Audible by Landon F.

Introduction 

Audible is an app that has tons of audiobooks voiced by paid voice actors. Each book costs around the same as one  printed book. Schools often overlook Audible as it costs money and would be too expensive for everyone to have their own account. This is a problem that can easily be solved by having a school Audible account. 

Benefits 

A school Audible account is exactly what it sounds like, the school has one account. This works because Audible allows any number of devices to use one account at any time. Some kids are not visual learners so having an Audible option would be a huge advantage. Another benefit is if everyone had an Audible on their iPad then the school would only have to buy one Audible book and not 30 real books. This would also clear up space as no longer would there be cabinets filled with books,just audio books on everyone’s iPad. If a student chooses to read a book then there are tons of free options online as well for most books. One of the Audible competitors, Librivox, is good but the voices in the audiobooks are volunteers and are never quite as good. Librivox also has an outdated selection of books not nearly as extensive as Audible. One thing people say is a downside to Audible is a student could possibly go on a buying spree and get tons of books but they would need the Apple ID to buy anything in the first place.

Downsides

One of the downsides is everyone would need earbuds. Any good earbuds that would last for more than a year are around $10 and a school can obviously not provide those for everybody and if they bought cheap $1 ones they would not last at all. One thing people say is a downside to Audible is a student could possibly go on a buying spree and get tons of books but they would need the Apple ID to buy anything in the first place.

Features 

One of many unique features boasted by Audible is the rating section where you can read others reviews before buying or rate them yourself. What makes this unique is that there are 3 categories that you can rate out of 5. These are overall, story, and performance. Overall, is what you thought of the book, story is what you thought of the story, and finally the performance is what you thought of the voice actor and his “performance.”

Tutorial 

When you first enter the Audible website you should see this

Next you are going to want to click the sign in button in the top right corner even if you don’t have an account and this screen will appear

Next either create your account or enter your pre-existing account information and now you see this

From here as I have highlighted you can view your library, books that are already bought. If you don’t have any books you can shop by clicking browse and add to your wish list which you can also view here on your home page. Audible originals are books suggested by Audible which are usually their highest rated books. Thank you all for reading and I hope you consider getting your own Audible account. If you want an Audible account it costs $15 per month and if you don’t want to just listen to the free books then you must purchase them off the Audible store. I would definitely recommend Audible to all audiobook readers out there for it is so worth the money for higher quality and a giant library of books.

Photo Editor by Aidan H.

How to use the Photo Editor App

Do you know how to use the Photo Editor App? If you said no this is the blog for you. Because in this blog I’m going to explain in full detail, how to use the Apple Photo Editor App.

The app looks like this:

Once you open the app, go into your camera roll and pick the photo you would like to edit. Once selected, pick the option “classic editor” or “pro editor.” For everything stated in this blog, MAKE SURE YOU PRESS APPLY WHEN YOU’RE FINISHED.

 

Your first option in classic mode will be the option enhance. If you click on this, you can pick an option and it changes the camera quality after the fact pretty much. 

Next option is the effects menu. These change the filter. 

Your third option is the crop option. As you would think, this gives you the availability to change the size of the picture chosen. It has preset things for cropping. All actions can be undone. 

The next option is adjust. From clicking on this you get the option to change the brightness, exposure, contrast, warmth, saturation, vibrance, highlights, shadows, tint, and fade. To change any of these click on adjust, click on what you want to change and drag the ball left and right to change it. 

Orientation is next. With this you can switch the photo to be upside down, to one of its sides, etc. The next one is text. It kind of speaks for itself. You can add text to your photo. 

Draw is the next option. You can change the size and color. Then, draw! 

After that, you have the sharpness option. When clicking on this drag the ball in the center left to right to change the sharpness. 

For blur, select the size you want, then drag over whatever you want to blur. 

For focus, you click if you want a circular focus or linear focus. Then pinch and drag both fingers to change the size. Closing your fingers closer makes it a smaller size. And opposite. 

The vignette option, it is almost the same as as the focus option but instead of blurring outside the lines it’s making a black cover. 

Stickers is self-explanatory. You can add stickers by selecting them. You need to download sticker-packs though. 

With frames, you can(obviously) add frames to your picture by selecting the frame you want. 

The whiten option obviously whitens the image. But you select a size and drag over what you want whitened. 

With the red eye option, select a size, and drag over something red. It will change the red to another color. Usually purple. 

The slash option puts the image in black and white and you can drag over something to give it its color back. This is useful mainly if you want to focus on a person or object. 

The meme option adds text to the top and bottom of the image in bold letters. Obviously, you can make a meme with this tool.

In my opinion, this app is very nice, but there are a couple of issues. First of all, I think downloading the sticker packs is a little too extra. Second of all, I once in a while, but not very often get kicked off of the photo editor app. Other than that, very nice app.

There are also a lot of nice things about this app. First, it’s free. A lot of photo editing apps cost money. Second, it’s fairly simple to use. You don’t need to do a whole lot to make your pictures well edited.

Well, that’s my thoughts on the app. So ye.

STEAM Friday by Hannah

STEAM Friday

STEAM Friday is a time for kids to be creative. Here at Columbine Mr. Solseth puts on a STEAM Friday. On these days kids have an objective they have to complete within a certain amount of time. In this case it was a 20 minute build time. Then it had to stand for 3. Their objective always changes whether they are doing the S in science the T technology the E in engineering the A in art or the M in math they always have to build something with one of these prompts.  

      

        Today I went and sat in on Mr. Solseth’s 1st hour class. They were doing a steam Friday project. Mr.Solseth puts this on every Friday.The class had to make a  tower with a flag on top in 20 minutes. It had to be at least 30 cm high with 5 marshmallows, 1 tooth pick, 1 sticky note, and 10 index cards.They could only manipulate the index cards and the sticky note.Their secondary goal was to have to highest tower. Mr. Solseth was going to drop a heavy book near it to see if it could stand.

       The first thing they did was design their flag then stick it on the toothpick. Next they thought of an outline of their tower, then try their best to recreate it. Then after they knew it could withstand the book drop they should build it taller and sturdier.

     They had to let it stand without falling for 3 minutes. After the book drop they only had 4 standing. The highest was a total of 49cm tall. The school record was 63cm tall but was not beaten until later that day. 

    In all the STEAM  Friday was a success everyone worked together to build  amazing towers. Alana Lasley(6th) said, “Well STEAM Friday’s help us find new ways of doing things and we learn that not everybody can succeed but the ones who do find different ways when their first ones fail.”

To add on Brooke Davidson says, “ I like how we can build stuff.” Finally we interviewed Mr.Solseth and he said that he started doing STEAM Friday so kids will know how to problem solve and so that 5hey could be more creative with their building. In all I do think that everyone is a fan of stem fridays so thank you Mr. Solseth.

Jace (6th grader) working on building his tower and balancing the index cards.

Duolingo by Ayla G.

 Duolingo is a free app in the Apple AppStore. Sadly, it is not available in the Android App Store. Though it is exclusive only to Apple it is a great app. Duolingo is an app that helps you learn languages in a fun way! It has 90 language courses in 22 languages. That is a lot of languages, right? For people that speak other languages than English, they offer courses for other languages, they can learn English on Duolingo. 

Pros!

• Easy to use- explains directions thoroughly 
• A vast variety of languages-for example, Czech, Mandarin, Russian, Japanese, Latin, Hungarian, and Swedish
• Advanced setting for experienced learners- if you already partially know a language you can start later in the lessons
• Starts out easy- starts simple and expands your vocabulary as you move on
• A simple yet fun game- it is a simple game, yet it is fun
• Addicting- when you are starting out you will most likely be very determined to keep your streak going

 Cons.

• Keeping up is kind of hard- if you are busy you will have to break your streak
• Some of the translations are incorrect or pronounced wrong
• Duolingo might not fully help you learn a language- sometimes Duolingo won’t help you become fluent in a language.
• It is repetitive and kind of dull- Duolingo repeats lessons more than it should
• Frustrating -sometimes you can become frustrated with the way Duo does things.
• Duolingo gets harder and more complex when you level up.

   For classroom use you might have everyone learn a new language. For example, you might have everyone learn French together. Or you might have everyone learn a separate language. For example,have everyone pick a language from the long list of languages.

 In conclusion, I fully recommend Duolingo, it may have its downsides but it is still a great app. It is a great way to learn a new language.