I decided to (attempt to) write a blog post each day that I am at the Discovery Educator Network Summer Institute (DENSI). DENSI is a week that Discovery brings together a hundred or so educators from across the country to learn and share with each other. This is my sixth institute and, as always, I already started a journey of enhancing my understanding of true technology integration yesterday.
Our day was short – checkin was at 3:00, but we still had a lot of time to sit and visit with each other. Before checkin began, Judy Uhrig and I started talking about her news stories and I shared an app with her called TouchCast. TouchCast is a simple way to create news casts that look like real news shows. Adding names, tickers, and images is very simple and with one touch, you can begin a live newscast while it records. I created this TouchCast the first time I tried it out.
Later in the evening, I also shared a time-waster called Thisissand. This app probably doesn’t have a use in the classroom, other than a calming influence on those students who need to have something in their hands in order to focus. However, I was at a conference talking to Hall Davidson once, and he came up with a great use – start the app at the beginning of a conference session. At the end of the conference session, the size of the sand art you have created is a measure of how good the session is. You will just have to decide whether you will add sand to it for each thing you learn or whether a large piece of art means you were so bored that you played with Thisissand the whole time. Here is one of mine from a session I attended – I won’t tell you which way I did it:
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
