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Android 4 Schools

Apps and Devices for Schools

Practice the Piano on Your Android Tablet

As a high school student I was heavily involved in all aspects of  my school’s band programs. I started playing trumpet in elementary school and by the time I was in high school I could play every brass instrument. At some point in my high school years I took it upon myself to try to teach myself how to play the piano. There was only one problem with that, I didn’t have a piano at home and the school only had two pianos available. Fast forward almost twenty years and access to a piano is a problem for far fewer students thanks to Android apps. Here are three Android apps that students can use to learn and practice the piano on Android tablets.

Piano Lesson Tutor is a free app offering video lessons for students. The lessons are designed for beginner to intermediate level piano students. The videos are hosted on YouTube so you could just find them there. Piano Lesson Tutor organizes the videos into lessons for you.

Piano Pro is a free app that puts a virtual piano keyboard on your tablet or phone. The keys are labeled to help beginners. Piano Pro has a series of play-along songs to help you learn to play the piano. The play-along activities are completed by playing the keys above which notes are appearing.

xPiano is a free app that also puts a virtual piano keyboard on your tablet. The keys are not labeled so you do have to know which notes are associated with which keys. xPiano has twelve different instrument sounds with which you can experiment. The app also has a recording option that you can use to save your music and export it to other projects.

Create Simple Picture Stories with PicSay

PicSay is a fun little photo editing app that I’ve had installed on my Samsung Galaxy Tablet for a while, but only recently started playing around with it. PicSay allows you to add speech bubbles, text, and some special effects to your images.  To start using PicSay select pictures stored on your device or in your Google Picasa albums. When you’ve finished editing your pictures you can save them to your SD card or send them to a number of online storage sites including Evernote, Dropbox, and Google Drive.

PicSay could be used by students to create short stories by adding speech bubbles and text to some of their favorite pictures. Your students could take pictures of their pets, like I did, and create conversations between them.

Fun and Education With GPS Essentials

Yesterday, I published a post about creating QR codes for GPS locations to build scavenger hunts. In that post I mentioned an app called GPS Essentials that a friend turned me on to. I spent some time last evening having fun testing out GPS Essentials.

In addition to the expected features of showing your current latitude and longitude coordinates, GPS Essentials offers a bunch of other useful features. Using GPS Essentials you can measure your current altitude, measure distances, and record your tracks. You can export your tracks and waypoints as KML files to use in Google Earth and Google Maps. You can also import KML and GPX files to use in GPS Essentials to navigate to various locations.

Combine the use of QR-GPS Plugin with GPS Essentials to create and carry-out scavenger hunts. Use the combination to record and plan walking tours for your next field trip. Or use GPS Essentials to teach students basic lessons on navigation (if you’re taking students on actual hikes, long bike rides, or paddling trips, don’t use GPS Essentials as a replacement for a real GPS unit and maps).

Create QR Codes for GPS Coordinates to Create Scavenger Hunts

QR Droid is my favorite free QR code reader for Android devices. QR Droid website offers a free QR code generator that makes it very easy to create a QR code for just about anything. This weekend I installed a free plug-in for QR Droid called QR-GPS Plugin.

QR-GPS Plugin works with the free QR Droid app to allow you to quickly create QR codes for the GPS coordinates for wherever you are standing. You ca also manually input coordinates or manually input a location by entering an address. Whichever way you choose to input locations, the QR code that is generated for you can be share via text message, email, Twitter, or Facebook. You can also save the code to your SD card and print it. (Of course, if you emailed the QR code to yourself you could print it from there too).

When you scan the QR code generated by QR-GPS Plugin you can open it within a number of different Android apps including Google Earth, Google Maps,  and GPS Essentials. The QR Droid blog has detailed directions on how to use the QR-GPS Plugin.

For academic activities using the QR codes generated from QR-GPS Plugin, I have a few thoughts (with a little help from a friend).  First, since the codes easily open in Google Earth and Google Maps you could create geography puzzles in which students use clues to guess the location to which you’re leading them. Then to check their answers students scan the QR codes and open them in Google Earth or Google Maps on their tablets or phones. Second, create a scavenger hunt in which students go from location to location scanning QR codes to get directions to the next stop in the hunt. Finally, the QR codes could be scanned and saved in Google Maps or GPS essentials for students to use as part of a walking tour.

Use Bookmarks as Shortcuts in Chrome for Android

Chrome for Android (only available for devices running Ice Cream Sandwich) recently received a couple of handy updates. The first update of note is the option to toggle back and forth between the mobile and desktop version of a website. Some websites and blogs have that feature built-in, but for those that don’t this is a good way to choose the view that works best for your device.

The second handy update is the option to use your bookmarks as shortcuts on your device’s homescreen. Rather than launching your browser then opening your bookmarks, just click on the shortcut to launch directly into your favorite websites.

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