This is our 1000th post! Thank you to all of our readers for helping us get this far. It’s proven to be a great experience for us; we hope you find it useful as well. Now back to your regularly scheduled blog post. — Aaron
In the upcoming week, Google is releasing a new feature in Gmail known as Priority Inbox. This tool, an addition to your existing Gmail account, allows email to be sorted according to importance. Google tags the messages of most importance to you (bills, notifications, notes from Mom) and marks them as the first to be read. You decide what is important and can makes changes as you go.
Susan Woodruff is an independent professional developer and active member of the International SIM Network. She recently began experimenting with VoiceThread and ways to apply this collaborative tool to education. Read her experience below.
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As I was playing around on the Internet and doing some web surfing the other day, I found an interesting application. Actually, it is the one I’ve been looking for (not all that hard) for almost a year. For a SIM professional developer, instructional coach, students, and teachers alike, I think the only limits of it are our own creativity. Let me start back about a year ago when my son came home from his Advanced College Calculus class. He was a sophomore last year in college, and he had always done well in math. Last year, however, the course was much more challenging. In about the second or third week of school, he came home all excited and wanted to show me how his professor was going to work with her students who had questions. He got online and went to a website. There he was able to access a video she had recorded where she worked through a problem mentally and modeled her problem solving process. Stephen said it was incredibly helpful. What he liked was that he could access it multiple times. Anytime he was doing homework and felt “stuck” he had access to his professor’s thinking by going to that website.
Back to the present…as I was goofing off and procrastinating the other day, I found a short article and demonstration of a VoiceThread. It is actually an online free website that can be used for teaching, collaborating, coaching, nearly anything that you can think of. Documents, videos, pictures, and nearly any other type of document can be uploaded to the site. The creator of a voice thread can comment on it while annotating through a webcam, microphone, or text. Once it is uploaded, others can be invited to view it, or it can be put on the website to be viewed by the public. It is quite simple to learn, and it is actually quite fun after you get used to looking at yourself on the videocamera. I did find that I had to switch my Adobe Flash settings on my Mac, so if you have any trouble recording, check those. I would love to collaborate with a few of you who might want to work on a presentation of something. The VoiceThread is so interactive that it almost feels like someone is there. For only $60 per year, you can buy a subscription that allows you to use a lot more features of the site. My mind is generating all kinds of great ways this could be used. Please check out voicethreads.com, and let us know what you think about it and if you have any great ideas for using it. I’ve made a VoiceThread just for you to check out. If you are brave, take a moment and respond with a note in the following VoiceThread. OK?
-Sue
Interested in writing an article for the Stratepedia blog? Just email Aaron or Amber with your ideas at help@stratepedia.org.
With the school year starting up again for most districts, we wanted to give our teachers a proper welcome back. So, in honor of the new semester, here is a link-happy list we compiled of the most talked about technology news of the summer.
Aaron shared several ways that educators are using iPads. In and out of the classroom, the iPad is a hit. Need textbooks? What about an assessment tool? Look no further than the iPad for a convenient solution.
Facebook added a new feature known as Places. This is a check-in service that uses your GPS location to let friends know where you are. This video from Facebook explains how to customize or opt-out of the service to fit your needs.
Network neutrality (or Internet neutrality) has frequented the news lately in relation to Google and their supposed change of position on the issue. This term refers to preserving the Internet in its current state with no restrictions, as an open network with content equally available to anyone regardless of their Internet provider or payment plan. Net neutrality will fall by the wayside if large corporations start teaming up (such as Google and Verizon) to create a tiered system. This would give Internet providers the ability to filter the content they distribute and require payment plans for differing levels of information.
ScreenFlow is screencasting software for Mac that allows you to capture and edit an activity or process all on your desktop. I recently started using it to create tutorials and here’s why.
1. Its easy to learn. I followed along with these short tutorials and started working quickly after. (Click the All column to view all tutorials at once.) ScreenFlow has an easy-to-navigate interface and just the right amount of options.
2. Its relatively inexpensive. While a ScreenFlow license runs around $99.00, no additional equipment is necessary. The software works well with the built-in microphone and video camera on your computer. Unsure if ScreenFlow is for you? Test the trial-run out for free.
3. You can produce professional-looking videos in a short amount of time. ScreenFlow allows you to zoom in on specific area and import existing video that wasn’t shot using ScreenFlow. You can also add text, music, and record your own narration.
Last week Aaron, Nate, and I attended a TED talk hosted in Kansas City. I loved every bit of it and had the opportunity to watch some spectacular presentations.
Game designer, Jane McGonigal believes the emotions and skill required to be successful in online video games are similar to those needed to improve the world. She argues that gamers are a valuable resource that we, as a society, need to learn in order to save the world. Check out her extremely interesting presentation below. (You won’t regret it!)
TEDxKC also included:
Francis Cholle and the intuitive intelligence movement. (He also author to the #1 most downloaded podcast on iTunes.)
Michael Wesch challenged students to grow from knowledgeable to knowledge-able.
Digital paper works in conjunction with digital pens, such as the Pulse Pen mentioned by Aaron last week. Small dots printed in patterns on the special pages form a language, of sorts. The digital pen reads this unique language by recording where your writing is located in relation to each dot on the page.
Pages, Apple’s version of Microsoft Word, contains several tools to improve efficiency while drafting documents. Learn more about Pages with Apple’s short tutorials.
Here are a few things to try next time you work with Pages:
Any iWork application can have a “Require password to open” setting by checking the box in the Document section of the Inspector.
To avoid breaking a paragraph across pages, select the section to be grouped together. Click Inspector in the toolbar, click the Text button, and then click More. Select “Keep lines together.”
Track changes made to a document by clicking the Edit menu, and then Track Changes. Highlight the word or phrase being edited and begin typing. The original word will be crossed out with the changes tracked in the margin.
To add an image to your document, simply drag it from your desktop (or other location) to your document and release. The image will automatically be inserted into the paragraph.
A storyboard is a graphic organizer that acts as a road map to aid with planning and visualization during a project. It originated, with Walt Disney Studios, as a way to sketch out scenes in sequential order before production began on an animated movie. While there are several templates available to download online, a pack of index cards can actually go a long way. Start by placing each topic or “scene” on an index card and then tack them to a wall or bulletin board. The index cards can be omitted or rearranged throughout the planning process as you see fit.
