A couple of days ago I wrote about a new twitter-like service designed especially for educators, called Edmodo. They posted a little screencast today. Looks promising:
EduTechie
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Twitter In the Classroom – Edmodo
Last week I linked to a great article about using Twitter in the classroom. Today I saw a new service that is in Beta right now that is a twitter-like web app specifically designed for the Classroom… Edmodo. I was not able to get in, but you can see some screenshots here.
It promises to be the service to connect schools, teachers, parents and students.
Instant communication and connection is a great thing and if a whole school buys into something like this it could be fantastically popular and useful, but you will lose the greater Twitter community which is part of the power of Twitter.
YouTube LIVE! Educational Use…
So there have been live online streaming services for a while now, but none of them have seemed to take off.
Today TechCrunch linked to a video that said YouTube was going to have offer live video streaming services sometime later this year.
Aside from being a huge Google fan, this could potentially be important in Education for one reason… users. YouTube has a HUGE user base.
A lot of teachers are already familiar with YouTube and will be more likely to start using a feature in a program they already use. I need not repeat the value of live streaming for a classroom. Teachers can teach for distance education, not to mention a global audience! With real time feedback tools like chat and twitter, teachers can also get real time feedback from around the world! 
Students will also find a much larger user base to present to.
Those are just some ideas off the top of my head. What about you? What other things can you think of?
QipIt – Mobile Phone Capture
So couple of days ago I posted about a new Google Chat client that I have embedded on my blog. First off, it has been great fun to interact with all sorts of people that I normally wouldn’t get the chance to chat with! A lot of you just entered to see if worked, but never said anything. But I did have some good conversations.
This morning I received a chat invitation from a Philippe Dewost, a young guy from France, who was reading a popular post from about a year ago: “8 Ways to use Camera Phones in Education.“ Philippe is a the guy behind, or at least a part of a cool program called Qipit that I thought might be of use to some of you out there.
Functionality
Basically it allows students/teachers to take a pictures of notes/whiteboards/etc. and email them to a service that converts them over to PDF. It actually works pretty good. It takes out all the ugly from the picture and makes a pretty good copy of what ever you are seeing (but it does have to be large).
Cons
- Multiple pages is somewhat hard. You can do it by attaching multiple pictures to an e-mail, but that is difficult on a phone. From what I can see there is no way to edit it once it has been sent and combine pictures together.
- UPDATE: Qipit does offer a “merge” feature that allows to reorder your pages and combine them in a single PDF. For multiple uploads we also offer an HTTP uploader (10 pages at a time, including pre scanning page rotate) so you can unload your cell phone using bluetooth and upload at once to Qipit
- UPDATE: The 100 page limit is an online storage limit. You always receive your qipit copies by e-mail.
Uses
The uses in education are obvious. Students can scan in hand written notes and share them easily with friends (and save paper!). Teacher’s can scan in notes from class on a board they want to remember… or even assignments.
What other uses can you think of? There is a Facebook group devoted Qipit too…
Twitter for Academics
AcademHack has a great article on the use of twitter in schools… check it out!
Ideas from the article:
- Class Chatter
- Classroom Community
- Get a Sense of the World
- Track a Word
- Track a Conference
- Instant Feedback
- Follow a Professional
- Follow a Famous Person
- Grammar
- Rule Based Writing
- Maximizing the Teachable Moment
- Public NotePad
- Writing Assignments
Another thing which may be of interest… 7 Things you should know about Twitter from Educause.
Glubble Browser for Kids – AWESOME!
Several months ago I got a computer for my kids. I am techie and I want them to have the skills they need for the future, but protect them from some of the terrible stuff out there. After much research I came across this GREAT firefox extension called Glubble. At the time I liked the idea, but it was still in beta and was difficult to navigate… well, today they released a new version and it is AWESOME! (Note, I am writing from the perspective of father of small children).
Overview from their webpage:
Glubble is a free tool for the Mozilla Firefox Internet browser. It
permits each member of the family to have their own custom environment,
so that when kids use it they only see the very best parts of the
Internet based on selections made by their parents or supplied by
Glubble’s editorial staff.Glubble enhances Firefox to
make sure kids can’t see the whole World Wild Web instead they can only
see family friendly parts of the web, its like their own little world
on the web. We call it their Glubble World.
Cool things for kids:
- Interface – Easy to navigate (even for kids that can’t read)
- Glubble’s – Preapproved content that is awesome – There are a lot of great sites out there, and Glubble has done the hard work in finding it for you.
- Favorites – Kids can easily add small picture thumbnails.
- New Content – If kids want to see something that is not on there, they can request it with a click of a button and a parent/helper will be notified and decide if they want to allow them to see it.
- Personalized Homepage
- Lots of pictures to find things… very nice.
Cool things for Parents/Helpers/Teachers:
- Reporting on where the kids have last been… on any browser. I can be signed in at work and see where my kids are have been last on the home computer. Nice!
- Easily add new webpages.
- Create your own Family Glubbles – I created one for all of our extended family’s blogs.
- A Family Wall – This is a place to post notes to the kids that they will see when they sign in.
- Normal Browser in admin mode.
Educational Uses:
I think it is easy to see how this would be useful in Elementary school. You could create a classroom account and then set up glubbles specific for learning units. It would protect them from other stuff out there too.
What do you think? How could you use this in the classroom?
Real Time Collaboration
GoogleTutor posted a nice reminder tutorial online today about the power of real-time collaboration with Google Docs and Spreadsheets. This past semester a class I was taking wrote a nice paper as a whole class and used Google Docs for gathering everything together between us all. Nice.
Why We should use YouTube in the Classroom
Michael Wesch posted notes from a presentation he just did about why we should use YouTube in the classroom that I found very useful. Topics he covers:
- Legality of using YouTube video’s
- Why we use them
- Tips for finding good video’s
- Ways to Download them locally
- Tools for Remixing them
- Ways to incorporate them into our teaching
Author Uses Blog Comments to Peer Review Book
Oh this is just awesome! I just read about how an author, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, is using his blog to solicit feedback for a book he is publishing. Blog’s are really going mainstream when this happens.
Great idea though! One we have been using in education for a while… peer feedback. Of course a blog potentially offers a much more diverse, and larger number of reviewers.
7 Things You Should Know About Series
The Four Eyed Technologist posted a great post with links to all the “7 Things you Should Know About” series from Educause. I have know about these for a while, but hadn’t kept up on it! You should really bookmark this page for talking with Faculty and Staf