Melissa Cortese LIS 568 Blog

Educreations is an iOS app that gives educators the ability to record their own videos of what they might put on their blackboards. It's essentially watching a Smartboard video of the educator's own making. This can be great for students who need at home review. Students can access the video at home and take notes at their own pace. What's unique about this recording app is that students can create their own videos too if they have an Apple device. So students and educators can have a community where they share their own educational videos with one another.  When I tried this app out I realized you don't don't have to be a video expert in order to do this. I can just record on my iPad me giving a presentation and using the markers on the screen to add animation to my video and demonstrate a point. While I liked the app a lot I think this is one of the many screen recordings apps that are out there. It does its job and its great but there isn't anything extra...

Quizizz I seen Quizizz used by classroom teachers but not by school librarians and I was interested in this app. This app is free and can be used with any Android or iOS device. This app creates quizzes made by teachers or the students can make quizzes themselves. These quizzes can be shared with the class and scores can be shared as well if the teacher wants it to be shown. There are timers, leaderboards, an application called "teleport" which allows you to take any quiz question and place it into your own. In a school I can use this to make quizzes for my students in a fun and creative way that they will enjoy.  Using this app I was surprised how easy and quick it was to make a quiz on it. I can also customize the feedback on each answer that is wrong and explain to the student why their answer was wrong. I can even see a report on who got which question wrong the most and least. I tested it out with a couple of my family members and the report seemed to generate f...

Farfaria is an app that is essentially a digital library that holds over one thousand books for children and it keeps growing. Children can pick from any genre to read and the great thing about these books is that children can either read it or even have it read to them as an audiobook. There are even some ebooks available in Spanish but the selection is small. There is even a sing-along section for some books as well. There are different “lands” that the student can choose from such as “fairytale falls” and “bedtime bluffs” that has different genres of books on each land. This makes the experience more interactive for the children and more engaging for them to be able to choose the books they want. The price for the app is the first month is free then every month its $4.99. For a lifetime subscription its $74.99. There is even an option for teachers who can buy it for $20.00 per device a year or buy it for $350.00 per classroom for a year or $1,500 for the entire school per yea...

This is the first technology tool I used for this class. I picked this tool because it was free and was voted the most innovated iPad app of 2015 by Apple. I also liked this app because I can see myself using it with students in a school library someday. The app allows the user to download Word files, PowerPoint, PDFs or webpages to the app. Once downloaded the user can can highlight passages, add notes, dragging out text and collaborating and sharing with others so they can add their own notes. This would be especially useful for peer reviewing and instead of printing out papers, the students can review each others papers by using this app. I can see school librarians and classroom teachers using this tool for not only students using to peer review but to grade papers too. Students can also use this with reading assignments as well by highlighting the themes of a passage and the main ideas. After the user is done correcting, reviewing or revising the paper, they can upload it t...