Thursday is App Day! UPAD

This year, my classroom was a "cloud classroom" in that I did my planning, conferring, and grading all online using my iPad instead of carting around various binders with me.  This shift made my teaching more efficient, organized, and easier in so many ways.

In previous posts, I have talked about how I use the Confer app for conferring ,the online Planbook for planning, and Dropbox, but I haven't yet talked about UPAD.  UPAD is an app for the iPad that allows you to save and mark up PDF documents so this is how I access my curriculum documents and article resources.

Once you download the UPAD app, you can choose to open documents in UPAD to mark it up and take notes.   Once in UPAD, you can read it in "Read-only" mode or "Editable" mode.  In "Editable" mode, you can choose your color/width of a pen or highlighter to mark up the text by underlining, writing, highlighting.  You can also use post-its and type your notes on the color post-it of your choice and can move the post-it wherever you want on the text.  Instead of bringing home my curriculum binders with me to plan at night and on the weekends, I just open the marked up documents on my iPad whenever I need them.  You can also create folders on UPAD to organize all of your documents. Since I also work on writing/revising the reading curriculum in our district, I am able to access all of those documents at my fingertips and save them in grade level folders.  I also add articles and even online books onto UPAD so I can mark them up with my thinking and notes.

I highly recommend purchasing this app if you don't have it yet.  It costs $4.99 and is worth every penny.  There is a free lite version which is a good option if you want to try it out first before purchasing the full version.  The lite version limits how many documents you can save and how many folders you can create so I recommend purchasing the full version for long-term use.

Enjoy!