I chose to go way back to the beginning of the Kansas History, to shortly after Kansas became a state. When it changed the Missouri compromise by the constructing the Kansas-Nebraska act.

I wanted people to remember what has happened in this state and the lives that were lost defending what they believed to be right. Bleeding Kansas was a huge part of US history during the civil war era. We as a nation, as Kansans, need to know what happen here in the heartland of our beloved country.

History is something near and dear to my heart, and the history of Kansas is no exception. I also no that no matter where ever I go, I will always have my Kansas roots in me.

While the video only hits a very small portion of the highlights of Bleeding Kansas, I think it works as a quick over view.

Again for this assignment I had to use the iTunes U  app that I had previously downloaded on my iPad.  This time instead of looking at the inspiring lessons  section, I looked through the apps section in the For  Educators part of this app.

In this sections I  downloaded  SketchBook  Express Lesson Ideas. These were set up in a similar manner to how the other two have been ( Inspiring lesson and One Best Things). These were fairly easy to navigate through as well. Hopefully I can find away to incorporate all the new information I am obtaining into my future classroom, but a the moment, it is easier to focus on just a few this I want to implement in my classroom.

A few of the other application listed, that looked interesting to me were: Photographing History: Archiving with apps, and  Student Authored Portfolios.

Another thing that I found interesting was that a lot of these apps that were there tied together with the One Best Things assignment/blog that I had recently completed.

To complete a couple of my last assignments in my ded318 class at K-State, I needed to download the iTunes U app on my iPad. This could be used on a mac computer as well, but the only apple product I own is an iPad. After downloading the iTunes U app I clicked the For Educators icon, I had to scroll down a little, but it was easily found. After words, for this assignment in particular I looked through the 30 books available in the Inspiring lesson Ideas section.

Once I was in the inspiring lesson Ideas section I checked out a few of these lesson including: Being the Change: Exploring leaderhsip and the work of Nobel Peach Prize Laureates; It’s All Geography to Me; Rise of the Frankenstuffies: The Industrial Revolution 

I actually subscribed to all three of these inspiring lesson because I want to pull as much information together as I can. I feel like I can never have enough ideas, as long as they’re constructive. Each of these books has an overview section, an instructor sections, and an outline. After that they are laid out in a slightly different, but equally as easy format. Each of these books describes in detail that information that will be presented to the students to enhance their knowledge about the particular topic.

A big thing that I know I can take right away from these lesson ideas is their clear organization. Even if I do not teach any of these particular topics I can take these different format and implement them into my own lesson planning. This will not only make my life as a teacher easier, especially for future use, but it will also greatly help if and when I need a substitute to construct my class for a short period of time.

I got the book: Starting with Choice: Primary Classroom Implementations by Karen Lirenman. She is a first grade teacher in Canada who believes that power of choice “empower, engages, and inspires” children.

In her book she also gives several videos to help demonstrate her point. She says that with younger learners that this increases “engagement, problem-solving, ownership of learning, authenticity, collaboration,, cooperation, peer assessment, and pride with accomplishment” to quote her directly.

I think that this could be for students of all ages and not just for younger children. All students want to be given choices about everything that is happening, very few of us just want to be told what to do all the time. We as educators have to realize that this is the same of our students.

Lirenman lists three requires for providing choices in the classroom:

1. a positive mind-set

2. being comfortable relinquishing control

3. identifying learning goals and supporting choices that embrace these goals.

Some of these things I believe come with experiences, in fact most of this goals will all get easier the longer we teach. I do think you have to go into your classroom with a positive mind-set though. Teachers will get more comfortable and be able to identify specific goals easier as time goes on.

The more choices we give our students, the better off they’ll be in the long run. This will help them not only in one area of school, but in almost all. The power of choice can also go beyond school and help to teach them skills they will need in the ‘real world’.

A couple other of books that I found interesting were: If Shakespeare Could Tweet and Photography Inspired Writing. I know that I am passionate about History/Social Studies. But I will always have a love for English and getting ideas and inspiration from other areas is not a bad thing.

ShowMe was the third interactive whiteboard app I tried. There were several reason that I chose this app over the two others I looked at.

For starters I did not want to pay for the app. The first app I watch tutorials over was 2.99. While many of the reviews said it was worth the price I did not want to pay for something I did not know if I would be using on a long term basis.

The second app I tried was called educreations. The inital app was free, but you could not save the video to your iPad once you were finished if you did not upgrade to the pro app. The pro app was $11.99 a month or $99.00 a year. I was not going to pay this kind of money for something that I did not see myself using long term. I do not know what kind of class I will have yet, so I do not know if I will have the one-to-one capabilities I would need to run the app smoothly with all of my students.

So I switched to ShowMe. For the most part everything was simple and easy. It was free, so that was a plus. I never did figure out how to edit the recording once I was finished. I looked at the site online several times for guidince, but I never found that tab they were talking about. So I will chalk this set back up to user error.

I chose to talk about how a bill becomes a law because I found it to be a quick and easy topic to cover in a short video.

For a more musical and fun version, you should check out this oldie, but a goodie:

I chose to use the Adobe Voice to create my digital story. I also chose to use Alice in Wonderland as my theme for the story because I loved this book as a child, as well as all the movie adaptations that have came from it. I also think any piece of literature has a certain amount of history that ties into it, which I can relate back to my content area. Another reason I chose to use Alice as the theme character was because I do not feel that there are enough strong female characters that are represented for girls to look up to.But yes, I do believe Alice fits this description.

In the Adobe Voice app the feature were simple and easy to use. There was a few different  layout options to choose from, not as many as I would have liked, but enough to give a variety  to the user. Along with the different layout options were 32 different theme options to chose  from too. You can change to whatever theme you want, during whatever part of the video you  are in, but you can not change anything design about the theme itself.

Even with these minor things that I do not like about the app, I think overall this would be an easier app for the students to create their own story or recreate a historical event from their point of views, or the point of view from someone famous who was there. These videos would not have to be very long either, possible even under a minute depending on what it was that I wanted my students to create. I think that students would have a lot of fun getting to do a project like this because it would be unique and different from other things that they are assigned to do. And it’s free! Neither the school, the students, or their parents would have to pay for this app. So it would not effect the budget at all. I think those are three big reason that schools and teachers should think about when deciding to use this app; it’s simple and easy, the kids would get to do a fun and unique project, and it’s free!

Keep in mind that nothing is impossible, unless you believe it is!