Learning and Leading - March/April 2013

Ematic has launched the Fun Tab, a 7-inch Android 4.0 tablet for children.

The Fun Tab comes loaded with popular games, such as Angry Birds, Where’s My Water, Cut the Rope, Fruit Ninja, and more. Child-specific features include Art Studio, which allows parents to view their children’s art in the program gallery and mark their favorite designs with gold stars. Kids can use Video Mail to record short messages with the FunTab’s front camera. Parents can monitor the online content their children are exposed to and customize lists of safe websites. They can track their children’s activities and read detailed reports of their educational progress, artwork, video messages, and more.

MORE INFO: ematic.us/tablets/funtab-pro

ISTE has released NETS for Coaches, a booklet that describes how technology coaches support the work of administrators, teachers, and ultimately students in transforming schools into digital age, global learning environments. Discover how to make the most out of this highly effective form of individualized professional development tailored to educators’ professional needs and personal learning.

MORE INFO: www.iste.org/store/product?ID=2595

Providence e-Learning, maker of interactive iBooks for the iPad, has released an educational series of British literature, including titles such as Macbeth, Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Poetry of William Blake, and Frankenstein. Each iBook is designed to make the classic come alive with narration and video lectures by top scholars, interactive glossaries and dictionaries, and quizzes to spark engagement and encourage classroom discussion. The interactive content is designed to appeal to various types of learners, including visual, auditory, read-write, and kinesthetic as well as students with learning disabilities.

MORE INFO: www.providenceelearning.org

Python for Kids, a new book by Jason R. Briggs, is a kid-friendly introduction to Python, one of the world’s most powerful and widely used programming languages. Python for Kids is designed to teach students how to create drawings, animations, and games. It features ravenous monsters, secret agents, and thieving ravens, and each chapter is full of colorful art by Miran Lipovaca.

MORE INFO: www.nostarch.com/pythonforkids

One Size Does Not Fit All Despite all the talk about the need to adapt instructional methods to reach every learner, there is little agreement on how to do it. Barbara Bray and Kathleen McClaskey of Personalize Learning, LLC, explain what personalized learning is and detail their six-step plan to take it from theory to practice.

Improve Your Teaching with an ARS

Research shows that audience response systems (ARSs) can improve classroom interaction and student engagement as well as promote a more student-centered environment. Steve Gregor and Gregory Muscelli explore the effectiveness of ARSs and measure how well teachers who use them meet the NETS•T.

How Do You Engage, Enhance, Extend?

Educators are expected to implement technology that engages students, enhances lessons, and extends learning. But how can they do that if they don’t know what those terms mean? ISTE book author Liz Kolb defines those terms and illustrates what technology integration looks like in the K– 12 classroom.