AR Apps with and without targets

I never imagine I can see dinosaurs in the real world! But it happened when I just simply clicked on the Dinosaurs app on ipad. All kinds of dinosaurs are just walking and roaming around everywhere in my surroundings. When we touch each single of them on the screen, the detail information will pop up, such as species, diet, sizes, the period they live and so on. We can experience them both in my real world and their virtual world by switching scenes.  In my language classroom, after I introduce the topic and read dinosaur stories to my students, I can ask them to create their own dinosaur research report. They can read more dinosaurs reading books, playing with Lego, playing with the toy dinosaurs and put a 3D image of a dinosaur in a photo. They are going to present along with their posters about their knowledge on dinosaurs and sort the dinosaurs into categories. I will apply this app to students fourth grade and above.

As a language teacher, I always expect my students to explore the details of an object and describe it in an expository writing. AR House will provide students a real virtual experience. They are able to take a tour of a construction site on this app instead of going to a field trip. They have the opportunity to exam every floor from every angle in the building for details, they can observe the building’s  outdoor view and every perspective from the roof. Students can work in peers and talk with each other about what they observed and how they felt. They can come up with the discussion of the structure of the building and outline the structure of their writing before they start the written work. I will use this app for the written task for middle and high school students.

If I want to talk about the body part or the physical structure of humankind, Anatomy 4D will be a good app for that. Just through this app and a simple printed image, Anatomy 4D transports students, teachers, and anyone who wants to learn about the body into an interactive 4D experience of human anatomy. Students will be able to learn about and explore the human body and heart in intricate detail. They can choose to change the view back and forth between a male and female body. They have the opportunity to highlight various organ systems individually, for example, they can focus on just the skeletal, muscular, or respiratory system. They can zoom in to experience each organ or body part in-depth. This app will be used for me to teach high school students.

Quiver could be perfect for me to use as a storytelling prompt. It comes in different languages including English, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish and instructions on how to use the app. Students will have fun to color and create their main story characters and settings. The feature of the app seems attractive to students that it gives students the opportunity to customize their own figures and watch each one jump off the page! Students will love this magical experience. By moving the device that hosts the app around, students can view the animation from different angles.When viewing any given animation students can zoom it in and out, capture a photo or video record it, pause and resume it. This app helps students to develop their imagination and creativity in a storytelling activity. I will choose to use it to children 6 years and above.

Comment on 5 Chinese Apps

Essential Chinese is an app for the introduction to vocabulary, phrases, and grammar of the Chinese language. It covers most basic conversational topics in daily life. Each lesson focuses on one topic. However, free lessons are limited, the user needs to pay for more lessons. It has 3 sections in each lesson: vocabulary, grammar and conversation, which allow the user to practice listening, speaking and recognizing Chinese words and phrases. Games are designed at the end of each section. This app is good for beginners to start learning Chinese from the beginning.

Chinese Pad provides interactive Chinese books and articles on the app. It includes a built-in Chinese-English dictionary, an open content platform and a set of tools to drill users in the basic language skills. With this app, the users can practice their handwriting; record their voices and test their knowledge on a certain topic. This app is good for learners of intermediate level or above. Because the content is more focus on Chinese culture, custom, folk stories and idioms.

Learn Chinese provides a couple of free lessons with various topics. In each lesson, selected vocabularies on a particular topic are displayed with pinyin, characters, sound and pictures. The user can listen to the sound of the word repeatedly. After each vocabulary is introduced, a test follows up asking the user to match the sound of a word with its picture. On this app, the user can create a profile and keep their learning history and results recorded. It is an app designed for a more audio-visual style learner. It meets the needs for those who just simply wants to name things in Chinese since it doesn’t cover phrases, sentences on a conversational level.

Chinese Skill is an app designed for testing. When the user starts a lesson, he enters in a quiz window right away. However, the quiz seems to breeze past many aspects of language without any specific focus on any of them. For example, in a quiz, the user will be asked to match a sound with a Chinese character; trace writing a character; fill in blanks for a missing word in a sentence; then translate a sentence into English. The user can review all the contents by taking formal tests that come with four categories: flash card, character, word and sentence. This app is a tool for testing learners’ knowledge so the user is supposed to have some background knowledge.

iLearn Chinese focuses on teaching learners Chinese characters. It believes that a large number of characters are required for effective communication. It emphasizes the historical information of each character and demonstrates the writing of characters stroke by stroke. The users are able to practice the writing on the touch screen as many times as they like to “feel” and “program” the stroke orders into their memory. The app has image icons for characters of both concrete and abstract meanings. That means it provides pictures for not only real objects like “desk”, “cup”, but also abstract concepts such as “love” and “year”. This app is good for those who love to research about the history of Chinese words and learn Chinese from writing and accumulating words.

Puppet Pals on iPad

Puppet Pals is a great app for children to creatively explore narrative. With this app, teachers can ask students to create and record their own play and stories. At first, we choose up to 8 characters and in the free version, we can get some fairy tale settings. We can get other backgrounds and characters by purchasing. Students can choose any character and up to 5 backdrops for their stories. It’s a good way to see students’ creative abilities and how well they use their language. When students get characters on the stage, they can place them on the backdrop wherever they want and start recording whenever they’re ready. They record their voice so that they can have their narration along with that. We can have a couple of students working together on a project. No matter how many students work on it, they can narrate themselves in the story. It’s a great way for children to use their creativity and imagination to create stories and integrate both language arts and fine arts.

Once they’re done, they can click to save their projects; title them and export them out. Teachers will be easily seeing all the projects on iPad.

It’s definitely an useful app for me as a language teacher to teach literature in a fun way and access students’ reading and writing abilities as well.

Adobe Photoshop Express

After downloaded and installed Adobe Photoshop Express, we got some tab settings that we can upload and edit in Adobe settings. We can choose to upload the photo to Photoshop.com, Face book or Twitpic. We can have an account on Photoshop Express online and get tips on how to use it. To edit a picture, we select and upload it, then there are many ways to edit it, we can choose either to crop, rotate or flip it. We got options of exposure, saturation, tint or contrast…others are like sketch, soft focus, sharpen and effects and borders…After the edition, we can save the picture and choose to upload or post it to Face book or Twitpic. It is an app for any device and convenient for us to edit our pictures and use them in our classroom posters or power point.

Spelling Test on iPad

With ‘Spelling Test’ on iPad, we can create our own lists of tests that students can take on their own. We just simply spell out all the words and record them into about a few minutes. Then when press the list and listen to words spelled on the iPad itself, students can take the test independently. If some words were spelled wrong, it will show how to start correctly. When it’s done, it shows how the students spell the word and if they got correct or not. It can also be moved to the smart board, and students can listen to the task and work on it independently on the smart board. It allows the test be taken at any time and any place. I am looking into using it in my language classroom. In the beginning of the class I can ask my students working on it while I am setting up the class.

Dictionary on iPad

‘Dictionaries’ is a simple but powerful app on iPad designed to find and learn about words in the dictionary. When we type in a word, we can get either the exact word or a series of words we were looking for. Each word shows and says out loud exact pronunciation, definition and how to use it in a sentence. There is also an option to go to the source; when typing in a word, we will find a list of alternatives. The Word of the Day section gives us a word that the website has chosen each day. There are a few more options for customization such as listing aboard similar to an actual dictionary. This app looks fully extensive and frequently updated.

Safari and Rover

Safari is a web browser developed by Apple. It is an application both on a Mac and iPad. Rover is also a web browser, however, it is a “Flash capable” browsing app designed for iPad. Safari as a broadly used web browser has many features, such as Full-text search, Safari Reader, iCloud tabs…While Rover could be used for a more educational purpose when to access flash content on iPad.

I will prefer to use Safari, because it looked very handy and at the same time there are many limitations on using Rover on iPad. For example, websites using the Unity plugin for 3D graphics will not work on Rover. The gestures in Flash content don’t work well and lag causes delays and problems for interactive sites. It does not support other common web plugins like shockwave or Unity. And it is only good for using one iPad at a time and only with a fast and unlimited broadband connection. Since it uses too much bandwidth, it is will not be a good choice to allow the whole class using it simultaneously in the class.

Using iThought in the Classroom

iThought will be a good tool for me to teach language in my classroom. Students will have opportunities to brainstorm ideas about a given topic. They can organize their thought processes and turn these ideas into structured written pieces by creating and using mind maps.

For example, when I introduce family members, I can just simply ask students to create a family tree with iThought. In a project-based learning, students can use iThoughts to brainstorm, collaborate, and organize their goals, responsibilities, research, and work flow. They can also use it to take notes to demonstrate their understandings of a topic covered in class. Students can then share their maps with their peers using the various sharing options and comment on each other’s work.

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Pages compares with Word

Both Pages and Word are word processors and page layout applications. The document window for both of them contains a toolbar, which gives one-click access to commonly used functions such as inserting objects and adding additional pages etc. When text is selected, the format bar of both of them enables users to choose fonts, text size and color, adjust line spacing and alignment. For Pages, its toolbar gives access to uploading the document to iWork.com and there is a separate Inspector window which provides almost all formatting options available for any element in the open document. When Pages is first opened, users are presented with a Template Chooser which allows them to start with a blank document or with a predesigned template – including a basic, report, letter, resume, envelope, business card, flyers & posters, cards, miscellaneous, and a newsletter section of templates – that contains placeholder text and images which can be replaced by dragging and dropping photos from the Media Browser.

In word processing mode, Pages on iPad supports headers and footers, footnotes, and outline and list creation. Users can collaborate with others on a document. Pages tracks changes by different users by displaying each person's edits in different colors. Users can also add comments alongside the document. In page layout mode, users have complete control over the position of objects on the page. Images and text can be placed anywhere on the canvas. 

When using an iPad, typing accurately and quickly on the iPad’s wide on-screen keyboard was comfortable and fast. The Web browser also works beautifully. However, most people need two hands to use iPad.