ" height="243" width="391" align="left" There is no question technology is everywhere. In fact, Jason Ohler (2010) suggests, that it "is so embedded in the environment that it's basically invisible to us: We are fish, and tEcosystem is the water" (p. 91). As educators, it is time to examine not just how to incorporate technology, but how to harness its potential to engage and motivate our students in ways that foster creative thinking, problem solving and higher thinking skills to truly prepare our children for a unprecedented digital future. Classrooms and students of the 1960's are no more.

media type="youtube" key="9gH5lBy_gks" height="234" width="384" align="right" As a teacher-librarian, I would be remiss to suggest that books aren’t one of, it not **the**, most essential resources of our trade. But with the integration of mobile devices and apps like [|“iBooks”] into our classrooms, it is not only undoubtly going to change the way books “look” and “feel” but the way we create and share them. Consider this ...



Feeling cautious, perhaps anxious, by the speed and depth in which technology is transforming our lives? Well rest assured, it’s not new, and your not alone. When we look back, societies have experienced these very shifts and emotions throughout history (granted not at the same light speed of our today’s technologies!). Shifting from tablets to scrolls, from hand scribed books to the printing press’ mass production of books, from computers the size of rooms to handheld computers, we are constantly adjusting and shifting with new the emergence of new technologies .... classrooms and teachers included.

Something to ponder...

“We make a lot of the fact that today’s kids have no sense of amazement about the steady stream of innovation that has become a way of life.” They are, according to Marc Prensky (2001), “digital natives” because they grew up digital times. As the digital indigenous, they take their environment for granted. But if they are digital natives, then my friends and I were electromechanical natives when we were growing up ... we no more noticed the appliances in our lives than today’s kids notice the digital gadgets in theirs.” (Ohler, 2010).