Monday, May 21, 2012

Desert Angel by Charlie Price

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Fourteen-year-old Angel wakes up one morning at her desert trailer home to discover her mother has been murdered by a lowlife named Scotty, who has vanished. Angel has no water, no weapon, but she knows that Scotty, an expert tracker and hunter, will surface soon in order to eliminate her as a witness. She has to run, to disappear, if she is to survive and tell the world what happened. Her flight takes her through a harsh landscape to places she never expected to be, forcing her to trust others for the first time and strengthening her in ways she doesn't even anticipate . . . until it's time to take a stand.

App of the Week 5-21-12


Paper: FREE
Paper is an easy and beautiful way to create on iPad. Capture your ideas as sketches, diagrams, illustrations, notes or drawings and share them across the web. Paper was designed from the ground up for touch and creating on the go. No fussy buttons, settings or other distractions. Paper works the way you think, like a familiar notebook or journal. Have all of your ideas with you in one place.


http://itunes.apple.com/au/app/paper-by-fiftythree/id506003812?mt=8

Friday, May 11, 2012

App of the Week 5/11/12


Play the Piano on your Droid!

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.

The List by Siobhan Vivian

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Emily and seven other high school girls struggle with the way they see themselves and the way others see them after a list ranking the prettiest and ugliest girls is posted.

Monday, May 7, 2012

App of the Week 5/7/12


Instagram in Education


Part of this post also appeared on Free Technology for Teachers
Last month when Instagram became available for Android devices, Android users everywhere, myself included, clamored to install it right away. Instagram provides a platform for adding nice effects to the images you capture on your phone and sharing them with your friends on Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, and Tumblr. Earlier this week I drafted a post about  about using Instagram to have students post short photo essays to Tumblr. I scrapped the post because I wasn’t sure if that was really a viable option. As it turns out, I should have run with that post.

Valiant: a Modern Tale of the Faerie by Holly Black


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 Seventeen-year-old Valerie Russell runs away to New York City and befriends a group of very unusual characters who live in the city's subway tunnels and soon finds herself bound into service by a troll named Ravus.