Archives For ryanorilio

iOS App Review: Remind101- a safe way to send text messages to students & parents.

ryanorilio —  March 16, 2013 — Leave a comment

Ryan Orilio is a teacher, innovator, and Apple Distinguished Educator. Visit his blog at www.ryanorilio.com and follow him on twitter @ryanorilio.

Disclaimer: I started to write this review a few weeks ago; I had just gotten and started to use this app and thought it was great. However, I decided to put off the review until I had been using the app for longer than a few days in case my view of the app changed. I also wanted to get some student input about my use of the app in class.

Remind101 is an app for your iOS device. It allows teachers to send secure, free message reminders to students and parents. The message reminders can be in the form of text messages or emails. You can even receive both! The app is super easy to use, and setting it up literally takes 2 minutes.

Here’s how the app works:

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Why AppleTV & iPad beats Interactive Whiteboard….every time.

ryanorilio —  January 21, 2013 — 2 Comments

By Ryan Orilio, Apple Distinguished Educator.
Originally Posted at www.ryanorilio.com
Twitter @ryanorilio

Screen Shot 2013-01-20 at 9.28.16 AM

My school has interactive whiteboards installed in every classroom. This is a fairly recently upgrade. It was just in the last few years that this “initiative” was completed. Every classroom, K-12, has a interactive whiteboard and projector (unless the teacher asked to be excluded, and a few did)

Now don’t get me wrong, I think that as opposed to nothing, having a interactive whiteboard in your classroom is a great improvement. It helps teachers engage children, it jazzes up your lessons, it allows you to save what you write, and adds some interactivity to your classroom. These are all positive traits, and things that teachers are trying to do everyday.

My argument here is that if the school district is going to spend the money to install a interactive whiteboard, that money could instead be better spend on something else that does the job better… AppleTV & an iPad. I am speaking as someone who has used both tools in his classroom. In fact, at the first school that I taught at, I purchased an interactive whiteboard one year with my entire budget allocation. After I began to showcase the tool at professional development sessions, my school decided to put one in every classroom. Continue Reading…

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Re.vu in schools- Great for Visual Resumes and more!!

ryanorilio —  November 23, 2012 — Leave a comment

Written by Ryan Orilio, Apple Distinguished Educator. Follow him at www.ryanorilio.com or @ryanorilio.

I stumbled across Re.vu last year. It was actually something an esteemed colleague sent me thinking I would like it because I’m interested in good, simple, eye catching design. Also, its something new. Re.vu is a online service that allows the user to “design an interactive, dynamic, visual resume”. It’s not an online resume, its a whole lot more.

The way that re.vu works is through templates. There are a bunch of good, free templates which you can choose from. Many allow you to put an image in the background, and are highly customizable in terms of what type of information you want to include. If you don’t want to include a timeline, you simply uncheck for box for it. The online system is very easy to use, and took virtually no time for me to start setting up my first re.vu resume.

So I set up a simple resume on Re.vu. It looks pretty good, and as you can see, everything is styled kind of like an infographic. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, and infographic is a data-rich visualization about a topic or concern. Click here to see some sample infographics. Sometimes it’s easier to see as opposed to reading about what something is.

Anyway, after setting up my resume on re.vu (which I thought came out pretty well) i got to thinking about how this tool could be used in schools. I got pretty excited about it after realizing that there was a lot that could be done with the tool.
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24 Hours with the iPhone 5

ryanorilio —  September 22, 2012 — Leave a comment

So I just got an iPhone 5. To be fair, my wife actually got it for me while I was at work on Friday. I wanted to share my first thoughts after using the iPhone for a little more than a day, and through one battery cycle.

20120922-152707.jpgFirst, the size and shape… The iPhone 5 is noticeably thinner than previous versions. It is also lighter, and again, noticeably. The larger screen and taller phone work really well, especially when you hold the phone to your ear to take a call. Even that little bit of added height makes the phone feel a little more significant up to your ear and a little more comfortable. I’ve had phones in the past that just feel so small and weird when I’m taking a call on them. That’s definitely not the case here.

The larger screen is really nice too. Again, the increase in size isn’t a lot, but it feels like a lot when you’re doing something on the phone. Surfing the web all of a sudden is mush more enjoyable, and even using Facebook is much easier due to the increase Continue Reading…

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Review of Marble Math by Artgig Apps

ryanorilio —  September 9, 2012 — Leave a comment

IMG_0208Marble Math is a math skills practice game designed for older elementary age students. This app from Artgig Apps is a lot of fun, and for the $1.99 price tag, its a deal for you and your students.

Marble Math has three different levels of Math games that you can play. Each level has a variety of different types of math problems that you solve by rolling a marble through a maze and avoid fun obstacles.

The maze games can be played two ways, you can roll the marble with your finger, or use the iPad as a surface and as you tilt the surface the marble rolls towards the lower side. I really like this method of game play because it can work with students who need practice with manual dexterity.

Marble math works on a variety of different math skills. The easier mazes can work on adding, subtracting, roman numerals, fractions, and even money. As you progress into the higher levels division and multiplication are added, as well as decimals, comparisons, and sequencing. A real handy feature for parents and teachers, is the ability to customize what skills your students or children practice with Marble Math. Specific skills can be selected for practice in each of the three levels. Continue Reading…

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App Review – Fiske Interactive College Guide 2012

ryanorilio —  March 4, 2012 — Leave a comment

By Ryan Orilio, Apple Distinguished Educator


For the last 25+ years the Fiske College guide has been the go-to guide for students who want to begin their undergraduate school search. The Fiske Interactive College Guide is the interactive version of the printed guide, but different in that it included much more than the original.

The Fiske guide is is well laid out and easy to navigate. On the main screen you have the choice of looking through all of the included 316 schools in the guide, or the provided groupings of Best Buy public or private schools, or Ivy League schools. Tap on a grouping and the window expands so that you can scroll through the schools , alphabetically listed in the grouping.

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App Review: Shake-a-Phrase from ArtGig

ryanorilio —  February 20, 2012 — 1 Comment

By Ryan Orilio, Apple Distinguished Educator

Shake-A-Phrase, from ArtGig, is a young learning app that teaches parts of speech in an engaging and fun way. As an app for children ages 6-12, Shake-a Phrase is a good tool for teaching parts of speech and language, but I feel like the app has not yet reached it’s potential.

The app can be used in three modes. “Shake it” will shake up a silly sentence for you to read and identify the parts of speech.  “Story Starter” generates a silly question for you to answer. It is an attempt to start a funny story and have the user finish it.  “Quiz Me” generates a random sentence and asks the user to identify parts of the sentence.

When using in “Shake it” mode you can select from 5 themes for the sentences: Sports, Monsters, Fairytale, Animals, and the Shake Starter.  An example from the Fairytale theme: “The noisy and witty wolf grabbed a stinky orphan.” That is great because it allows children to learn and play with words and phrases that they may already be a bit familiar with.

When you touch a word in the sentence, the app highlights the word, identifies the part of speech, and offers a definition of the word. It would be great if the definition of the word was able to link to a WWW search, but it does not. According to ArtGig there are more than 2000 words that the app has to choose from, which means that it will be a long time before you run out of new sentence combinations! However, the app will only let the users identify nouns, adjectives, and verbs. So there are words in every generated sentence that cannot be tapped on for identification.

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Alien Buddies-Great Early Learning App!

ryanorilio —  February 6, 2012 — Leave a comment

This early learning app from Artgig Apps combines shape and color recognition, problem solving, counting, and motor skill practice, with a variety of fun, colorful characters. Alien Buddies is currently available from the App Store for $1.99, and can be used on your iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch running iOS 3.2 or later.


Alien Buddies has four games that your age 3-7 children can play. The 8 different Matching games let you work with colors, shapes, letters or numbers. There is even an audio option where the color, shape, letter or number is spoken, and your child selects the corresponding answer. You differentiate for different children by selecting numbers up to 50, and letters in capital, lowercase, or a combination to identify. The fun, interactive interface makes your child want to save the necessary 10 aliens in order to win the game!

The Dot to Dotgame is a great fun way for younger children to practice their fine motor skills. After selecting an image to draw, the dots to connect appear and you connect them by dragging on the touchscreen from numbered dot to dot. The number of dots in the puzzles ranges from 10-17, for different levels of difficulty. This is also a great game for practicing sequential counting. The game counts out loud for you as you identify the next number in the sequence, and you can even turn on the “help” which will cause the next number in the sequence will be identified for you.
The Puzzle can be played with 4, 6, or 8 piece puzzles. Continue Reading…
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Take 360° video with your iPhone

ryanorilio —  January 22, 2012 — Leave a comment

By Ryan Orilio, Apple Distinguished Educator

The Kogeto Dot is a $79.99 camera attachment for your iPhone 4 or 4S that allows you to create 360° videos. I got a chance to play with one, and I then passed it among the students in my high school Video Productions class, and this is what we thought about it.

Attaching the Dot
The Dot is very easy to attach to your phone. It snaps on the back of your phone (once you have removed your phone from it’s case) and automatically aligns the mirror above your camera. It is not difficult to remove either, and the plastic of the case seems pretty sturdy. (I wasn’t afraid that it was going to break at any time).
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