The Purple Parade

This year our district switched to Google Apps for Education.  All students in the district were given a Google account.  Then, our district bought a few of the Nexus 7 tablets powered by Google.  (As I wrote about previously in this blog, one of our buildings is trying out the bring your own device and the tablets work well for those students who don't have an internet enabled device to bring).  The tablet works seamlessly with Google Email and the Google Drive.  According to USA Today , the Nexus 7 is more flexible than the Amazon Kindle Fire.  What I have found is that you can download many free educational apps from the Google Play store to the Nexus 7 and use the Google Drive and Email, too. Today, I was working with a teacher to set up the Nexus 7 for a special education student.  That student has a hard time writing. So, the teacher wanted a voice activated app that would type what was said and then print it out so it could be edited by h...

Today, my son (who's in 2nd grade) learned a valuable lesson... " save early, save often ".   He loves history and has been on a pirates kick for awhile now.  He was even a pirate for Halloween.  He's been reading and rereading the same book about pirates for months. Today he decided to make a book about pirates. He got on the iMac and started typing in an old version of Microsoft Word for the Mac.  It is not a very good program, but it's pretty easy to use for a 2nd grader.  He was almost done when all of a sudden, the program crashed.  He didn't know what had happened.  I asked him if he had saved his work, but he said "No."  The tears started to well up in his eyes.  My heart was breaking for him.  He had worked so hard for hours on this book.  He could've been playing on the Wii or watching TV, but instead he was reading up on pirates and making a book about it.  I reopened the program to see if I could save it. ...