Science

There are a couple of ways to help with experiments that are performed within the classroom. The first thing that I would suggest is signing out the mini iPads and having students use them to take pictures of each stage of their experiment, no matter how small the stage is. Then using the following programs, the students can take notes, draw pictures, take pictures, and narrate while publishing their work for you to assess in an interactive way.

VoiceThread
www.voicethread.com

This is an account that is no longer free after three voicethreads are made by the students. Although as an educator with a paid account, you can assign student accounts as well that you can access. This site is located on a server cloud and you would be able to access it anywhere there is an internet connection. One idea to use for this would be to have your students take pictures using either their phones (if they can upload), the Macs, or the mini iPads for each step of a project or experiment. Then have them narrate either in writing, with voice, or both in order to demonstrate their knowledge of what they were doing.

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Did you ever want to show the students the mistakes that keep occurring within their writing as a class? Do you want to show them the variety of words, or lack of, that are a part of their writing? There is an easy and very visual way to do this called Word Clouds. You can enter an entire class of papers by copying and pasting using digital copies of student papers before they turn in their finals.      www.wordle.net

Once you have entered the papers, the words that are not common like "the" or "it" can be removed and the rest of the vocabulary used by a class put together. The bigger the word, the more often it was used. Above is a demonstration of a paper that was entered into Wordle and you can see the correlation to how often a word is used. The same will show up with common mistakes in spelling.
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When discussing the Geography or Environment of the past and present of the Earth, EarthViewer can give you and your students a screen shot of information based on the time period. If you want to have students do a report where they discuss the atmosphere of the Earth at a specific time, then the information can be found on this free app.

There is also a teachers section located on the bottom that will help with the navigation of this app. This would also be a great way to have a joined project between Social Studies and Science.