Tech Tool of the Week: Pages

Would you like to have your students type up a story, a report, or an essay?  Think you need to reserve the computer lab or borrow some laptops from IT?  Think again!  There's another option: you can have your students use the iPads!  Our iPads have an app called Pages, which is a word processing program.  Pages is simply Apple's version of Microsoft Word.  Students can do everything in Pages that they can do in Microsoft Word.   They can even type in Chinese!


Here is a short introductory video on how to use Pages to get you started:

Tech Tool of the Week: Edmodo

This week's highlighted technology tool is an exciting new website called Edmodo. Edmodo is a free service that allows teachers to create and maintain their own safe and secure, collaborative classroom communities.

When you take a look at Edmodo, it looks a lot like a Facebook for the classroom. Edmodo allows you to create a social learning network specifically for your class. Unlike Facebook, however, Edmodo is completely private and secure.  And it allows you as teachers to manage class content, collaborate, and more.

Teachers can share educational content, manage projects and assignments, handle notifications, conduct quizzes and events, and facilitate other engaging learning experiences with students. Schools and districts can claim unique Edmodo web addresses for added communication and customization. And teachers can build profile pages on Edmodo, which they can use to meet and stay in contact with other educators, plus share best practices and top resources.

On the student side, members of an Edmodo classroom can interact with the site, take quizzes, participate in games, and ask the teacher questions. But students may not direct message each other within the site. Edmodo is not meant to be a social platform for student to student interactions that don’t relate to what’s going on in the classroom.

Finally, one other cool feature of Edmodo is that it works on a variety of different platforms, including the iPhone, Android, iPad, and laptop or desktop computers.  Check out some interesting ways that you could use Edmodo for mobile learning!


For ideas on how to get started and to access teacher resources, take a look at Edmodo's blog. In addition, here is a short demo video to give you a taste of what you can do with Edmodo: