One of the major shifts in the Common Core is the move towards reading informational texts. This includes charts, graphs, maps and more. So when I noticed this free app — HistoryMaps — I was curious. Maps can tell amazing stories, but students of course needs strategies for learning how to “read” a visual display of information. This particular app can be helpful, although you should know that its name tells you exactly what it is: a collection of historical maps (and very Europe-focused). There’s almost no text, and very little historical reference to the maps (other than some time periods).
But that lack of information is what makes this app so fascinating. What can we infer from the map of Omaha Beach from the WW II section? Where do troops land and what was the landscape like? How about Waterloo in 1815? Or the layout of the city of Paris during the French Revolution? And what did the European continent look like in 814 after the death of Charles the Great? Pull up the map and see. One of the more fascinating maps is the Map of Discovery, which shows the paths of explorers from 1340-1600.
Sure, you can probably find many of these maps with some online searching. But why bother? This free app has them all, handy and ready to be “read.”
Peace (in the map),
Kevin
PS — it’s free but you have to put up with some banner ads at the bottom of the page. Just thought you should know that.
CommonSense Media just put out a handy guide to summer technology activities, broken down by age levels. I might share this with the parents of my students, as I often get questions about what kind of technology is appropriate for my sixth graders (I often say, the kind that gets them creating not just consuming). This guide is worth checking out and maybe sharing.
I like that Minecraft, Machinarium, Scramble with friends, and other games that stimulate the mind are on the approved list here. And the apps are grouped around themes, too, as if it were a summer camp flier. I appreciate that stab at humor. Keep in mind that CommonSense has a pretty strict filter for technology — they are a bit narrow in what is good for kids. I’m fine with that, but it is important to be aware of that bias around technology, too.
I’ve been intrigued by Apps that provide the tools for the users to create their own video games. Sketch Nation Studio is a free app that does just that. The platform allows you to create and play original games, by using either artwork that you draw right in the app, or artwork that comes off your device, or art that you draw on paper and then take an image and import into the game.
There are several variations of platform-style games, and while the end result is not nearly as sophisticated as some of the apps you might buy for your device, it provides enough creative outlet to feel as if you have, indeed, created your own app game. You can set the style of game, add energy boosts and enemies, adjust gravity, create backgrounds, and more.
And did I mention that the Sketch Nation Studio App is free? I don’t see any advertising on the app, in case you are wondering .
There are also options to publish the game onto the iTunes store (and the company promises to share in the profits from any sale of the game app, so I guess your game funnels through their publishing system). I’m not sure if that would actually work (yet I may give it a try just to see what happens), nor if the game app provides enough variation to actually create a game that would sell, but even sharing a game via iTunes is pretty interesting. And, therefore, I am intrigued by the potential of that opportunity for creating and publishing for my students. And I am now wondering if using this app on our school’s iPods wouldn’t be a neat end-of-year activity to tie into our earlier Game Design Unit.
(Note: I wrote this for our local newspaper, hoping they might run it as a column around the holidays, but I never heard back from them. Oh well. I still have other publishing spaces, right? — Kevin)
My seven year old is looking at my classroom book order form from Scholastic.
“Ohhh, dad, can you get the Angry Birds book? Pleasssssse?”
I noticed that there is indeed an Angry Birds Poster Book. It says I can decorate my classroom with Angry Birds.
“No. Definitely not.”
“Why not?”
This podcast and column is why not, but I explained it in a different way to him before we both sat down to read a book together.
Is it just me or am I the only one getting more and more tired with those Angry Birds?
This frustration began simmering this summer when the fun little game app moved off of our mobile devices and into Hollywood (Angry Birds Rio, anyone?), then into plush toys ($18 for a stuffed animal, are you kidding me?). Now, I notice, the video game has morphed into a no-tech board game that came out just in time for the holidays and there’s even a webcomic that tells the backstory of … something.
Forget the birds. Rovio Entertainment has itself a real cash cow.
What worries me most is that gaming apps like Angry Birds are fast becoming prominent places for blatant advertising and options to buy with in-app purchases popping up everywhere, coupled with tie-ins for all sorts of other products.
It’s not just those birds, either.
The whole resurgence of the blue-skinned Smurfs this past year has spawned not only a movie but also a series of online game sites, networking spaces for children like Smurf Village, and mobile device apps that are completely loaded with ways for kids to buy, buy, buy …. with their parents’ credit card accounts, of course. You may have missed the lawsuits that finally led to some changes with how in-app purchases take place after bills of hundreds of dollars started showing up, but I didn’t.
As an educator who fervently believes in the possibilities of technology to transform the ways we write and interact with the world, this commercialization of technology is incredibly frustrating, particularly when you consider the audience.
I can’t say I am surprised by the corporate world’s push to make new games a touchstone of commercialism. If nothing else, they know the compulsive tendency of their young audience. Every innovation that eventually attracts a mass of consumers (radio, television, the Internet, etc.) is also bound to attract companies seeking ways to leverage that audience for profit.
But can we please collectively agree to leave the kids alone? Target me all you want. I can take it. I can turn it off. I can buy your product and regret it later.
Our youngest citizens, however, are bombarded enough with the commercialism of our culture. They don’t need their world of play tainted with advertising, too.
Recent news items that have alarmed me included some schools now offering up the doors of lockers (Minnesota), the sides of school buses (Utah), and even the front pages of their report cards (Colorado) for businesses willing to pay up to hawk their goods to an unsuspecting audience. These schools do it because they are strapped for cash. I understand that. I just can’t stomach the idea of the captive audience.
I recently came across some push-back recently that gave me some hope.
It’s a petition for folks and organizations and families who want to send a clear message to gaming companies and the vast entertainment complex to consider the audience for their products, and to please tread lightly on their childhood.
As far as I can tell, the petition has no advertising. I take that as a good sign. And there is not a bird or Smurf in sight. Even better.
I was about one minute into trying out My Doodle Game, an app for the iPad that allows you to make Doodle-Jump style games, when my seven year old demanded (with vigor) that I let him take over and create the game. And by the way, Dad, go away for while and I will call you back when my game is ready to go. So I left the room and came back, and then I played a pretty neat game that my son designed and created within a short amount of time.
My Doodle Game is surprising rich, and robust (and I thank my friend, Skip Via, for showing me how students he is documenting in Alaska are using iPads for this app). Best of all? The app is free. That’s right. Free. (There is a cost for the software version for computers and it runs about $15. I’d rather have free, to be honest. Now, this free cost means that you don’t have access to every character and every option in the pretty extensive library, but there is plenty to do with the free options, including an array of heroes and villains and various objects to place in the path of your little stickman. You can also pay to add more to your library.
If I had a class of iPads (oops, I mean a class of students with iPads … hehehe), I would add My Doodle Game to the list of apps I’d like to see on there. In fact, I’d want more apps to be like this one — shifting the student from player of the game to creator of the game.
I was approached on Twitter to review an educational app for vocabulary, so I figured: what the heck? The developer seemed nice enough and he sent me a code for downloading Shake-a-Phrase, which I somehow messed up and ended up buying the thing after all. So, there’s a sort of disclaimer here: I should have gotten this app for free in exchange for posting my opinion about it, but I bought it anyway. Take it for what you will.
What is Shake-a-Phrase? It’s a vocabulary app that seems nicely suited for learning some basic parts of speech (when you shake the app, it changes the sentences). There are three main components to it, including a section in which you tap words to identify the parts of speech identified (the basics: nouns, verbs, adjectives), and each time you do it correctly, you move to another level. I’m not sure what the levels bring you, to be honest, but I can see some advantage to my students around parts of speech here. It might get way to repetitious after about ten minutes, though. There are a few “themes” of words — sports, monsters, etc. — that make it interesting, but only to a point.
Another component of Shake-a-Phrase provides you with a one sentence story, and if you tap words, it pulls up both the definition and the part of speech of the word. This is useful for learning new words. Again, useful but repetitious after a while.
The third component is called “story starter,” and they give you the first part of a story, which is designed to inspire your writing. Except you can’t write on the app. Which seems strange to me, as I was all set to imagine “what if a flaky serpent evolved into a witty pixie …” But there was no room on the app for my words. I sort felt let down.
Overall, the app is nicely designed, and it is pretty fun to play for a short amount of time, although it feels a bit like the result of an adult designing a game that they think a kid will play for hours when the kid really wants to play Plants and Zombies. I don’t think my sixth graders would find it all that interesting for too long.
Yet, Shake-a-Phrase could be a nice addition, or extension, activity for work around Parts of Speech. What would make it more valuable for me would be for the app to have all of the major Parts of Speech, not just the Big Three. You can only get so far with nouns, verbs and adjectives. Prepositions, pronouns, adverbs and the rest would be more helpful. And if it were something I could pull up on the interactive board, that would be neat (Can you see us shaking the board? Yeah.)
Still, for younger students who are just learning that we even have things in our language called Parts of Speech (although why and if Parts of Speech are important to improving writing is whole other conversation), the app might be a beneficial entry point for fun practice. The shaking of the app and the silly stories that appear on the screen would likely be a draw for a lot of kids.
I’m not quite sure what to make of this iPod App. BeSeen, which was developed with funding from the Carnegie-Mellon Foundation, is designed to teach “social networking” through a game-play of a fake social network. The player is a high school student (you create a profile, choose a grade and gender, and get started … with an initial update from your mom) and the game unfolds in a quick-time flow of days and updates. An entire school year takes place in two hours of playing time.
On one hand, I am exploring it for a possible inclusion in a new unit I am developing for my sixth graders around Digital Citizenship in December. I will be talking social networking and the app has some possibilities for discussing how a network is designed and works. It has an area of updates, a profile page, friends, etc. There are some simple (too simple) games that get played to earn you the right to choose canned updates and earn badges (what is it with badges these days?). I like that it is a contained social network (it’s only an app, not a network) and that it involved role-playing.
I was looking at the teaching guide (always nice to have one of those) and I liked this overview of the key reasons for students to use BeSeen:
1. Your “friends” on social networking websites are only people you know in real life. (See Lesson 2.)
2. You must understand and personalize your privacy settings, and then review them regularly. (See Lesson 1.)
3. Your online profile should reflect your best qualities. You never know who will see it, such as schools and groups you would like to join someday, employers you would like to hire you, and other adults and friends who you would like to impress. (See Lesson 3.)
4. Don’t say anything about someone online that you wouldn’t say to someone face-to- face or on a billboard. (See Lesson 4.)
5. Bullying online is immediate, widespread and permanent. (See Lesson 5.)
6. Cyber threats and dangers could very easily affect you. They’re much more common than most people think. For ex- ample, over one-third of school children experience cyberbullying. (See Lesson 5.)
7. It’s okay to report any wrongdoings that you witness online. You should. (See Lesson 5.)
8. You should ask permission to post any photographs or videos of your friends and to tag them. (See Lesson 1.)
9. When it comes to location-sharing, you should only share your location with people who need to know it, such as your parents. Most of the time, you should simply turn off location-sharing.
(See Lesson 1.)
10. Just because you can use mobile devices everywhere and any time, that doesn’t mean you should. Think twice to make sure you are not being disruptive to the people or the situation around you. (See Lesson 4.)
11. Don’t neglect your real life in favor of your online life. (See Lesson 2.)
12. There are boundaries in the student/ teacher relationship in the social net- working environment. (See Lesson 3.)
On the other hand, it comes across as a little too preachy. Players who make a “bad choice” (like skipping class to get some doughnuts) get harangued by others in the network. I know that sounds bad. I am not in favor of skipping school for doughnuts. But, I don’t think a real social network would respond like the way “friends” respond here.
I am not all that far into the game, but I was checking out possible badges to be earned and there are two references to porn and sexting. That gives me pause for use with my sixth graders, although I should note that it is labeled as being designed for kids 12 years old and older due to:
Infrequent/Mild Alcohol, Tobacco, or Drug Use or References
Infrequent/Mild Sexual Content or Nudity
(Not sure what nudity is talked about.)
Which brings me to my point: I can’t quite figure out who the audience is for this app.
If you are a high school student, there is no way you would see any value in this app. It’s too basic and too preachy. They would laugh you out of the classroom. So, I suspect it is designed for the age level that I teach (middle school), just as they start dipping their toes into social networking. I’m intrigued by this concept of using the app (OK, so I see my students making a backstory of their character, writing about the choices their characters faced, and maybe even comparing/contrasting this app with their own real experiences in networks) and I am still wondering if it might fit.
I’ll keep playing my role as a high school senior and see where the conversation flows …
