Adobe Spark provides free resources that allow teachers and students to easily create and share their work digitally. One tool that I particularly like is the Adobe Spark Video app. It is simple to use and a great tool for narrating a captivating story, presenting a report, explaining a concept, or telling a personal story. Students can choose their own images to add to their videos or select from the thousands that are available. There are also options to add text, music, animation and more. Discover how you might use it in your classroom by watching the short videos below:

Adobe offers many free courses for educators. One of these is called Digital Storytelling with Your Class. The program is described as follows:

"This free online course is aimed at all educators looking to get started using digital storytelling to engage students, and learning to tell compelling digital stories with Adobe Spark. The course is self-paced, so you can learn at your own speed, and should take no longer than 3 hours to complete.

No prior knowledge of Adobe tools is required to take part.

Throughout this fun and easy course, you’ll explore:

• Short video tutorials by expert educators which give you the technical skills required to create your own digital stories with Adobe tools
• Information on using digital storytelling in your curriculum to produce exciting outcomes for you and your students
• Basic principles of digital storytelling

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Successful graduates of this course will receive an Adobe digital badge and a certificate accrediting 3 hours of professional development."

Looking for inspiration? Check out sample student work and teaching resources.
Questions? Read the Adobe Spark Educator's Guide.

Learn how to use Pages by reading Pages for iPad. You can access and download the text in Apple Books on your iPad.

Apple Classroom is a management tool that allows a teacher to:

• view all student iPad screens from his/her own iPad
  
• lock or mute student screens
  
• navigate groups of students/individual students/or the whole class to certain apps or websites
  
• lock students into specific apps, websites, or documents
  
• share and receive documents and more

Discover how Apple Classroom can improve your classroom teaching by watching the quick guided tour below: 

Learn the specifics by viewing the PDFs linked below:

Earn your certification as an Apple Teacher for iPads! The certification is free and easy to tackle, one badge at a time. To learn more about Apple Classroom specifically, check out the Productivity with iPad badge, linked below.

In short, HyperDocs are interactive, digital documents (i.e. Google Docs or Slides) containing links to activities, videos, and resources that drive and engage student learning. HyperDocs take the teacher lecturing in the front of the room  off stage and encourage students to follow the paths that ignite their curiosity. While students are navigating a HyperDoc playlist, the teacher is able to move about the classroom, working one-on-one or in small groups with students. Discover more in this short video created by West Ada School District, and check out this template for a visual.

How might HyperDocs support your curriculum? Could you create HyperDocs for fast finishers to access? Are you interested in modifying a unit so one day consists of student learning being guided by their choices? Or do you want to make HyperDocs a more regular part of your teaching? Learn more about how HyperDocs could change the way you teach by checking out the examples below. 

Check out the free templates and additional resources below.

Task cards are a great way to support your students in adding meaningful work to their Seesaw journals. The below video is lengthy, but if you zoom forward to 15:00, you will discover how one teacher uses task cards during Daily Five.

Learn awesome ideas for task cards by exploring below.

Use Google Slides to create task cards. Learn how below!

Have you observed anxiety in any of your students? Do you want your class to be more mindful, focused, and present? Smiling Mind is a non-profit organization with a goal to make mindfulness accessible to all. The Smiling Mind Education Programs have been designed with educators in mind and consist of over 200 lessons for students from primary to secondary school. Discover how just five minutes of mindfulness a day can benefit the overall wellbeing of your students by watching the video below.

What is mindfulness? How does it impact the brain? Learn more by watching the video below.

Get started by adding 5 minutes of mindfulness to your class each day. What about using it to set a daily intention as Morning Meeting is coming to a close?  Or what about a five minute post-recess reset? Download the Smiling Mind app or load the web-based program. Have your students lie flat on their backs. Press play, and let the journey to mindfulness begin!

Interested in taking mindfulness to the next level? Consider using these fun cards to do simple yoga poses with your students. Each  of the 50 cards includes step-by-step yoga pose instructions.

Are you looking for an engaging and educational app to add to your math rotations and/or a way to inspire your students to practice math concepts? Consider using the app Motion Math. Check out the third graders below to see Motion Math in ACTION!

Interested in trying math rotations? Start small. Have math rotations once a week. Design three rotations for your students to move through when instructed. Create an activity/game station (consider trying Motion Math here!), a writing about math (journaling) station, and a station working with you. Be sure to include an extension board with optional activities for students who finish their work and need an extra challenge.

Consider adding literature links, like math picture books, to your extension board:
Multiplying Menace
Fractions, Decimals, and Percents
40 Fabulous Math Mysteries
Perimeter, Area, and Volume
Sir Cumfrence
Working with Fractions
Mapping Penny's World
The Grapes of Math
Mystery Math

​When I was a homeroom teacher, winter break marked the completion of many units and projects. Depending on where students were in the writing process, they would often publish their pieces before or after winter break. If your class is on the same page, the New Year will provide an opportunity to consider how your students will share their completed writing. In this post, I will present you with a variety of innovative ways for your students to publish and share their work with others, beginning with a few samples from my own students.

Below is an example of a student who wrote a biography and presented using a green screen to get in character.

Use foldables to create lapbooks. This works especially well with nonfiction. 

Feature student work with QR codes. In this example, the codes link to the students' finished research papers (linked online through a publishing site called Issuu) and 30 second video clips/commercials introducing their ancient Egypt topics. Scan the QR codes below or click here for a commercial and here for a writing piece.

Teach your students to be responsible digital citizens who are creators, not only consumres, of content. Create student blogs!

Now that I've shown you a few ways my students have published their writing, I will introduce you to samples from other teachers.

Use Stop Motion to animate and bring a story to life. Read Meghan Zigman's blog to learn how.

ChatterPix is a free app that makes a photo come to life with speech. Kids can draw, paint, or collage images. They can also find real photographs online.

Not all writing gets published; so by asking your students to publish their work, you will be presented with the opportunity to talk with your students about the differences between the writing we keep for ourselves and the writing we publish. By having your students share their writing with others, they will be held to a different standard of excellence, and they will rise to the occasion to publish their best work.

Still looking for ideas? Check out 5 more tips here.

Having access to iPads has changed how teachers are teaching and how students are learning. To discover a few ways iPads are being used in classrooms, read the articles below.

Before you can actively use iPads with your students, you'll need a basic understanding of how they operate. What are the various iPad features and controls? Check out the diagrams below by clicking the button titled "iPad Features and Controls" to learn more.

By learning how to connect to Wi-Fi, manage storage, download/update apps, and print photos, your life as a classroom teacher is going to be so much easier. Give it a shot with the following step-by-step tutorials: