iPad Easel

Want a true authentic painting experience without the paint? Students can be engaged in art through the iPad. Simply download any drawing app that you would like and then put the iPad in an easel that provides multiple types of drawing/painting stylus and allow your students to draw via the iPad. No mess and the artwork can proudly be displayed on school websites or a blog because the drawings are already digital!

Practically you would need an easel and an iPad for each students, but if your school is looking to consider a class set of iPads, this could be one subject area you can share with them to help convince investing in iPads. Besides using this as a drawing easel, I can see this being used for a lot of other things.

I have invested a lot of money into iPad holders, ones with keyboards, ones that prop multiple angles, some that can be held both landscape and portrait style. The easel would provide a way to prop it up and with a synced blue tooth keyboard you can do some keyboarding practice or other apps where students would be unable to drop the iPad...a plus in my book.

The easels also come with additional tools. Some are equipped with a whiteboard on the other side to allow students to sign-up for iPad time or to have a brain storm/diagram session before moving to the iPad. Technology provides a lot of wondrous things, imagine what creative things you could do in the classroom with a stand for the iPad. Perhaps story time with an e-book where you show it off of the easel.

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App Review - DailyArt

Daily Art is a wonderful art app that provides the user with one classic art each day. This is a wonderful way to introduce students to art besides their own. Use this as a way to teach new styles, open up discussions about what the painting does for the people who look at it. Use it as a warm-up, have your iPad sitting out with the app open (use guided access, see guided access post if curious about protecting your iPad). The warm-up could be the classical art makes me feel, I believe this art was made to..., The use of the color in this artwork..., I wonder why the artist decided to... There are tons of different ways you can get students thinking with a little bit of exposure to different paintings and artwork and this app does the hard part for you, finding artwork to share each day.\

The app also gives you background behind the artwork as well as any information about the artist who made the artwork. After exposing this information, you could then hold another discussion about why the painting was made again after know some of the artist's background.

Check it out here on the apple store

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Free yourself from the front of the room!

There is an iPad app far superior in the effectiveness category, Splashtop whiteboard.

Whiteboard allows the teacher to connect his or her iPad to a computer through the internet. By syncing your computer to the iPad, I am now able to write on my iPad, click on my iPad, and even print from my iPad and everything that happens on my iPad will then occur on my computer as well. Imagine, you are doing notes on a projected smartboard. Instead of needing the smartboard you can simply hit the splashtop app, login and all of a sudden your iPad is now your smartboard....

BUT...you are no longer limited to the front of the room. You are free to move about your room or building (provided your building has wifi). Besides teaching, I can take notes immediately onto my computer from a meeting in or out of the building. I can print a page I forgot to the copier across the school without having to walk back and forth. I forgot a file once from my home computer, logged into my computer through splashtop and dropped the file into dropbox, thenI was able to get the file on my dropbox at school.

This is an extremely powerful app that does cost $20.00, but the uses go beyond the money. This app is so beneficial in everything I do in and out of school, that it was an obvious purchase.

There are several splashtop apps, the whiteboard addition is the app that allows you to annotate over your documents, providing a cheap alternative to the smartboard if you already have an iPad.

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