Full day workshops are $165.00 at the ICE (Illinois Computing Educators) Conference. The App Creation for Teachers session, led by Jim Shese, covered exploring free and low cost app building sites such as Appypie and iBuildapp and it was fun to mess around with sites I had not used before. Another great benefit of the day was the super people taking the class alongside of me such as @RobinAWyatt and @KirkRun4Stroke and also Joan from Oak Park.

I knew the class was worth it early on in the morning when an idea popped into my head regarding an app I could make that would be extremely useful at our school. I have built two successful apps using Yapp already and the last one in particular has been well received.  I was wondering what I might do next. Yesterday I started designing my next project.

I’ve been working with one of our Science teachers at school with three of her classes. I created a Google Sites ePortfolio template for the students to use and they are putting their work into them. I have also visited the classes to help them with various aspects of displaying their work digitally. One of the things I have been doing is making tutorial movies for them and including the YouTube movies in the demonstration site they are using created by me and their teacher. They can watch a movie in one tab, and then go to their ePortfolio tab to put in use what they watched, popping back and forth as needed.

Here is the plan for my next app.  I’ll make an app and put their tutorial movies in it. These students are using Chromebooks, which means the screen size is not huge. Having the tutorials on their cell phones on an app, right next to their Chromebook should work out well. I love this idea and can’t wait to test it out next week with the students. I’ll let you know what they tell me.