Wednesday, February 29, 2012

First Giveaway...

Details coming this week for my first ever Review-Giveaway. Yay! So excited. And it's a Premium Giveaway! Teachers, don't miss out on your chance to win BIG!


Thursday, February 23, 2012

Hello Slide

Want a Presentation Online Tool with Voice Narration? Say Hello to...Hello Slide.

Hello Slide is a tool that you can use to add voice narration to slides that you display online. With their FREE Plan, you get unlimited editing with up to 50 presentations. Not bad, huh. Need more? Then Go Pro for 9 bucks a month to get up to 200 presentations and your presentations exported to video.



Update: February 27, 2012
I wanted to test out Hello Slide to see how it actually works. I have to say it's a pretty neat tool.

First create your slides in PowerPoint (Keynote will do the trick if you're a Mac). Then export the presentation to a PDF file which is the file type you'll need to import in to Hello Slide (other ways are coming soon according to the FAQ page Hello Slide's Website). Selected the language to be spoken. Add the words/sentences for each slide. Tested it out and voilá!

My presentation is below --- You can embed or send link directly. Here is the link to the Education category presentations that have been uploaded by other users. Other categories are available as well. The presentation has a continuous flow. By hitting the space bar, you can pause and un-pause the presentation.


Friday, February 17, 2012

Election 2012

Scholastic has a neat little page with great info geared towards the 2012 Election. It's packed with breaking news, election questions and answers, election maps and games and more.


Time for Kids has a similar page. It's as kid-friendly so I would say Scholastic would be better for the younger group although older students would enjoy it. Time however is probably for the upper elementary if not middle school through high school. It has a neat link called Electionary that defines some of the election terms, a downloadable Election Calendar, and info on the Republicans.


Let's Chill!

 Wanna CHILL and watch your favorite videos all in one online place where you ave easy access to your own CHILL page. Well with Chill, a free service for creating and sharing collections of your favorite videos, you can do just that! With support for YouTube, Vimeo, VEVO, and Hulu, you'll love your new "chill" spot on the web.

As a teacher, I think it would be great to have instructional videos all in one place. You can add categories too. Here's my new chill spot but it video-less...for now. I'm looking forward to adding video and chilling.


Thursday, February 16, 2012

Cool Tools for Schools

There was a webinar on 30 Web 2.0 Tools for Teachers. After viewing the webinar, I picked out a few tools that have me interested in finding out more. (If you'd would you rather just view the slideshow and not watch the hour long webinar, you can just view his slideshare file.) While I knew of some of the tools, I did not know about the following: Socrative, TodaysMeet, Sweet Search, A Cleaner Internet, Feedly, & SimpleBooklet.

With Socrative,Teachers and students can use it on any device with a web browser (tablets, smartphones, laptops, iPod Touches, etc.). Teachers log in using email and password and students log in using the virtual number provided by the teacher. Students respond on their devices and results are immediately visible by the teacher.



TodaysMeet allows users to use stream to make comments, ask questions, and use that feedback to tailor your presentation, sharpen your points, and address audience needs. It has a super clean interface and is super easy to use. Sign up for a free account and give out your meeting wed address to start "meeting".





Need a search engine for your students...Well Sweet Search just may be the solution you need. With Sweet Search, there's a section for teaching web research skills to educators and students, a search engine for emerging learners, a place for students to Learn Something New Every Day, a section of over 1000 Biographies and a Social Studies content area. Now that's SWEEEET!


  
Tired of clutter, especially when watching YouTube videos, Clea.nr is a must. They remove the clutter, it's as simple as that!

 

In the midst of writing this post, I browsed to Feedly and completely indulged myself in their website. I lost track of time while getting hooked on the tool both on my desktop and on my iPad. This app is definitely one of my newly loved apps/tools. Feedly is a magazine-like start page based on the best content of your favorite websites. It's powered by Google Reader and Twitter and is available as an add-on to Firefox and as an app on the iPad.



According to the creators of SimpleBooklet, this cool tool allows you to create compelling multi-page brochures, product guides, and promotions that can be posted where your customers go. No complicated integration, just simple one click publishing to anywhere on the web. Design Your Way by with drag and drop with one click tools.



Wednesday, February 15, 2012

What are Chromebooks?

Everything is done in a browser, all your stuff is stored on the web, wi-fi, wired ethernet or mobile broadband networks allow you to get online, fast startup and longer battery life, automatic updates, built-in security...ALL ON A CHROMEBOOK.

Here's a touching story how Chromebooks touched the life of one student and his teachers. For more information of Chromebooks, click this.

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

App Learning Tasks


BLOOMS INFUSED!

Here's a great app resource that's categorized in a spreadsheet file into:
  • Category
  • App
  • VerbTask
  • Bloom's Revised
  • Bloom's Traditional
  • Cost
 This great resource is online, Google docs file created by Brad Wilson over at 21 Innovate. Check out a quick screenshot below and then head on over to the actual file here.

Android for Schools

I know that not every person loves Apple (I just don't know why, hahaha). It's apparent that "I'm a Mac" and I have been for many, many years. I purchased a really nice device that was Android enabled but no one uses it. It's just sitting on our kitchen counter collecting dust. My kids are even "Macs" and I've tried to get them to use it but they just can't warm up to it. They'd rather use the iPads or their iPods and so Android is not my/our world. With that said, I feel guilty posting everything iOS. So here's a post to help support those who use Android.

Richard Byrne, the tech geek over at Free Technology for Teachers, recently launched a page directed toward the android market and specifically for schools who use those type of devices. It's simply called, Android for Schools. I'm a big fan of Richard so I think this will develop into a handy resource for you "Androids". I scrolled through some of the post and yep, the apps mentioned have foreign names, but I'll be checking back sometimes to keep up with what's going on the dark side (no offense).