About Lessons for the Classroom:
Discover innovative ideas to use directly with your students in the Lessons for the Classroom series of courses created by Apple Distinguished Educators (ADEs). Each course shares a unique lesson, unit of study, or best-practice — already in use by outstanding educators — and ready to implement in your own classroom or learning environment.
The series includes lessons across the core content areas of mathematics, language arts, social studies, science, and arts & music, with additional courses for electives and professional development. Enjoy this course — and explore others in the series — as you look to inspire your students with innovative ideas and new approaches for learning.
There are 30 courses in the “Inspiring Lesson Ideas” collection.
The three that stood out the most to me were:
How to find the collection on your iPad:
Go to iTunes U and click on “Featured”. Then, at the bottom of the page, there will be a blue quick link to “For Educators”. From here, many of the Inspiring Lesson Ideas courses can be found. To view all, simply click “See All.”
The course I chose to review from this collection was iPad as Expressive Sound Canvas. 
For this lesson, students were to create a jazz improvisation based on Jackson Pollock’s painting, “No. 5“. Students would use the iPad as a sound canvas to create the improvisation. The introduction involved an introduction to Jackson Pollock, using clips from a documentary and prompt questions. Next, students were introduced to the idea of combining visual and auditory arts and how the two are both forms of expression. During this discussion, apps such as Korg, MorphWiz, and ThumbJam were introduced as options for students to create their improvs with. Finally, students were able to play together as a group, improvising over one chord. The earlier observations of Jackson Pollock were referenced here, frequently.
This would be a really great idea for a secondary music class – which was the target audience in the lesson that Adam Goldberg, the author, wrote about. Making this appropriate for a younger classroom would be difficult, as it involves a lot of abstract thinking that elementary students have typically not yet developed. However, it may be possible to incorporate aspects of this lesson into an elementary classroom. It would probably turn out coming out like the Soundscape project that I described in an earlier post. Overall, this at least gave me some more apps to look into using in my future classroom!
Grade: C+
The book contains many ideas of games to play in the classroom to improve literacy, math skills, and vocabulary understanding. Scoodle Jam is an interactive whiteboard app with graphic organizers built in for use in the classroom. It can be used between students in the same classroom, different school, or even in another country! Though none of the lesson ideas were in my content area, it gave me ideas for games to play in my own classroom. 