Seasonal Haiku Decks

Today, Mrs. Minicozzi came into our room and taught us all about Haiku Deck! 

 In class, we have been talking about topics and details, so this visual app was a fun way to practice these concepts. First, Mrs. Minicozzi gave each student a month of the year and a planning sheet. On the planning sheet, the students wrote their topic and then came up with 4-6 details about that month. Some of the details were national holidays or typical seasonal events. Sometimes students added birthdays. Once the plan was approved, students logged into the class' Haiku Deck account and started creating their slide show. Each detail became a word or phrase and the students looked for a Creative Commons photo to complement the detail.  

Mrs. Yollis published the Haiku Decks on this class blog. The HTML code used was modified to fit. The height was "304" and the width was "480".

Enjoy!
Hint: If you can't see the decks in Chrome, switch to Firefox. 

  

February - Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires


Copy of February - Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires







Nicholas Arena - Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires







May - Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires







June - Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires








July - Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires




August - Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires








September - Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires









October - Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires






November - Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

December - Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

What are some tips for using Haiku Deck? 

Tell us how you changed your slides to make them better! 

How will you use Haiku Deck in the future?

Bill Nye The Science Guy App Review

Guest post by Ms. Neumeyer, our online student teacher from Canada.(Dean Shareski's class) Today Ms. Neumeyer continues her series of iPad app reviews. 

Check out her other reviews! 

Virtual Manipulatives 

Toontastic

Hopscotch 

I don’t know if you have ever heard of Bill Nye- but he was a big part of my learning about and coming to love science. He is an excellent science teacher who really knows how to bring science topics to life for kids through humor and interesting experiments. Here is a picture of this humorous and intelligent guy:

Bill Nye The Science Guy

Disney recently released an app called Bill Nye the Science Guy.  When you first open the app a voice over by Bill Nye exclaims, “You’ve arrived at my desk!” and a desk full of objects is shown.  Users can choose from objects on the desk, such as a rocket, a robot or a sundial, and the app will bring users into a different lesson. There is a huge variety of options to learn from such as: games designed to teach users about the solar system as you take pictures from a rocket, learning about planet Earth’s geological history while digging up a backyard, and cool optical illusions woven into a storyline about alien invasion.

In addition to games, there is also a book of do-it-yourself experiments and the six science experiments require nothing more than everyday household items. Be sure to check out the bobble head. It has interesting science facts to share.

My favourite part about this app is the original videos from the Bill Nye the Science Guy show! A quick tip is that despite the buy button on the right hand side, if a user just taps the video it starts playing.

This app also displays Bill Nye’s typical humour as you can see when you open Bill Nye’s desk drawer and learn when he started wearing bow ties and even how to tie yourself!

Here is a short video of some screenshots I took while trying out this app:

Had you heard of Bill Nye The Science Guy before? 

What part of this app seemed the most interesting to you?

App Review: Hopscotch

Guest post by Ms. Neumeyer, our online student teacher from Canada.(Dean Shareski's class) Today Ms. Neumeyer continues her series of iPad app reviews. 

Check out her other reviews! 

Virtual Manipulatives 

Toontastic

The reason I picked the Hopscotch app to review is that I saw recently that you had been learning about coding using Scratch.  We talked about this tool during my online college class, and it was also designed for kids to learn about coding. I thought it would be perfect to try out!

Welcome to Hopscotch! 

The first step when opening this app is to pick a character (and they sure have some great ones to pick from).

      Then users are given a list of commands on blocks which they can drag into order. The user can choose from a variety of options such as how far their character moves, the color and size of trail it leaves, creating a line or shape, changing its size and costume, etc.

             Hopscotch is an open-ended program so users can create anything they want. Users can easily experiment with what different commands do and revise their script to make it do what they want. Users then hit the play button to run their script, and if they want they can share it with others over email.

Here is a quick animation

 I made with Hopscotch.

Check out the Sydney Opera House done by an experienced coder. 

 What have you created using code?

Share some tips for making an interesting animation!