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All About Apps Reviews
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Description: This app is designed to send or schedule quick announcements to an entire class, group, or individuals. Educators can choose to send one-way messages or choose to send and receive messages. Messages can be received through any device that receives text messages. Phone numbers stay private with this app; students and parents don’t see the sender’s phone number. Teachers can use remind to send out a variety of different types of announcements. Some examples of announcements are due dates for homework assignments, schedule changes, motivational messages, and school-wide events. You can also use Remind to start conversations with parents and students. Teachers are able to set office hours to show the best times to reach them. Conversations can be used to share personalized feedback with students and parents, reach out when you notice missing assignments, provide support to set absent students, send home quick updates about student progress and hold office hours to answer questions. A weakness of the app is that it can take awhile to load or send out messages. Also, messages are limited to only 140 characters. However, this is a great app to conveniently communicate with parents and students in your classroom
All About Apps Review
By: Cari Williams
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Description: Tales2go is great for children ages K-5 to help them with their Literacy Skills. Tales2go is your partner in the fight for better literacy, making it easier and more cost-effective to add a listening component to reading instruction. Repeated exposure to spoken words drives vocabulary acquisition and retention, which is a key component of reading proficiency. Tales2go streams over five thousand audiobook titles from leading publishers to desktops, laptops and mobile devices in the classroom and beyond. You can download just about any book to be heard by different storytellers. Students can hear the words being spoken and really get into the book. One weakness with this app is that the books only come in English. It would help if it came in other languages, so it could be integrated into language classes. One other weakness about the app is that the tech support is not the greatest. They have trouble communicating with customers in a timely manner.
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Description: Class Dojo is an app to help teachers, parents and students with classroom management. Every student has a profile and avatar. The teacher can assign positive or negative points throughout the school day. The app can be used on cell phones, computers, tablets, and SmartBoards. Every time a point is changed a sound plays to alert the class. The student profiles can be viewed by parents who have a login so they can monitor behavior from home. My students love the option of picking their own avatar and they work to earn points for rewards. The app is free and you can register at their website https://www.classdojo.com.
Invaluable Invitation
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The story begins with the line: “When I look at you, and you look at me, I wonder what wonderful things you will be.” This rhythmic rhyme story was written to express the best wishes from parents to children. Parents express their love and hopes for their children in this book. The parents hope their children can be kind, clever, and bold; all of these are kinds of value that parents want students to learn. There is a sentence in this book: “Take care of things much smaller than you.” These words are simple, but make an important point. Children are encouraged to protect the weak and small. Although every parent hopes their children can become excellent people in the future, the most precious wish from parents is that their children become who the children would like to be. This story tells the children that no matter what they are, no matter where they are, parents love their children. This story is easy, and the sentences are short, but it is sweet and worth to read because of showing the loving from parents.
Readers will also enjoy the illustrations. In this book, author and illustrator Emily Winfield Martin draws some children dressed up in various costumes, and introduces some interesting activities the kids would play.
After reading the book, parents and teachers can talk with them about what they want to be when they grow up. This book will help children remember and understand the importance of being kind and brave whoever they become in the future. Have fun with The Wonderful Things You Will Be.
Fan Yu teaches Chinese students English in China, and a students of Missouri State University working on a master of Science in Elementary Education degree.
Book Review
The Wonderful Things You Will Be
Written and Illustrated by Emily Winfield Martin
Review by: Fan Yu