Category Archives: iHelp Cafe

In this almost abstract time of forced distance education, those of us who have used Schoology with iPads are realizing that everything needs to be re-evaluated. Students are using everything from a Kindle Fire to iMac to a smartphone to do their work.

There are going to be times when students need to annotate on a PDF and submit the answers  and to make it that much easier for the students and families I have made this reference by device type.

I recently learned that QRstuff.com has a scan limit. For the creator everything is free and wonderful…unless you need to have your QR code scanned over 50 times. This really has negative affects if you are distributing a survey, or doing anything for an classroom of students: delivering a webpage, a site login or anything that will be accessed over 50 times.

An alternative to this is to use classroomscreen.com and use the QR code generator and save and share that image of the code. Check out my previous post about classroomscreen.com for more details.

I have been using and pushing this tool for over a year now and my teachers all love it. I thought I had made a post about classroomscreen.com but apparently not.

Classroomscreen is perfect for a whiteboard in a room where the teacher has a lot going on. You can add the date and time. You can place a timer for classroom tasks, a QR code for students to follow. You can add the random name generator (that saves names) and a noise level indicator. There is a place to add notes and even a traffic light. All of this is in front of a choice of many static and some moving backgrounds.

check it out and let me know if you do not just love this site.

While sites like Classtools.net can closely replicate some features of Thinglink.com and other large and robust programs, there is a reason we always go back to the classics. Just as Happy Gilmore will be a movie I can watch over and over again, Thinglink is a site I will use over and over agin. It is everchanging.

Not too long ago Thinglink came out with 360 ° photo tagging for their paid subscribers but not for the majority of free subscribers who use it in the schools. Now the free version includes tagging a 360 ° picture.

Here’s how to do it. I used my insta360 camera and took picture, downloaded the picture to my photos and then emailed it to myself. I know it sounds complicated but it took like 15 seconds to do. From there just upload it into your Thinglink account and share with your class. This video shows what I created in about 2 minutes. Just think what your students can create.

Where can i see this being used? I love it for early elementary to identify almost anything. I can also see great applications in foreign language as well as science class identifying parts of organisms, space etc. If you can find and download 360 ° pics, you do not even have a need for a camera, but if you are going to invest the money the Insta360 is relatively cheap, works well with iphone or ipad and is easy to use.

The website classtools.net/movietext offers a great way to celebrate the opening of the final film of the Skywalker saga.

It allows you to create your own movie opening scroll in honor of Star Wars. You can create your own words, save it edit it and share it as a website. It does not ask for any personal identifiable information to use this site. You just create a password and it will give you a link to your own website movie scroll.

And it plays that fun music

iMovie new 2.2.7 update has a lot of things in it. One of those is that you can now create a Greenscreen video in seconds. Why is this so great? a few reasons. First, most districts already use iMovie on iPads with their students. It is a cornerstone app. What we have been using, DoInk is a great app, but it is $2.99 per device. This is relatively cheap and I have had success getting the technology department to push the app out to certain teachers and shared iPads for use. It gets too expensive when the entire 6th grade would like the app. Now with iMovie, each student can write, film, edit, produce and share their own Greenscreen Movies.

Greenscreen iMovie

I was reminded that there must be some shortcomings to the iMovie Greenscreen feature. I have not come across any that would make me change my lessons at all. That is really what you look for when speaking to an app’s limitations. A couple of things that were mentioned to me in comparison to DoInk are that you only get Green or Blue choices for the backdrop overlay. With Do Ink you can change the backdrop to other colors, but I have a Greenscreen and that is what I purchased to use to create the backgrounds. I am not going to teach a lesson on Chromakey, that is not my function in the school. I am going to help the students create something amazing and beautiful.

Check out the new 2.2.7 iMovie and all its new functions.

Clever PDF is a great new web tool for editing PDF’s to your own specifications.

Sometimes you might be looking at a 125 page PDF and only need 1 or 2 pages from it. Before now there was no way to pair the document down without paying a fee. Now you can split the document, combine documents and so many other things to do with PDF’s

One quick mention. If you are using the tools that take a PDF and change it into an editable document such as a Word or Pages doc you WILL lose some of the formatting and definitely will want to look at the document and probably fix that document before sending it off.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be a slug?  If you think about it a little differently, as a slug you would leave a sticky trail behind covering everywhere you have been.

Trace my shadow shows you the sticky trail you leave all over the Internet.

Just a few clicks and you and your students can see just how many different trails you make on any given day.

You might even say you create a web.