Do you love the Bitmoji craze but you are a Microsoft diehard true and true? Do you worry about all things google and the fact that your Facebook and Instagram accounts seem to read your thoughts?
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This is the ket to leveling the playing field and then stomping down on google hard. By using this at the end of a powerpoint online file shared from your onedrive not only can you have the Bitmoji classroom you have always wanted, but you can have more than one slide at a time.
From onedrive, locate the file, click the share button. (be sure to uncheck editing rights) and add &amd=&action=embedview to the end of the url and share. Viewers will see the file in presentation mode and they will be able to interact with your online virtual classroom.
Schools, teachers and administrators all jumped into the fire this past spring. It seemed to bring out the best in all of us, including our students. Students were paying close attention, they were going above and beyond the call of duty to get connected, stay connected and get the job done.
Fast forward to late summer and the same does not hold true. There are a lot of us who have become numb to the whole distance learning effort. Students are tired of problem solving everything from connection problems to not being able to find their work for the day. Teachers are getting bitter when working in the cloud only offers a new level of disconnect between them and their students. Lastly, administrators are trying their best to keep everyone moving in the right direction while ensuring instructional best practices are not falling to the waste side while fires of all sizes appear across the educational horizon.
While I do not pretend to have any answers, nor do I think that I can do the jobs any better than the teachers, I do offer up an alternative that might help raise student engagement. The idea of podcasting has been around forever and has really seen a surge lately. Personally, I prefer audiobooks but the idea is the same. While students are driving or commuting in some way, provide them with a 5-15 minute lesson that they can listen to. This “podcast” doesn’t have to even be a podcast, just an audio file that students can easily access.
The process, use a podcasting or voice recording app like voice record pro, or
podcast studio and record a lesson. This is your chance to be personable, maybe show a little humor and even dangle a carrot for the students to listen to your entire ten minutes because they are going to get a bonus question for the next assessment or receive bonus points for coming to the next live meeting prepared. These tools both record audio in a mp3 file which can be attached to an assignment, to a post or as a file, you can email or message these files in any LMS that you happen to be using.
Give the podcasts a try and you may find that the next time you ask a student to remove their earbuds, they might be listening to you. That would be a great problem to face.
If you want to get crazy up in here, you can go next level and create and distribute your own podcast using a service like Buzzsprout.com. I will be writing about my journey into podcasting very soon, in the meantime checkout “The Commute Institute” wherever you listen to podcasts.
Narakeet is not a new tool(it is a new name, it was formerly Video Puppet). Nor is it an innovation on an old tool, although it has a few new features. During this educational environment however it is almost a necessity. Narakeet will take a PowerPoint or Google Slide (with minimal modification), keynote or Open Office; just make sure your slideshow is of 20 slides or less and use the narrator notes that the creator has made. Narakeet will produce a video that is narrated in your choice of voices and languages in just a few minutes.
Whiteboard chat is a great tool for social distance or remote collaboration. Sure, OneNote and Google docs give you the ability to collaborate, but with whiteboard chat you can have a group of students draw a mind map or a Venn diagram and collaborate on the same item if they are in the same class, down the hall from one another or across town.
So what is wrong with Padlet? Nothing is inherently wrong with Padlet. Over the years however, they have trimmed the number of free Padlet’s you can create from 20 down to a very small 3. The problem with 3 is that a secondary teacher who has 5, 6, or 10 classes will need a padlet for each class to give themselves time to grade and assess the students work. This makes Padlet a tool that teachers hesitate on. Whiteboard chat is not a hesitation tool, it is a collaboration tool.
Whiteboard chat allows you to share via a QR code and for contributors to add pictures, text, drawings and more. They can even animate what they have added. You can use whiteboard chat another way too, you can distribute individual boards to students as well.
I am in NY and there is a new privacy law, ED Law 2D. This law has a lot of components to it and if websites or programs do not handle student pii (personal identifiable information) correctly, NY schools should not be using them with students. Whiteboard chat uses QR code to share and collects NO information from the users so it checks all the Ed Law 2D boxes.
I have shared this tool with all the teachers in my district and hopefully they see the same benefits as I do. It is a great tool.
Whether you pronounce it GIF or gif these are pretty cool images that are really vids.
How did I do that you ask? Ok, so you didn’t ask, but I am telling you anyway. I went to this website, https://ivipid.com/, this website allows you to make personalized versions of production company titles for a minimal cost. This one is my favorite. It is a lot of fun.
After I made the video and downloaded it to my device, I then uploaded it to giphy.com and made a GIF/gif out of it and then BAM! it is not a video anymore, its an image and can be inserted anywhere you would insert an image.
