Today I review several informative lesson ideas provided by Apple Distinguished Educators that will be very beneficial to use in my classroom. To find the 30 inspiring ideas for teachers, you must download the free app iTunes U. In this app, you will be able to search through many apps for both teachers and students. Once you click on the For Educators icon, the apps will be limited to lesson ideas, apps for your classroom and so forth. If you click on the Inspiring Lesson Ideas category, you will see the 30 courses provided ranging from art to math and several other subjects.

There were several courses that really interested me, my top four are; The Leaf Walk Field Trip, Endangered Animals Writing Project, The Civil Rights Act of 1964, and Organic PE: Basketball. Of these four, I will be going into further detail about The Leaf Walk Field Trip.

In this lesson idea written by Douglas Kiang, it is focused for a middle school age group science lesson. The lesson plan begins with the students choosing leaves either off the ground or by taking them off of branches, as long as they are as flat as possible. Once the students have found a fair amount of leaves, or enough for your project, they will use the app LeafSnap which is available for free from the App Store. I downloaded this app and it is a fun, educational, way to identify leaves and provide information on those certain leaves. It is important to use this app near the location you found the leaf since it tags the location.

When your students are finished identifying several leaves, the next step in the lesson is to create a book with the information found from LeafSnap. Although there are many apps to create a book, this lesson plan suggests Book Creator. In the book, many things can be added besides the leaves themselves. You could add many facts, the tree which they come from, and so on. This lesson plan suggests to include the map where it was found and optional drawings of the leaf.

I found this series to be very educational and it gave me a better understanding of how to create lesson plans and gave me many ideas on what I could include in my classroom. I really enjoyed The Leaf Walk Field Trip lesson plan because it is definitely a lesson I could use in my classroom for one of my horticulture classes. Overall, I found these lesson ideas to be extremely interesting and they will definitely help me in the future.