Think outside the app: 3 outstanding examples of app-smashing

What-smash?

Despite sounding like a weird potato-fruit dish, app-smashing gets your students thinking less about apps and more about tasks. Hopefully with a minimum of actual smashing.

App-smashing is when you give students a specific assignment that can best be solved using more than one app. iPads4Teachers has a fantastic overview of app-smashing here.

Sounds good, but I need examples

You got ’em!

1. Video cards

Sylvia Duckworth, an elementary grades French teacher in Canada, created Mother’s Day video cards by taking screenshots with HaikuDeck, then importing those into iMovie to add voice and music. The result, you’ll agree, is simply smashing*!

2. Cultural anthropology

A group of students at the Cabot School in Vermont tackled a cultural anthropology project by using iPhones to record audio interviews they did with community members, editing the audio in GarageBand, then embedding the results in a map with Thinglink. Smash!

3. Show your work: demonstrate your solution to the problem

Susan Hennessey put together the above video as part of an assignment for the MOOC Creativity: Music to My Ears. She writes:

We were tasked with picking a problem, brainstorming 100 possible solutions for how music could help solve it (on a shared Google doc) and then selecting 2 or 3 to create a novel solution.  We were given 1-minute to present the problem and solution.  Since we were working with middle level students, we wanted to defer to what they liked about the 100 possibilities.  The two profiled by the Tellagamis are the top two selected.

Google Docs + Tellagamis + iMovie. A novel approach to the assignment, which, after all, is what app-smashing is all about.

What are some ways you’ve used app-smashing in your classroom?

*I’m actually obligated by law to make that pun at least once during this blogpost. True story.

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