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Welcome to EdTech Tuesday. I'm Rich Dixon. And I'm Jennifer Gibson. Jennifer, what app
did you bring to share with us today? I brought an amazing app called Foldify. It is a free
app. I'm going to go ahead and open it. I would say this is an app that would be very
interesting to elementary and even to some secondary teachers. I'm a big fan of foldables:
foldables are essentially a way to learn concepts and materials. In this case, you're going
to see a lot of shapes, which would be great for primary students. But I wanted to show
you a little bit about this app. It is free, if I didn't mention that already, free is
a good thing, and what I love about it is there's all these great foldables. So let's
say you're a primary teacher and you're working on communities. You can have students create
houses, they color, they create these communities, and they can move them around at the top.
You can see all the fun tools that are available, and then they print out so that you can actually
fold them - you see the picture here on the left that allows you to see what it might
look like finished (of course, colors and whatnot can be different). And it really gives
them that space recognition; it's a manipulative in a sense. I can also see this being of interest
and help when studying surface area, volume, and other concepts within geometry. Absolutely,
you could put numbers in there, you can move the image. If you've made any changes, it
will pick them up. Jennifer, I want to know how do I get this from my iPad out so that
students can actually do something with it? So you're going to see here that we have the
print icon, and what this does is it allows you to either email it as a PDF to your email
and then you can print it out that way, or if you have a printer that has the AirPrint
feature - this is a feature that not every printer has, but I'd say most of the new ones
do - this allows you to print directly from your iPad, as long as you're on the same network
as the printer. So that's one way that you can go ahead and print them out. I'm going
to show you, we're going to go back, and when you're back here there's a couple of things
that you can do. We're looking at some templates here, but we can then go into where they create
the shapes. Let me bring this up. This is an area where a number of people have shared
their Foldifies, so there's a lot of collaboration going on here. Here's one someone did on the
iPhone, and you can see what they did and how they created it. It's sort of like a social
media, you can like it and then have your students do something customized with that.
You can see there's tons of different options. Some of these are just fun shapes, but you
can use them in a presentation, you can use them again for shapes and features like that.
You can sort up here by Best, and this is by how many people have voted on these, and
you can see the vote number, and Newest over here. Jennifer, one idea that's coming to
my mind, amongst many I'm sure that you have for this app, is I can see if we created something
like this, say to represent one of the characters in a story, and to be able to even use the
edges here to write down different character traits, or different important events in plot
development. I can see a lot of application. If you're looking at this and you're thinking
"This looks just like a fun app," true, it is very fun, but I can also see a lot of different
ways to apply this in the classroom that are really meaningful. I want to go back real
quick to My foldify. When you hit the plus button, then you have all of these different
shapes that come up. These are the templates that they offer, and you can start to create
with them. And then they go ahead and give you a blank and you can add in different features,
like some eyes, you can drag those down and put those onto the image, as well as your
own photos from your iPad that you've taken. You can bring those right in. Then your Foldify
starts to become very customized, and like you said, then they can print it out and write
on it, fold it together and use it for a presentation. Jennifer, I think this looks like a great
app. Are you seeing any cons with this that we might not have already talked about? We
know we need a printer for it to get it from here, so that's not necessarily a con, we
just need to be aware of that. We do need to be aware of that. I think for its price,
its value, I think it's one of those apps that you're going to want to use if you had
a purpose for it, a purpose with meaning. It's not just a color tool, it's something
that, like you said, you have to think through the use of it: is it going to help them with
their learning? I think that's the important part with any app you're going to use. Any
final thoughts? I think you should buy it or download it for free.