Getting into College with the Help of the Web

Rather than taking your chances with serendipity, UClique can help with customized program for students, their parents and high school guidance counselors. For kids, the service can connect them with the most appropriate school and track every aspect of the process, while their parents can see the status and the possibilities for getting financial aid. Schools can use it to manage the process and make sure every transcript, recommendation letter and test score gets sent.

 

Freebee Friday: Palz with Money

A cool way to raise some cash for your school and get the kids to be more active is to get the school to use the GeoPalz online game. The game encourages participants to donate money towards the game’s upkeep and buy physical objects that have a pedometer inside. There’s a new object – from a tiny football to a ladybug – every three months and a school or district can get a cut of that cash flow. Basically, every step the student takes in the real world is recorded with the pedometer and get transferred into the GeoPalz online domain, getting them closer to a goal and prizes. Teachers can monitor each student’s progress and a whole class can take a virtual field trip with this online world.

 

Photo Art in a Snap

Schools thinking about expanding their art program to include digital image manipulation should look at SnapSeed. While the desktop version of SnapSeed works with Macs and PCs, there’s also a version for an iPad and the company is working on software for an Android tablet. Version 1.4 works with the latest iPad hardware and software as well as having fine-tuned black-and-white filters and a center focus filter. As is the case with the desktop versions, the mobile SnapSeed software has lots of tutorials and help with technique as well as the ability to share finished works.

 

All in One Management

Tired of navigating through a dozen programs to keep attendance, record grades and all the other things that a school does? Skool Manager is a school management suite that’s written in India and puts it all – from admissions to payroll – into one package. The software has modules for attendance, scheduling, library, exams and more. The Lite edition (for one user) costs $800, while the Enterprise version (for up to 10 users with customized reports) costs $2,500.

 

Rosetta Stone Takes to the Web

Rosetta Stone has a new product for schools that can help every kid learn a foreign language. It’s called Totale Pro K-12, which rather than traditional software has its dynamic immersion lessons delivered as needed over the Web. It works with PCs, Android and iPhones or iPads. Available first in French, Italian, Mandarin, Spanish and German, the system includes all the content of the traditional Rosetta Stone products, but also has games and Studio, which offers live feedback online with a coach and other students. There’s also an administrative tool to track student progress and aid in assembling grades.

 

 

The Cloud Gets Creative

What if you could get all the apps in Adobe’s Creative Suite as downloads as needed on a subscription basis? Well, that’s exactly what Adobe’s Creative Cloud is all about with the latest versions of all the Creative Suite 6.0’s contents along with 20GB of storage space online for everything from digital art and Web sites to class assignments. Adobe’s cloud adds two new online apps that are hosted online: the Edge HTML 5 editor and the Muse Web design tool. The creative Cloud is available only to individuals at the moment for $50 a month, but Adobe is looking at creating district-wide licenses for this product.

 

Freebee Friday: Dictionaries without the Bulk

We’re all used to seeing the classroom bookshelf of Merriam-Webster or American Heritage dictionaries sag under their collected weight, but there’s a better way to get the right word. With the right software, an Android device, whether it’s a tablet or a phone, can be an excellent classroom dictionary.

These three wordsmith apps work well in portrait or landscape orientation and get kids off to a good start by predicting the word they’re looking for based on the first letters typed. It’s excellent help for flustered early writers to find the exact word they’re looking for.

With money to replace printed dictionaries hard to find, these digital reference works are free and just a download away. The downside is that they display small and easy-to-ignore ads to pay for their operations. For a few dollars, the ads can disappear.

DICTIONARY.COM

Going from a printed dictionary to Dictionary.com is less jarring than you might think because the pages have the look of a traditional dictionary with numbered definitions that are organized by word form. On top of a vocabulary-increasing daily word, Disctionary.com has a separate thesaurus for finding the right synonym for when words fail; the two are linked for quick look-ups. In addition to audio pronunciation help, kids can speak words of interest into the tablet to get to the word’s meaning, spelling and definition. Dictionary.com has detailed and often surprising information about the word’s origin and you can eliminate the ads for $3.

MERRIAM-WEBSTER DICTIONARY

For many, Merriam-Webster is the definition of dictionary. The company’s Android app comes in a smaller and more portable package, yet mirrors the content of the company’s flagship Collegiate Dictionary. There’re several digital goodies included, like the ability of kids to speak the word to get a definition. The dictionary promises to update itself with the latest in cyber-speak and it highlights related words in the definition that are linked to their entries. In addition to its origin and when the word was first used, Merriam-Webster has audio pronunciation examples. A big plus is that rather than a separate thesaurus, synonyms and antonyms are displayed with the definitions. The ad-free version costs $3.

URBAN DICTIONARY

Tom Clark’s Android Urban Dictionary is hipper and edgier than the others (e.g., mouse potato: the computer or gaming equivalent of a couch potato), but may not be appropriate for all classes. Unfortunately, the app lacks audio pronunciation help and all-too-often the definitions cross the line into slang, irreverent language and scatological terms. Still, it has access to more than 6 million entries, so it’s complete as well. It has a cool feature that will become a classroom favorite with students: shake the slate to get a random word with definition and example. It may seem haphazard, but it’s an excellent way to increase a class’s vocabulary. You can dump the ads for a reasonable $2.

 

 

What’s in a Name?

Because a new version of Windows is on the way, 2012 is shaping up as a year that most school IT people are simultaneously looking forward to and dreading. First and foremost, look for a simplified interface that uses Microsoft’s Metro interface and is based on manipulating large icons called tiles that can show information themselves. The lineup, at least at first, will be simplified from the current five versions to three:

• Plain old Windows 8 will be on a par with Win 7 Home Premium that is included with most computers. It’ll be more than enough for most student and teacher use, but lacks the ability to perform some computing tasks;
• Windows 8 Pro will be on a par with current Win 7 Pro or Ultimate and have things like encryption included;
• Windows RT will easily be the most innovative of the three and come on ARM-powered notebooks and tablets. It will likely only work with new Win 8 apps and early reports show that it may have trouble connecting with an Active Directory Server. It will come with a version of Office.

The good news is that these changes to the computing status quo will occur sometime in the fall. The bad news is that there won’t be an automatic upgrade route from XP or Vista systems, which many schools continue to use.

 

High Res All the Way

What’s the use in having high resolution tablets if the software can’t take advantage of all those pixels. The latest Art Rage from Ambient Design not only can use every bit of the new iPad Retina display and adds a bunch of new features, but costs less. At $5 a copy, the drawing app can work with a 2,048 by 2,048 digital canvas and now can import images from cameras, has an improved color picker and can save images as .PTG files.

 

Freebee Friday: Software for Special Students (and Teachers)

All too often, the special software that disabled students need to work with computers and learn with the rest of us is too expensive for schools to afford. The SEN Teacher site takes the opposite approach with a slew of free programs for helping kids learn. There’s everything from applications for communicating with images and an interactive program that identifies a skeleton’s parts to mouse software that filters out the jitters from hand tremors. It’s all free and ready for the download.