Apricot - Easily Deliver Writing Prompts to Students (andParents) #edtech #ipaded #writing @justapricot

Apricot is a neat tool I read about today on FreeTech4teachers.com that allows teachers to quickly and easily deliver writing prompts to students.  There are a few things about this free service that I really like, the first being that it's free.  Actually, the first should be that there is a website that wants to help students become better writers, but free comes a close second.  The second is that it's very simple for students and parents to become a part of a teacher's class.  Websites that make signing up for their service tedious and difficult need to learn from sites like Apricot.  Give the students a code to sign up, don't put the onus upon the teacher to do all of the work.

Yet another thing is Apricot's interface.  It's very simple to use and the writing platform is just geared for writing, not a lot of bells and whistles, which can often get in the way of student's expression.  I don't care that you know how to use the Olde English Font in pink and size 72.  Finally, I love that it makes parents a part of the equation.  In today's digital world, having a teacher or a service send work directly to a parent's phone or laptop is priceless stuff.

In a nutshell, a teacher adds a prompt and the students are prompted to respond.  They click on the link, write away and turn in their work.  The teacher then gets a copy of each response on the Apricot site and then has the option to send that work out to parents.  Parents will get a copy of their own students work as well as the option to see three other students' work without the names provided.

Overall Apricot seems to have a nice niche in the writing delivery and collection department.  How is this different from using Google Classroom?  I think the nice feature of inviting parents into the environment is useful as well as the fact that all of the work stays right in the tool, it doesn't open up anything else to get the job done.

Easy website for mobile.

Tonight is our 3rd annual Technology and STEM showcase at Wenatchee High School. http://bit.ly/wsdshowcase15

In the process of prepping for the event we wanted a "mobile" app for the attendees to register, get maps, bios, etc.  without any knowledge of programming a real app, Ray created a Google Site and optimized it for mobile.  If you keep mobile in mind and use 100% widths on your items, Google sites make a super simple great mobile site.  

The site even has the live stream from YouTube that some of our students are presenting from the event.

If you are a Google apps school or non-profit it makes sense to use the tools within Google sites to create these unique event sites.  The beauty of them is that you can so easily collaborate on the site.  Ray started the site and we both edited to get it ready for our event.

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Google on!

Ron Brown

Create Rubrics in Google Sheets - Grade & Email Results #edtech #gafe #ipaded

Many times Google Drive add-ons that I find do fun things, other times it's useful things.  File this one under useful (and helpful and wonderful).  Online Rubric is a Google Sheets add-on that allows you to create a rubric, enter scores for your students and then the results get emailed to them.  This is an ideal tool for teachers in a 1:1 setting or for a teacher who has students who have email addresses.

Like most Google add-ons, there is a wizard that walks you through the process of adding your students, adding your rubric with the number of points, categories, and descriptors.  Then you simply go to the Score tab, enter each student's score and then email the results.  In their email, the recipient gets the title of the rubric, the descriptors and their scores, nice and net.

This is a great tool.  One final feature is the ability to export/import a rubric, which makes it easy to share.  And sharing is caring.

#makeschooldifferent

Recently I read a great article from dangerously ! irrelevant and it inspired me to participate and give back my 2 cents.  Scott was challenging those in educational leadership to post a response to the following:  When it comes to education, what are 5 things that we have to stop pretending?

Here is my response:

When it comes to education, we have to stop pretending…

• that we need to be "trained" in person to learn the technology
• that we know what students are passionate about the same things we are teaching
• that teachers need the technology first
• that students don't have a voice and choice in their learning
• that replacing paper worksheets with digital ones will be any more engaging.

Opinion of Ron Brown

** Check out the responses from everyone who has participated. Awesome! **

Google Drive OCR Feature Reads Text on Images and PDFs #edtech #gafe

I learned today about a feature in Google Drive that allows you to take an image or a PDF and use the OCR (optical character recognition) to access the text.  Once you have the text you can edit, change, or copy it.  To use the feature, find a PDF or an image in your Google Drive and right-click (control-click) on it and choose "Open with... > Google Drive".  You'll see your image or PDF on the top and the text from it down below.  That'a a very useful feature, especially for teachers and students who have not had access to edit PDFs in the past.  Oh, and it works with 200 languages

iPad Peek - See How a Website Looks on an iOS Device #edtech

I saw iPadpeak.com while watching a tutorial and I liked it immediately.  It allows you to see how a website is going to render on an iOS device so you can see if it's going to look good or not.  Just enter the URL into the address bar and press 'Enter' and take a peek.  It also got me thinking that there are probably a lot of those type of sites out there, and there are.

http://mobiletest.me/
http://www.mobilephoneemulator.com/

GoFormative - Excellent Tool for Formative Assessments & Student Response #edtech @goformative

On Twitter today I came across a new (to me) tool called Formative.com and after only about 10 minutes of playing around with it and watching some of their help videos I was hooked.  The tool is very deep, but here are the basics.  Teachers can create assessments from images, documents, PDFs, Google Drive, amongst others, and within that assessment they can add multiple choice, text boxes, and places for students to draw their answers.

After creating the assignment teachers can assign the test to students with a unique code or to an entire class if the class has enrolled, which is also by a unique code.  Students can access the assessment on any device.  It gets better from here.  Teachers have a live look into any students assessment where they can comment, grade, or just view each students live work. You can even toggle the names so their is no teacher bias when looking at who's doing what.

And even better, the results can be graded automatically or graded very easily by the teacher as the student is taking the test.  The thing that I really appreciate about this tool is that it does a lot of things and all of the things it does are valuable to teachers.  It's not trying to do too much and make itself a do-it-all tool, which gets annoying.

I highly recommend you check out their site and the accompanying videos that explain what it does.

How it Works

Help Videos