We have come to a critical place as educators–to embrace technology or try to beat it down by forcing kids to keep it in their lockers or not bring it to school. While technology should not distract from learning it can enhance it if we let it. Here are some Apple App’s to aide in teaching Family Consumer Sciences.
Category: Technology
Family and Consumer Science Apps
Penzu- Have your Students Journal Online
Cross “journal” off your list of school supplies -the world’s going paperless and so should you and your classroom! The newest way to journal is online. Online journaling has been around for a while but Penzu is a little different…
Picture My Diet
A picture is always worth 1000 words and in this case can reflect your health. Inspired by the IPhone app called dietSNAPS, this unique lesson for visual learners allows students to track and assess their diets. The dietSNAPS app for the IPhone is a photo journal that allows users to take pictures of everything they ate and drank even pictures of themselves exercising and even send it to someone else for accountability. The app is fairly cheap at $1.99 and has generated a social following on Twitter and Facebook.
Personal Finance Resources
“Many young people fail in the management of their first consumer credit experience, establish bad financial management habits, and stumble through their lives learning by trial and error” states the Jump$tart Coalition. From this reality many programs have emerged all with one goal- to financially educate our young people. On this post I tried to list many of the notable programs, games, and websites that provide resources for financial literacy.
Arrange-a-Room
I am all about the free internet resources since supply budgets seem to get tighter and tighter every year. This free tool is a design a room tool that allows students to choose room dimensions and shapes, add furniture, and chose colors.
Online Fashion Design
On a recent internet search I found the coolest online fashion design sites that allows you to dress a model with real designer clothes and accessories. You can even change the facial expressions of the models. I had so much…
Electric Quilt
Electric Quilt integrates sewing with technology. It allows students to combine blocks, borders and virtual fabrics, turning their computer screen into a design wall. The program allows one to print quilt labels, draw original block designs, and even import scanned fabric and photos.
How to Download a You Tube Video
Have you ever seen the perfect You Tube video that you could use in your class but can’t show it to your students because your school blocks You Tube? Understandably schools block the site but there are powerful teaching aids…
How to Take a Movie Clip
Have you ever seen a scene from a movie and thought, “Wow that would be good to show my students!” Well, thanks to technology it is now easy to take movie clips from DVD’s and show them to your students. There are many programs that do this but my favorite one is AOA DVD RIPPER. It is free to use if you take a clip less than 10 minutes long and for my purposes ten minutes is plenty.