App Review: Stick Pick

Stick Pick has become a must have app for my classroom and I believe it can truly help any classroom teacher no matter what age level! I first heard about Stick Pick at an Anita Archer workshop (she's great by the way!) when she was discussing formative assessment for today's classroom. Stick Pick is a teacher tool that has transformed my whole group differentiation and excelled my students' comprehension and academic achievement.  This app beats calling on students using the old 'pull a stick with a name on it from a can' method (although that is essentially what this is but with a whole lot of awesomeness in that can!) Priced at $2.99 it is an app that is definitely worth its weight in popsicle sticks! We feature this app in our formative assessments utilizing iPads classes for educators and here are a few (okay many) reasons why and the basics of Stick Pick:

• Create as many classes as you want within the app. This is great for tracking progress across multiple academic areas or for teachers who have many classes/small groups that they see in a day. I know of an interventionist who uses this app and loves it!

• You can use it as just a can with sticks with names on them if you want, or you can have question stems assigned to each student that will appear when you pull their stick.

• The question stems are categorized into three modes: ESL, Bloom's Revised or Bloom's. 

We love that we can set what
type of questions to ask students!

• You assign each student within those three modes. The breakdown of the modes are:
• ESL: Beginning, Early Intermediate, Intermediate, Early Advanced, Advanced
• Bloom's Revised: Remembering, Understanding, Applying, Analyzing, Evaluating, Creating
• Bloom's: Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, Evaluation

• When you notice that a student is either struggling or excelling, you can easily go into the student's profile and adjust their question stem level.

• Once you have all your students entered, you can easily copy an entire class with or without the scores, saving you time on re-entering each student again if you have the same or similar roster. You can also choose if you want to be able to pick a stick by tapping, shaking the device or both and if you want the sound on.  And for all you lefties out there, there is also a left-handed mode! 

• When you choose your class you will be taken to a screen with all your sticks in a can. From there you can choose to 'peek', allowing you to choose a specific student to assess. Or you can tap/shake your device to let the app randomly choose a stick for you.

• When a student is chosen (either by you or randomly) a screen appears that shows you their name, the options to assess, reset the stick and mark it as used.  You will also see 10-20 question stems from that student's assigned learning level. We love the options within the question stems and have found them to easily work into whatever content we are discussing.

Just like when we want our students 

to pick 'just right work' this app 

helps us ask 'just right questions'

• After the student answers you can track if they answered it correct, incorrect or assign them a score of 0-5 on a preset rubric. For Bloom's and Bloom's Revised modes it is a Critical Thinking Rubric. For ESL mode it is a Degree of Elaboration Rubric.

Critical Thinking Rubric

• Once you score the student you can either mark it as used so it goes into a different 'used can' or reset the stick to put it back in with the other sticks to be chosen from again. 

What the main screen looks like

• The teacher gets to choose what can to pull the stick from, so even if you mark it used you can still access those students' sticks before resetting the entire class. At any time you can reset the class so that all the sticks go back into the main can. 

• Student's responses and progress is recorded within the app. You can easily go into each student's profile to see their history (super helpful when grading time comes around!) and you can send the information out via email. 

Being able to see student's past results
allows us to reflect on student progress

Whoa! That is a ton of information! It may seem overwhelming to read about, but it really is a simple, easy to use app.  If you are wanting to improve your formative assessments, classroom discussions, and differentiation of instruction this app can help you!

One of my first ever principal observations suggested that I work on incorporating more higher level thinking questions into my whole group instruction. Working with a group of students that included those who were new to the country with little to no English all the way to gifted and talented students made that goal huge and daunting.  Wish I would've known about this app then, as it really takes all the work out of higher level questioning at the right level for each student! 

Upper grades can even use this app within their small group work, allowing students to ask each other questions, making their work more on point and productive.  We highly recommend Stick Pick as a top teacher app! Let us know how you are utilizing Stick Pick in your classroom!

Running Records with iPads & App Review: Levelbook

Levelbook by Von Bruno is a great app for teachers to use when testing their students' literacy. We love that Levelbook is designed, developed and maintained by a professional certified teacher. As of right now Levelbook costs $4.99.

Gone are the days of making copies and carrying around a binder of running records (yahoo!). Teachers now have a tool that combines their basic running record format with a calculator, stop watch features, and the ability to record the student reading and play it back at a later time. We are big fans of this app because it allows us to go back throughout the year and listen to our students' reading progress with our students! We can share these recordings with other teachers who are working with our students or with parents at conference time. The developer has added many great features in the latest update, and through our conversations with him it sounds like there are many more wonderful features to come!

Here are some of the other main highlights of Levelbook:

• Simple and clean format of this app makes it easy to use and access daily.
• Cloud storage available now so you can access your student's information across multiple devices.
• Student's audio and running record information is recorded and saved, along with scores, notes and flags. These can be easily seen and accessed under each student's profile, listing them in chronological order. They are also color coded based on whether that book is considered independent, instructional or frustration level for that student.
• Students are color coded according to their achievement to the benchmark data that you input. When viewing an entire class you can quickly see who is at grade level or below. See picture above.
• 5 different reading level systems are supported, inlcuding Fountas & Pinnell (what our district uses) as well as Reading A-Z, Reading Recovery, DRA, Lexile, and PM Reader.You select what reading system you are using when setting up your class accounts.

• You only need to input book titles and information once. The app then remembers it and stores it in a drop down box for you. You can input all your book information ahead of time, or you can add books as you go. We've done both and are big fans of each aspect of this feature! See picture to the left.

I presented at our district's staff development day on Utilizing Running Records with Your iPad and featured Levelbook during that class. Here is a part of that presentation reviewing running records basics as well a simple how to guide we created for Levelbook. At the very end there is a slide with some of the possible updates coming to Levelbook! As we've said before, we LOVE it when developers take feedback from educators and use it to better their products! 

We've discussed utilizing your iPads for your classroom running records before in our review in Record of Reading, and we continue to encourage teachers to make the leap from using the old fashioned paper route to using a great app such as Levelbook! It will streamline your running records by freeing up time, space and hopefully a little bit of your sanity! Well we can't promise that last one, but know that we've found Levelbook to help us stay organized, portable and minimize the time we spend assessing--leaving us with more time for teaching! Let us know if you are using Levelbook in your classroom! 

Using PDF Expert App to Make Assessing Easier!

Every year I find myself reevaluating how I do my assessments.  I'm fortunate to work in a school district that already has standards based grading and assessments that coordinate, however it feels like every year I'm lugging around more and more paperwork and stuff that I find myself not often using.  Then come the end of the year I have oodles of paperwork that I need to shred, which hurts my heart to see all that paper used and then forgotten about.  So with school quickly approaching one of my tasks this summer was to streamline my beginning of the year assessments.  I want it to be quick, easy, portable, and most of all as paperless as possible!

I wasn't sure if this was entirely possible until I remembered this fantastic app called PDF Expert. According to iTunes  It lets you read and annotate PDF documents, highlight text, make notes, draw with your finger and save these changes being compatible with Preview and Adobe Acrobat.  This app is geared more specifically for business people, but Normoff is always on the lookout to see how we can make our lives in education easier with whatever is out there! I'm not going to give you a complete run through on this app, but rather a quick guide as to how you can use PDF expert to make your own portable assessments with the documents you already have.

Step 2 Choose a Server

Step 1: Create your document and save it as a PDF (or if you are already using a PDF you are ahead of the game!)


Step 2: Save your PDF to one of the many supported servers in PDF Expert. I use Google Drive as that is what I use the most anyway, but you can also use Dropbox which many teachers are familiar with.


Step 3: Open the PDF Expert app and then open the network by pressing the blue network button on the left hand side of the app. Select Add to choose the server and then choose the server you wish to connect to.

Step 4 Download the PDF

Step 4: Follow the prompts on PDF Expert to log into that server. When you are logged in you should then be able to see all the documents, including the one you created. Select the document you want and it will instantly transfer to your screen as a download.






Step 5: Open the download.  You can now write and fill out the form as you want.  There are two main tools I used at the top right-the text box creator and the pen.  The text box creator was nice and makes the paper look more clean and formal, however if you are in a hurry it can get just a little bit tricky getting it to line up exactly where you want it to be.  The pen feature works best with a stylus and is my preferred method of note taking.  Don't worry, there is an eraser and an undo button as well.  I'd recommend playing around with this at home so you can press all the buttons to see what they do like I did! I also really like the ability to stick a note onto it to jot down any tidbits of info.

Step 5 Write using text or pen

Step 5 Add a Note

Step 6: After you have taken all of your notes on your student (thank you movie star Ryan Gosling for volunteering to help us!) Press the square with an arrow icon in the top right corner. This will let you send, print or save a copy of the document. I saved the copy with the students name and then the name of the document. This is terrific because it allows you to always have the original waiting for you for the next student! Now you can see your saved copy on the downloads section as well.

Step 6 Save as a Copy

Step 6 Name your File

Step 7 Find Your Work

Step 7: If you need to go back in and continue to work, just open up the copy from the documents/downloads section or from the recents section. Know that you do NOT need to save as a copy every time, it will automatically save changes you've made without you needing to do anything! Woot Woot!! Isn't that every teacher's dream!


Step 8: If you need to you can easily print to a wireless printer or email it to someone.




So that is how I'm going to start my beginning of the year assessments: paperless, streamlined and efficient! It seems like a lot of info but I promise it is actually super easy to do!

We find that PDF Expert is a great teaching app especially within the Daily 5 format.  If you want to hear more about how we use PDF Expert join us for one of our workshops like iPad Apps for Teachers, Creating Formative Assessments Using iPads or How to Maxmize Learning using iPads with Daily Lesson Plans.  Hope to see you there!