"Lisa Johnson from Edudemic has a list of 9 great tools for making summer learning fun and engaging!"

Rapidly approaching the dog days of summer (give or take a few days or weeks), I felt a need to share a power packed suitcase of tools that could be used to archive your summer highlights and memories. Many educators never really go on vacation. While they may appear to be leisurely sipping daiquiris on the beach, let’s be realistic… their brains are constantly running, reflecting, and mentally archiving away ideas for the next school year.

To meet both the recreational and curricular needs of educators, I have concocted a special blend of FREE web tools and apps, highlighting both extracurricular as well as instructional integrations for each. Hopefully, these tools will exceed your souvenir quota and prove to be true digital treasures for the 2014-2015 school year as well.

iOS Apps

Bubbli

Create 360 panoramic bubbles of the sights and sounds of places you visit that others can explore by clicking on a shared link.

• Recreational: Share 360 views of your favorite destinations in a weekend photo challenge. (Examples)
• Curricular: Compose a 360 bubble of a classroom remodel to share with parents and the community. (Example)

Photo Mapo

Transform photos into mapped masterpieces.

• Recreational: Blend textual anecdotes, pics, and actual maps of places you visit. 
  
• Curricular: Create Augmented Reality postcards detailing facts about countries and landmarks, research habitats and compose a digital artifact, or document a field study (in Swedish).

Flowboard

Create an interactive photo album.

• Recreational: Explore 10 Places to Visit Before You Die and Summer 2012 Photo Album
• Curricular: Create a Flowboard to highlight renewable resources.

Bill Atkinson PhotoCard

Send a digital postcard with text, photos, and even links.

• Recreational: Everyone enjoys receiving postcards… whether it be by snail mail or electronic. While most postcard apps allow users to share only one photo, consider sharing additional travel photos with friends and family via a Photo Stream link which can easily be pasted into the text portion of a digital postcard.
• Curricular: Descriptive Writing, Imaginative Stories, Reflective Writing, and Physics Challenges using digital postcards.

Strip Designer

Create a comic of your adventures.

• Recreational: Create a comic to reflect and share your learning and experiences from an event. (Example using Comic Life)
• Curricular: Use comics to recreate a chapter of a book as a graphic novel, engage in a pattern hunt, explore a virtual city, display their knowledge of onomatopoeia and vocabulary, explore bat conservation and landforms, and give key figures of the Enlightenment relevance.
• Curated Curricular: Explore 120+ EDU examples integrating comic creation iOS apps.

Device Agnostic

These 4 tools were featured in a recent post, “5 Tools for the Device Agnostic Classroom”. While they clearly have sound curricular connections, they can also be extended to transform and archive your multimedia memories into a digital depot that can be shared with friends and family.

Snapguide

Highlight Each Day of a Trip with a Multimedia Guide.

• Recreational: How to Have An Awesome Time in Copenhagen, How to Do the Great Ocean Road from Melbourne in 4 Days, How to Have a Great Vacation in the Pacific NW
• Curated Curricular: Explore 250+ EDU Snapguide examples

Haiku Deck

Publish a Slideshow of Trip Pics and Anecdotes

• Recreational: San Antonio Summer Vacation and My Summer Vacations Haiku Deck
• Curricular: Research Projects and Showcasing a Year in Poems
• Curated Curricular: Explore 3,000 curated examples

Tackk

Create a Multimedia Travelogue!

• Recreational: Vacation in Switzerland, My Roman Holiday, and Hola Espana: Sangrai and Tapas
• Curricular: Share resources for professional development or have students create a Tackkfor a particular research topic or presentation.

Thinglink

Augment a Photo, Map, or Collage!

• Recreational: Places I’ve Been Interactive Collage, Trip to Rome Travelogue,Trip to Rome Augmented Itinerary, Tropical Vacation with Soundbytes
• Curricular: Explore Liberty and Famous Structures of the World or Augmented Global Impact of the Cold War
• Curated Curricular: Explore 500+ EDU Thinglink examples

As the true intent of these applications is to blend engaging extracurricular artifacts of summer with ideas for integrating these digital gems all year long, let the learning and sharing continue all summer long. Share your digital creations with your social and personal learning network and keep the learning rolling all summer long and beyond.

—Via Edudemic

To learn more from Lisa Johnson, you can hear her at the July 28-30 EdTechTeacher Summit. She will also be teaching a three day iPad Classroom workshop in Austin, TX this August.Lisa Johnson is also the author of the TechChef4u blog and curates multiple ed tech and technology integration resources on her popular Pinterest boards.