Tech Stuff: Recently used Apps

When I work with small groups of teachers and with students on to one or two I find that my iphone gets put to good service. As a Reading Consultant in a high school I am involved in a wide variety of learning opportunities throughout the day and week. Last week I used the following apps:
❑ Google Voice (web app): Because I have a “virtual” phone at school and rarely have time to collect messages from someone else’s real phone my voicemail message gives folks my Google Voice number. This way they can leave a message that is forwarded to my iphone (that I am not allowed to use during the day), send an SMS message with Google’s transcription and send an email. It has been very useful and sometimes humorous as the transcriptions can be tricky. Apple will not allow Google (or anyone else) to provide an app for this so the web app is the best alternative.
❑ finarXscan: After facilitating a meeting with a group of teachers I used this great program to get notes and agendas back to participants. Take a picture with the iphone, the program processes the picture with some choices for color and quality then turns the picture into a pdf. Multipage PDF’s can be created and emailed. Copies can also be stored on MobileMe or Dropbox. A great time and paper saver.
❑ Wurdle: This is essentially an electronic version of Boggle. Students enjoy using it and like to keep track of their scores. With no data to back me up here, I do think it helps students with word recognition and building fluency. And if these are just fantasies of mine, then I do know that playing with words makes struggling readers and spellers more confident. A nice touch to the game is the provision of a list of all the words one could have spelled, it highlights where the words are on the “cubes” and provides a definition of many of those words.
❑ Scrabble: see above-it all applies.
❑ Dictionary (.com): While learning to use the print dictionary is important, for many of my students the efficiency and suggested word lists make finding definitions much more appealing.
❑ Tweetie: I have been following #edchat (Tweets) and finding considerable helpful insights about teaching and literacy from some prolific Twitterers.
That is it for this entry. Hope you find some of these helpful.

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