Testing AudioBoom Recording Tool

I've been testing out various free audio recording apps for my students and found AudioBoom to be a nice option for next week's work on voice recordings. AudioBoom plans have both a free version and paid version, we only need the free version which allows unlimited recordings and a max of 10 minutes for each. Here is a little video demo on how to record, share it to our G+ Community and embed it into a blog post. I was pleasantly surprised that it actually embedded the player into a blog post.

 

listen to ‘Haiku’ on audioBoom

June 1st EdTech Tips from Rm 224

EdTech Tips from Room 224

• Read Like a Historian http://sheg.stanford.edu/rlh
• Vermonter, Adam Prevost's Edutopia article "School Time" in New Zealand
• Google Apps Meets Common Core 
• Voice/Audio Recording Tools 
• TwistedWave ~ web based audio recording - saves to GDocs
• Soundcloud ~ record & save sounds
• Google Keep ~ note taking with text, images, voice recording
• Voice Note  ~ speech to text -copy/paste to doc

May Tech Tips from Room 224

• Recommended Education Blogs 
• I Teach English to Great Kids ...a blog (recent article on Plagiarism and the Google Tools
• Seomra Ranga -resources for primary school teachers
• Edutopia
• The Connected Principal
•  Recommended Google+ Communities
• U-32 G+ Community
• WCSU G+ Community
• start your online personal learning network today by joining a G+ community...we currently have two district G+ Communities or join one of the thousands of other G+ communities with members from around the world https://plus.google.com/communities
• such as Common Core Communities or Google Apps Communities or Math Communities or Science Communities
• to join a G+ community you must activate your G+ profile. log into your school google account, click on the +You link in the top black menu bar
• Digital Presentation Tools
• Google Presentations (Slides) - go to Google Drive, create, presentatin. it has transitions & animations, offers both collaboration and research features 
• Prezi.com ~ new features offer voice over in the paths and a background music track
• Garr Reynolds Presentation Zen ~how to avoid death by PPT

Weekly EdTech Tips from Room 224

EdTech Tips from Room 224

• Note Taking Tool
• VideoNotes is a new tool for taking notes while watching videos
• but after further review...it might be easier to just open a Google Doc to write and share notes
• Google Drive Offline
• Chrome now supports automatic offline syncing for Google Drive
• Google Now has been added to iOS devices...iPhone/iPad...
•  Simply open your Google Search App to begin using it. http://www.google.com/mobile/ios/

Tech Tips

Tech Tips from Room 224

Forwarding  Google Mail to Outlook:

While I'm a gmail advocate and hope others are using their school Google Account for communicating and collaborating with students, having two email accounts can be confusing and annoying. Until we migrate to all Google, there are ways to minimize the confusion. I've often been asked, how to forward the school Google mail to an Outlook mail address...a useful thing to do if you don't often go to your school Google account and students are sending/sharing things with you there. 

Here is a short video tutorial on how to forward gmail to Outlook. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2waQlB0jD4

Creating Digital Stories with WeVideo:

WeVideo in Chrome Apps

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wevideo-for-google-drive/okgjbfikepgflmlelgfgecmgjnmnmnnb?hl=en-US

Here is a short sample lesson with goals aligned to Common Core ELA standards: Digital Storytelling - Creating a Visual Narrative

It's Not About The Technology

Short and Sweet Message for Educators. 

Blog, Wiki, Site, Moodle, or just a pencil....

Many teachers are beginning to see the value of online web tools such as blogs, wikis, sites, moodle, social networks, google docs, etc...as tools to manage their class content and as places for students to collaborate and share their ideas but I am finding that many teachers aren't seeing the subtle distinction between these various applications. They may set up a blog when in fact they need a web site or they set up a wiki when what they really could use is a blog, or maybe what they really need is a robust course management tool like a moodle. How do you know which to use?
In general, here is a quick summary of how I see it:

• blogs - one to many communication with comments
• wikis- many to many communication; shared knowledge, everyone is contributor
• google sites- content management with flexibility and controlled by the teacher (students can have sites as well)
• moodle - course management system (much more complex than a google site and control is through an network admin)
• google apps - set of collaborative tools such as google docs, sites, calendars, we can set it up as educational edition where users are part of a domain, i.e. u32 google educational domain

I'll try to blog about these in more detail later.