For this weeks review I looked at the book series One Best Thing. This is a series of books published by Apple but written by educators from a wide arrange of backgrounds and topics. The books cover a wide variety of things from teaching strategies, great apps and what to use them for and different classroom technologies. They are short books that are helpful to implement a strategy into practice successfully. All the books are free on the IBook store and more will be added in the future.

For my book I looked at Apple TV: A Deployment Guide. This short book is about how to successfully implement an Apple TV in the classroom. I choose this book because of my recent use of Apple TV has been a learning experience and I think it does have merit in the classroom. The author of this book was Mr. Paul Yip, he has been a Computer Resource Teacher for 10 years in Ontario, Canada. This book is about 18 pages going over brief deployment guides for the Apple TV from costs, installment, use, and security. It starts off by giving a brief explanation of how the Apple TV is useful in 1:1, shared devices and BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) classroom by allowing a consistent flow in learning because this device is basically a lot of devices in one, like an interactive whiteboard, projector, and TV. Then it starts by talking about a proper place to keep the device where it would be the most effective. It needs to be close to Ethernet,  Power and an A/V wall plate. Then it briefly goes over mounting, saying it is not necessary but because it is small, portable and lacking a locking hole it is recommended to get some kind of security lock. A few brands it discussed were a Tryten mounting plate, or even just aluminum plumbers tape. For safety he recommends plastic panduit, raceway, wire-mold or a steel conduit depending on your schools regulations. This is for cord safety as well as management to make the classroom look neater and safer for the students. The Apple TV can also be run through WIFI but it is recommended to run it through an Ethernet jack just for a consistent stream.  Overall he says to work closely with the IT department to make sure of proper set-up and connectivity between classrooms and teachers. It runs through air-play on any Apple product 2nd generation and newer and can also be used on some third-party applications but it is not recommended because they are not supported by Apple.  In the final part of the book he goes over cost and cost saving. The Apple TV costs about $109 and with mounts, panduits, and cables it makes it around $250 which does seem like a lot of money especially if you are putting it in all the classrooms. But in his cost saving questions he discusses how it is cheaper than it seems. Given that an average interactive whiteboard costs anywhere between $3000-$5000 you can install Apple TV in multiple classrooms for that price and the IPad can do almost as much as the interactive whiteboard can which would be incredibly cost effective in lower end schools. Overall this book was really informative on how to purchase, install and run Apple TV in schools but it does not do any explaining on an application in the classroom besides as a replacement for interactive whiteboards. But given that these books are a basic introduction to a topic more exploring would be done on an individuals part.

I really like these series of books, they are very entertaining and filled with a lot of interesting knowledge about a varying amount of topics. I recommend them to anyone going into the field of teaching in any concentration.

For this weeks Blog Reflection I looked at Doug off the Record. Currently Doug Peterson works at the University of Windsor, but also taught mathematics at the secondary level. This blog site is pretty random not really focusing on one topic but rather a variety of topics of what ever Doug says, strikes his fancy at that moment in time. It looks at mathematics, weather, education, politics or really anything that is interesting at the time. Overall I did not really care for this blog at all, it was really random and I could not find any real resources for teachers. This blog is more or less just an interesting site to look around if you need to kill some time, but if you are looking for anything meaningful I would really go somewhere else. Each blog is specified to a topic but his blogging style is wild and does not keep your attention for long. He uses a lot of suffixes but does not explain what the suffix stands for but rather expects you to know them, from CS to PLN. For an example one of his blogs When does software become useless, looks at the use of a computer game in the classroom with educational value and the new Microsoft office system. He starts explaining interesting takes on these but does not expand on them, he even states a couple of inquires he was asked recently but instead of answering the questions he just said “those of you who know me, know how I answered,” that is not really appropriate for an educational site, he should of expanded and answered them for those people who don’t know him. So I do not recommend this blog to teachers or students unless you know this guy personally or have seen some of his speech panels.

For this weeks blog reflection I looked at Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day. Larry Ferlazzo is an English, Social Studies and ELL teacher in Sacramento, California. As well he is also a published author writing about ELL/ESL in the classroom.

The website itself if pretty plain but overall well organized. Everything is organized into well thought out categories. Some cool things he has on the site include links to buy his books, a list of his most popular blogs and links to his other blogging websites which specialize more towards the English side of his background. His blog posts specialize in popular websites around the web that would have significant importance to teachers and students. Some things he includes are “The Best Sites to Learn About…….” which is a series of blog posts pertaining to a variety of topics from the Vancouver Winter Olympics, The Haiti earthquake, holidays and even popular figures in history. These are interesting because teachers can give them to students to do projects or even just to explore topics related to what they had been learning. One of the most interesting one was The Best Sites to Learn About Martin Luther King, this would be great for me in my classroom to allow students to research more into civil rights and some of the background behind one of the major leaders. One thing that is important in all his posts is that he only puts websites that are accessible to ELL students. A few other key points to his blogs is that he posts the best sites for particular subjects, website apps, and IPad apps. He is very deep and informative in all his blog posts and they are well thought out and well done and it is very important for both the classroom and for teachers to gain information.

For or this weeks blog reflection I looked at Ditch That Textbook. This blog was written by Matt Miller who is actually a Spanish teacher. After many years of trying to teach he went into a textbook free classroom using a combination of student influenced teaching and technology integration and found a lot of positive results.

The main topics of his blog posts are different ways to use technology from apps to help assessment and websites to help teach essay writing. As well he also writes about how teachers can improve themselves. One of his blog posts that really caught my eye was 10 useful tools for assessment with tech. The reason this post was so good was because it went over various apps you could use in order to assess your students in a non-traditional manner.  One of these was the answer pad which allows students to draw there answer.

Overall this blog was really fun and informative. The layout was really good and easy to follow unlike a lot of blogs of this manner. As well he also includes links to other sites and even to his book about this topic. This is definitely a blog I would go to again in the future.