Tech Talk Follow-Up
Upper Campus, Thursday, February 26th
Thanks for Spending Lunch With Us!
We had a wonderful Tech Talk today. Please give Olivia and Molly a HUGE thank you for sharing ideas from the San Diego iPad Summit. Also a big thanks to Sheila for letting us combine forces this week!
Here are links to the EdTech topics they presented. Olivia and Molly, feel free to jump in if I don’t do a good job explaining.
Apps and Services We Talked About
Zaption
LucidChart
Flubaroo
A Better Way to Assign Videos for Students to Watch
In a classroom setting, teachers will stop a video and make comments or ask questions. Would you like to have that same functionality when students are doing homework?
With two services, Zaption and EduCanon, you can. We looked at EduCanon at a Thursday Tech Talk in November. This past Thursday, Molly gave us a demo of Zaption. Molly has already used Zaption in her classroom and was very pleased.
Both web services allow you to add stop points in web videos and ask questions, give comments, add reflections and more. Both have free and premium (paid subscription) features. After looking at both, I think Zaption has more free features than EduCanon, but I have a feeling they will keep leapfrogging each other.
Both services have a search feature to find videos on educational topics that others have found.
Have You Ever Needed a Chart?
Her solution was to create a flowchart for her students to help make the decision of whether to snap a picture of something or not.
Why not use a drawing program? Well, you certainly could, however, flowchart software allows you to connect the various elements in your diagram together. If you rearrange them, the connections (the lines and arrows that connect the elements in your flowchart) adjust to the new layout.
There are lots of tools out there for creating flowcharts. LucidChart seems pretty easy to use.
There is also a Google Drive plugin for LucidChart. You can find out more information here: Introducing LucidChart integration with Google Drive
Olivia's Chart
Automatic Grading of Quizzes Given With Google Forms!
Olivia showed us how she uses Google Forms to create short vocabulary quizzes. Through trial and error she has been able to figure out the best Google Forms settings for giving quizzes. I will list a couple of her tips below.
There is a Google Docs Add-On with a funny name, called Flubaroo, that will automatically grade the quiz and put the results in a nicely formatted spreadsheet. Of course, this only works on questions that have a correct answer and not free form writing or short answers.
You will need to enter the grades into Veracross yourself, but at least the grading has been done for you!
Olivia has volunteered to show you how it works, if you would like her to. Thanks, Olivia!!! :-)
Stop Motion Videos are Great Teaching Tools!
Olivia and Molly told us about an iPad app called MyCreate. We already use a stop motion app at Upper Campus called iStopMotion (this is the one that Caitlin uses), so I am not sure buying a second app is practical, but MyCreate looks like it has more free features than iStopMotion.
I found a couple of good examples of stop frame animations made by a student.
Teachers can also create stop motion animations in order to help bring a concept to life and increase student engagement. Yes, there is time and effort put into it, but if it is a video you could use for years, it may be well worth it to you.
If you are interested in exploring stop motion animation either for yourself or as enhanced student projects, let's talk!
Web Links to Remember
Tech Talk Thursday
- Resources and tips for finding good apps and tech resources on the web
- App Spotlight: Aurasma (Augmented Reality in the classroom)
Come on by and join in on the fun!
Bill