Appfinity

Technology as excited learning

For the last three weeks in my freshman high school classroom, life has been sans Apple TV. And it makes me sad. Weeping, wailing, gnashing on the inside kind of sad. The girl who professed eternal fidelity to the outgoing doc cam is now reconsidering her pledge. Doc cams, sure, enable the instructor or a volunteering student to mark the text or write margin notes on a piece of paper so that the rest of the class can observe and depending on the day either copy or critique. A teacher can make double or triple emphasis on a portion of a textbook or handout by placing it under the camera, then adjusting the focus and light and position and swallowing back a more forceful reaction at the sight of a two-foot version of her hand projected on the whiteboard (why didn't I repaint my nails last night?) as students either watch the board alone or attempt a here-then-there glancing between their own text and the image.


But with Apple TV it's all different. You know what you can use on those screens? Apps. Loads of 'em. Here are three that I'm especially pining (and currently unable) to try in my classroom.


Rory's Story Cubes.

This app is freshmen friendly because of its game-like appearance anchored with a more teacher-satisfied interface between image and word. Students think that they are playing a game in which they roll virtual dice that give them a series of images (stars, planes, crossroads, parachute), but the wily instructor knows that these innocuous pictures provide an especially fun, once a week warm up that nudges students to make connections between what they imagine in one medium (picture) with what resources they have in another (word). And the genre is completely up to the teacher! Will students be asked to write a story based on the images—or a poem? a summary of a recently read text? The options are endless.


Cultiwords.

This app is all about how the teacher uses it. One part SAT vocabulary study and one part Friday night word game, I envision this app being used slightly less frequently than the story cubes just to make sure that it doesn't begin to feel like sugar-coated discouragement. The words in the app are difficult (unctuous, cajole, anecdote), but the savvy instructor can create a team-powered game in which students aren't left to their individual funds of knowledge to construct their best or most educated guesses about meanings. Why not use this vocab to craft a word wall in the classroom so that students get even more familiar with the advanced words? Most creative use of a Cultiword in a paper or other assignment gets their name on the word wall alongside the word made that much more accessible to themselves and their classmates.


OmniGraffle.

This is my favorite. Pictures, stories, and competitive vocabulary are all good and well, but organization? That's where it's at for this English teacher. OmniGraffle touts itself as keeping content "gorgeously understandable." Swoon. It doesn't get much better than getting students excited about owning the content we want them to organize in a properly academic and logical fashion. The app allows for multiple visual work boards, from old timey parchment to colorful interconnected bubbles and everything in between. This is also a painfully expensive purchase so unlike with the other two apps, this one would be a whole-class purchase only. I can see myself using this app to facilitate a class discussion on how best to organize a text's plot; how academic and content words are etymologically related; how to construct an effective argument for a paper; and everything (and I mean everything) else in the world. I seriously believe this app could be a major step toward turning freshmen into compulsive organizers.


Now, about getting that Apple TV back in my classroom...