Jun 122018
 

Permalink: http://bit.ly/keepitwithkeep

You may not have heard of Google Keep, but you NEED to know about it. Keep is an incredible and easy to use tool for organizing all of the bits of information busy educators tend to collect whenever, wherever, that always seems to get lost. Keep allows you to bring together notes, links, photos, really anything you can grab with your computer, tablet and phone! Beyond gathering and organizing your digital ‘stuff,’ you can share your notes, collaborate with others, set reminders… even drag-n-drop text and photos into your Google Docs! Review the presentation below and start to make Google Keep an integral part of your daily workflow.

Links:

Session Presentation:

Video Demo of Google Keep in Action:

Sep 042017
 

Permalink: https://goo.gl/cJ3sMb

Apps, sites and services we’ll cover today (I’ll add notes and any of your suggested apps as we go!):

  • Explain Everything (I’ll be showing the $9.99 “Classic” version, but the free for 30 days subscription version will work for today). Learn more about their education subscription pricing, find an existing project to build from, or learn more about how to use the app.
  • Educreations – This is a decent free alternative app to Explain Everything, and has great classroom support. If you have a classroom set of iPads, your students can create accounts linked to yours to create/share/submit projects with you. Recording and input features are not nearly as robust as Explain Everything, but it’s free!
  • ShowMe is another good free alternative.
  • Doceri and Doceri Desktop – Control and record your desktop/laptop with your iPad. iPad app is free, but desktop connection software is a one-time $30 purchase.
  • EdPuzzle – Tremendously flexible platform for enhancing existing video for classroom use. Pull in video from a wide array of sources and add your own voice and questions to check for understanding embedded within the video.
  • TEDEd – A more limited platform similar to EdPuzzle for adding your own questions and additional resources to video, but their video lesson library is AWESOME and is growing all the time.
  • eMedia – Netflix for Utah Teachers. Part of Utah’s Online Library. eMedia is a growing library of videos vetted by Utah teachers, aligned to the Utah Core, and free to download and keep any video as long as you are a teacher in Utah.
  • Flipgrid – Use video like your students use video. Flipgrid is a video response platform that allows educators to host video based discussions with students. Educators create topic grids and students respond with recorded videos to discuss, reflect, and share via webcam, tablet or mobile device.
  • Learn more about Getting Started with Flipped and Blended Instruction from my blog at sedcclint.com
Dec 162015
 

My wife always accuses me of not telling her about all of the great apps and tech that I come across. It’s probably true, but I don’t want to fill up her phone with a bunch of stuff that she may or may not find useful. It’s my job to try out new things and share the best with the teachers I work with, not hers.

Well, the tables have turned! She told me about an amazing app that she just loved and has saved her a lot of hassle and time dealing with the LOADS of email offers that clutter up inboxes of us all on a daily basis. I thought that it was easy enough in Gmail to just choose all of the unread messages, scan through them, uncheck those that I might want to maybe look at, and delete the rest. I put off giving the app a try for a few weeks. It was a mistake. I was wrong.

Once I tried her suggested app, it liberated the amount of “Bacon” (not really spam, just email offers that at one time I signed up for) in my personal email account to the point that I actually didn’t DREAD logging in to see the one or two emails that I wanted to read. Honestly, I went from 50-70 emails a day down to just a handful.

So, THANK YOU Kelly for introducing me to Unroll.Me!

Here’s how it works. Sign up for this FREE service at https://unroll.me, or download their app for iOS (Sorry Android folks… Use the web interface or hold out for the app). Then, add one or many email addresses to your Unroll.Me account – most major email platforms are supported. I started with just my personal Gmail account. Then, Unroll.Me scans your inbox(es) for any potential messages and then prompts you to do one of three things with those messages:

  • Unsubscribe from the source (and the unsubscribe actually works!)
  • Keep messages from that source in your inbox, and continue to receive them as usual
  • Or, choose to “Roll Up” messages from that source into one daily digest email from Unroll.Me where you can view all of your rolled up messages for the day.

So, instead of 50 or so messages to sort through each day, you have one message with all of your offers that is easy to quickly scan through. The roll up includes a thumbnail of the message with the title, so you can easily tell what the content is. You can open any offers in the roll up with a click, or just delete the one roll up message and be done. The original email of any messages that you choose to roll up will be sent to an Unroll.Me folder in your email client.

It took a day or two for the volume of email coming in to go down, and every few days I open the app back up to “train” it for additional offers and messages that were not in the prior groups. But, just to show you how much this app has reduced my inbox clutter, take a look at the number of messages I’ve taken care of with this service:

UnrollMe Stats

Over 120 different senders. Almost 70 I’ve unsubscribed to. Only 5 that I actually want to see individually. The remaining 55 rolled up into a single daily message.

Bliss. Pure bliss. And I hope that you can start your New Year with the same feeling with all of your email clutter. Again, a big thank you to my brilliant wife for sharing this with me!

Now, I just need to add my 14 other email accounts and start training them as well… First World problems. Merry Christmas to you all!

 

Apr 032014
 

Welcome to UCET 2014! Below are the links to all of my presentation resources – just click on the session you have attended, and you’ll be able to download PDF’s of my presentations (or access them directly), see all of the session notes and links to the apps and resources that I have presented. You can also find all of my session information on Sched!

If you’d like to be informed when I post new resources and information, you can follow me on Twitter @sedcclint, or on my Facebook Page. Thanks for your attendance and interest!

Thursday, April 3

Friday, April 4

Nov 072013
 

Permalink: http://goo.gl/FKLUCP
OnTrack Section #:67099 , Course #:58985

Here’s the plan for our session today. We’ll learn about:

  • Harnessing the Power of Google Drive for projects, collaboration and maybe even a paperless classroom
  • Screencasting – creating learning objects with some cool interactive white board type apps
  • Creating rich media projects like narrated slide shows, picture- and full blown eBooks, and full movies.
  • Classroom quizzing and formative assessment with free web-based tools

You can download the presentation for our session today below:

Apps, links and resources for each area above:

Nov 022013
 
Permalink: http://goo.gl/Fju6xZ

Here’s the plan for our session today. We’ll learn about:

  • Presenting from your iPad: How to control and project your classroom computer, and how to project your iPad screen to your classroom computer & projector
  • Screencasting – creating learning objects with some cool interactive white board type apps
  • Creating rich media projects like narrated slide shows, picture- and full blown eBooks, and full movies.
  • Classroom quizzing, formative assessment and student/parent engagement with free web-based tools
  • Finding good places for educational iPad apps

Didn’t get that the first time through? Here’s the presentation video from the URSA Conference, using Google+ Hangout On-Air (YouTube Video). You can also view the presentation here.

Apps, links and resources for each area above:

Nov 012013
 
Permalink: http://goo.gl/Sr6O3D

Thank you for joining me today to take a tour of 60 of my favorite iOS apps for education in 60 minutes. We will be moving pretty fast, so please use the resources below as your reference and session notes.

Follow along here where you’ll find links and descriptions of all of the apps covered in the session today, or you can find them on my 60 Apps in 60 Minutes Symbaloo mix. If I didn’t mention one of your favorites, please let me know about it and also take a look at the favorites that others have contributed. I’ve also done this presentation for a few years, and some great apps have either fallen off of the Top 60 or I have encountered new great apps that have not been added to the list. You can see the new and old 60 in 60 Apps in this Symbaloo mix.

You can also search for apps by grade, subject, Utah Core area, device and cost at UEN’s Apps4Edu site.

Here’s the presentation for our session today:

Oct 142013
 

23 iPad Alternatives to the Book Report, from ipadders.eu.

A great article that not only gives you 23 great ideas of how you can incorporate Project Based Learning twist with the tried-and-true book report, but it also highlights the iPad apps they use for each project type. Many of these project ideas can be modified to work easily with assessment in other content areas as well.

Sep 182013
 

A colleague of mine has been asked to help a school out with writing on the iPad, and asked if I had any suggestions for great writing apps. It’s a good question, and there are MANY options to consider. It all depends on your budget, what features you need, and what sort of experience you are looking for.

As far as any apps that will help with the mechanics of writing, I don’t really have any suggestions. I would be interested to see if anyone knows of any apps out there that would help with that.

Evernote is a first obvious choice. It’s not just a note taking app, and it has a lot of great features that students can utilize for research and writing in general. I’ve written about it on my blog – check it out for more info. Evernote and an Evernote account are free. There may be an issue if the writers are under 13 years old…

The next obvious choice is Pages, Apple’s word processing and page layout app. This one is expensive ($9.99, $4.99 for 20+ copies through Apple’s Volume Purchasing Program) but it is the best thing out there for writing on the iPad, hands down.

Google Drive is a fantastic (and free) solution if the district/school you are working with has adopted the Google Apps Domain for teacher/student email and all of the other great additions that come along. If not, this will work if students can create and access a regular GMail account as well. You can do some amazing collaborative things with Google Drive. The one big drawback for Drive right now is that you can not create or edit a presentation on an iPad. I’m sure that ability is coming soon.

I’ve not used it, but many are suggesting PlainText for a free, stripped down, bare bones writing app on the iPad. Sometimes a simple bare bones app is a good thing. I think many times teachers and students get hung up and focus too much on what the document looks like, and less on the content and ideas. It’s much easier to fuss with fonts than to perfectly phrase a thought, and so that’s what they spend time, focus and energy on. PlainText also saves/syncs with Dropbox, so that’s nice.

CloudOn would not be my first choice, but it’s certainly worth mentioning. It’s basically Microsoft Office on the iPad for free. You can save documents directly on the iPad, or you can connect to other Cloud storage systems (Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, & SkyDrive). The drawback is that you must have an Internet connection to use it – you are basically connecting to a virtual server running the desktop version of Office somewhere in the cloud. I personally don’t like the clutter of Word/Office, but many people love and want Office on the iPad.

I’ve really been enjoying Drafts lately for it’s ease of use and flexibility, but it costs as well ($3.99). When you launch Drafts, you are presented with a blank document and a blinking cursor – no hoops to jump through to start writing. Each ‘draft’ is saved, listed in the left sidebar, accessed by a swipe. Then, when you are ready to do something with your draft, swipe from right to left to show the myriad of sharing/saving options.

The last one I’ll mention is Quip. This is relatively new and I have not had much of a chance to put it through it’s paces. It comes from some very smart people (developed by ex Facebook CTO) and has been built from the ground up to work with mobile devices. It’s a little quirky with some new gestures and such, but looks like a really good tool.