Organization- File Synch/Bookmark
The Joy of #IFTTT or, How I stopped worrying and learned to love productivity | ClassroomTM
I sadly can’t remember the one thing I needed to do which made me discover the brilliant IFTTT.com (IfThisThenThat) website, but whatever it is, I am very grateful. This is an incredibly simple yet cleverly-designed website which allows you to make all the standalone webistes you use for daily life (in my case, Twitter, Dropbox, Facebook, Youtube, Pocket, Email, bitly, Posterous, SMS Texts) and helps you to join them together. It does this by making what they call recipes.
Pearltrees - Web 2.0
Pearltrees is a site I just found out about from The Educational Technology Guy . This is a wonderful site for curating the web in a collection pearls. These pearls can then be customized and arranged in different patterns. Also, a person can invite others to collaborate on a pearltree and share it w/ others. I highly recommend checking out Pearltrees by clicking here !!
*Disclaimer: This is not a new concept by any stretch of the imagination, just my take on it. If you current use URL shorteners in the classroom, I encourage you to share this post with your colleagues. Now on to the post. We live in a Hyperlinked world and so do our students, yet nine times out of ten assignments are given out to students in paper form. This process is a means to an end in a traditional classroom, but why do we see this practice carried over in to digital assignments too?
URL Shortening: Spread the Word
I've not wrtten ia post about a tool in a long time. Mostly because I usually don't think about it that much and other people do a better job writing about it than I do anyway. But I've been using If This, Then That for a few months and quite like how it's helped my work flow. Will asked a few of us how we're using it and rather than try and cram it in a few tweets figured I could blog about it. Blogging is quite lovely thing for stuff like this. Let me share the tasks I've set up and why I use them..
IFTTT Meme
Dropbox + Pinterest + SMART Exchange for Teachers + Common Core = ClassConnect
Flip your Classroom, Just Store your Favorites , Find Common Core Content, and Share your Lessons “ ClassConnect saves me time building lessons so I can focus on engaging & inspiring my students. ” Eric and I just finished our first round of presenting this amazing tool to teachers for the first time since his product launched last week.
Digitize and Assess Student Work with ThreeRing
Born out of Startup Weekend EDU in Washington DC last fall, ThreeRing has been hard at work over the past few months transforming its initial idea and prototype into a working application and a brand new startup. Earlier this month, ThreeRing launched its open beta with two apps -- one for Android ( link ) and one for iPhone ( link ) -- available in their respective mobile app stores. ThreeRing tackles two problems in the classroom: 1) the need to bridge the analog and the digital with students' work (specifically, with teachers' tracking of it) and 2) the need for better assessment tools -- or rather, the need for assessment tools that don't involve multiple choice, standardized tests. And it does this with a remarkably simple tool: the mobile phone. ThreeRing allows teachers to easily create digital portfolios of student work by using their smartphones to snap a picture. Then teachers can tag the work by student, subject, class, as well as other metadata and comments.Dropbox Redesign Brings New Photo Viewer and Better File Management
Dropbox has launched a major redesign, simplifying many file management tasks and bringing a new video and photo viewer. The first thing you'll notice in the new Dropbox UI is the action bar which lets you sort files by name, date, size and type. Click on a file, and the action bar will get new options - for example, you can download, delete, rename, move or copy a file from there. You can also perform these actions by right-clicking on a file, which makes Dropbox more similar to Microsoft's Windows Explorer than ever.
Ever since Google Bookmarks stopped supporting lists last fall, I have used Evernote almost exclusively for all of my bookmarks and notes. Recently, while exploring some the many features of Evernote, I discovered that you can create flashcards from the contents of an Evernote notebook. StudyBlue , a flashcard service that I covered last week, allows you to pull your notes from Evernote into its service to create flashcards. You can pull in just one notebook from Evernote or pull in multiple notebooks. One you've imported your notebooks you can copy and paste from your any of your notes to create flashcards.
Create Study Materials from Evernote Notes
Evernote is a must-have application for the school administrator . This week, I conducted a concurrent session on it and other web tools at the North Carolina Technology in Education Society’s annual conference. From that conference, here’s 7 Ways Administrators Can Use Evernote :
School Administrator Uses of Evernote & Must-Have Evernote Extensions
Evernote
Last year, Dropbox raised a whopping $250 million funding round at a valuation in the ballpark of $4 billion . The raise had been rumored for months so it didn’t come as a huge surprise, but it still raised plenty of eyebrows. Because while Dropbox is totally awesome (I use it every day), at this point people see it as a convenient way to sync their files between computers — which it already does pretty well. So what’s all the money for?
Dropbox Can Now Automatically Sync Your Android Photos (And It Has More Up Its Sleeve)
Ever wish you could get a text message every time someone tagged you in a Facebook photo? Or that you could record notes to yourself that are transcribed and sent to your e-mail account? A nifty new Web service called ifttt (pronounced “lift” but minus the l) offers a way to automate tasks involving a bevy of services like Instagram, Craiglist, Dropbox and Instapaper, among others. The basic premise of the service is simple. Users simply connect two services together to respond to triggers, under the construct that if this happens, then do that. You can customize tasks on the service or sift through an extensive catalog of tasks to find one that suits your needs.