digitalgoonies.com

http://www.signupgenius.com

It happens all the time- your team, group, or class decides to have some party, get-together, or luncheon requiring everyone to sign up for something. Once upon a time, sign-up sheets were posted outside an office door, cubicle wall, or lounge bulletin board. Then someone had a bright idea: “Let’s email each other what we are signing up for!” And so the email madness begins. You know, it goes something like…

Sally decides to bring fruit salad, and so does Jill. Their emails to the whole group cross in the ether. Tony decides to bring a corn casserole but forgets to email the whole group and just emails the person coordinating. Then Sally sees Jill’s email and retracts her own and decides to bring a Jell-O salad at the same time Jill decides to bring an Apple-Walnut tart. So in the end no one brings fruit salad, three people bring corn casserole, and the plasticware was left off the list!

Sign-up Genius pushes this to the cloud and takes care of it all… and yes, its FREE! So let’s say we are having an end-of-year party at school and we need parents to donate certain things. So here is the sign-up sheet for all to see and use (go ahead, try it- it’ll just send me an email):

www.SignUpGenius.com/go/70A0B44A4AD2CA31-endofyear

No, we aren’t really having a party, though that would be all kinds of fun!

A few great settings that can be selected in the creation process:

• Can require an access code to sign up for items
• Can ask customized questions
• Users can leave their own comments
• Notify me by email when someone signs up
• Send reminders to group members X days before the date they signed up
• Allow a list member to “swap” slots with another member

So for the love of all things good, please pass this on to your room mothers, PTA coordinators, party planners, your Aunt Anne, and anyone else who needs people to sign up for things- it will save a lot of time and hassle (and keep those insane “Reply to All” email messages to a minimum).

http://narrable.com

There are many websites that allow you to add voice narration to photos, slideshows, etc. But there are very few that allow you to narrate a whole collection of images with ease like Narrable does.

After you create an account, upload local images (or browse Facebook), then sequence and resize them into a scrolling collage. Honestly, this is the hardest part- reordering and resizing the images is a little more cumbersome than it should be. Once the images are in place, simply give your photos a voice by either uploading audio, using the built-in voice recorder, or enter your phone number for the voice recorder to call you and record by phone!

Each picture may have a different recording- and each recording is labeled with the person narrating. This allows groups of individuals to contribute to the same project! Here’s a curriculum example (thanks to my awesome and wonderful daughter who lent me her voice for a whole sentence in the narration).

The final project can be shared in a number of ways, including embedding using an iFrame as shown here (view Fullscreen for best results):

www.evernote.com

Let me apologize ahead of time- I get real excited about Evernote. You may even call me an Evernote evangelist of sorts.

I have not blogged about Evernote before now for a couple reasons:

1. There aren’t enough words to do this justice.
2. Hasn’t everyone already heard of Evernote?

There are only a few programs that I launch daily that I cannot live without- and Evernote is one of them. What is it and why do I need it? Those are the hardest questions of all so let me see if I can summarize it:

• A platform to let you remember and access all of your information when you and where you need it
• Your digital life coach and manager
• Your lifesaver in time of need
• Your agent of change- start leading a “paperless” life

Evernote works on the concept of “Notes.” You add a note to your account using a device (computer, tablet, phone, etc.). The note can contain text, of course, but can also contain a photo, a link, a file, almost anything digital. You can then access that note at anytime once it is synced to the server. You can also share that note with others when you want!

Rather than be bore you with the details, here are some practical ways I use Evernote:

• Post-it note replacement- Instead of writing something down on a little note, I just whip out my phone and make a quick note within Evernote. I then can access that note later.
• Son’s football practice schedule- I take a picture of the printed football schedule (called a “snapshot” in Evernote). Then that text in the photo is searchable. Let me repeat that- any text in any image is searchable (sort of like the way scanners use OCR). This works even for handwritten text within an image!
• Take a picture of a PPT slide during a presentation
• Take snapshots of business cards, then trash the card itself
• Take snapshots of receipts- I inevitably will misplace paper receipts. Taking a snapshot makes them searchable and can show them to the store so they can get the information they need for exchanges and refunds!
• Take a snapshot of a diagram or poster on a bulletin board, etc.
• Take a snapshot of a book I’d like to read or buy later (since I won’t remember the title or author on my own) Continue reading

http://www.blockedinchina.net/

We’ve all heard the rumors and humdrum about the Chinese government blocking all kinds of websites with their massive web filter to “protect” their citizens from possibly interacting with anyone or anything that may be critical of their government or infuse those crazy Western ideologies like democracy and basic human rights (OK, I’ll stop the political rant here). But how much of the rumors are true? How aggressive are those web filters? Find out at this site simply by entering the URL of a website. The website will attempt to access the website from computers within China to see if it is blocked or not.

This won’t be all that useful for a great number of people, though it will for some. An ESL teacher that was going to leave to teach English in China asked me about our web resources- asked if they would be available to him once he is in China early next year. For him, this website is of great value. For students in general, this is a great lesson in cultural differences- analyzing which websites are blocked and finding out why!

http://croak.it/

Fans of online voice recorders like Vocaroo, Soundcloud and Aviary’s Myna know that these web apps have many uses. Students can use these for things like storytelling, summarizing, explaining concepts, etc.  But one of the major drawbacks (relatively speaking) is that these are all Flash-based . That is not all bad in itself. However, since Flash is on the way out and is not supported on iOS devices, a replacement is needed to fill this void- especially one that will work on iPads!

There are many options out there, but Croak It! is by far my favorite for a couple reasons:

• No registration required (this is critical for student use)!
• Free (this is also critical in our line of work)
• Has both Android and iOS apps
• Can also be used online with a computer as a Flash-based web app
• Creates a unique URL for each recording
• Can add a CroakIt! button to your own website!
• By default, the recording is private only to you (or whoever has the URL to your recording)
• Can post to Twitter or Facebook
• And I love the frog logo!

http://docsstorybuilder.appspot.com

You’ve all probably seen one of the Google commercials similar to this one:

Wouldn’t it be cool for our students to create a story through video screen captures like this? Well, this new tool “Docs Story Builder” does something similar by allowing students to “become” characters in a shared Google Doc. Students type in the character names, then enter what they want typed on the screen by each character. Then, they can choose a musical soundtrack to accompany the final “video” story.

It’s best explained by viewing an example- click on the image below to see what I mean. This is an example of one student playing the part of two students and adding imagery and elaboration to his/her writing (links to http://docsstorybuilder.appspot.com/BV7wPj).

There are so many cool things about this. Just imagine the possibilities- students retelling an account of the Boston Massacre, or interviewing Abraham Lincoln… and on and on and on.

The site generates a unique URL for each Doc Story, but there is no easy way to embed the “video.” It’s still in its infancy- perhaps these asesome features will be added later! Enjoy!

On a personal note- anyone notice how Susan hasn’t blogged since the middle of May? Just saying…

http://www.codeyear.com/

OK, I will be the first one to admit that I am not a programmer and barely a “coder.” I know some HTML and Javascript- enough to make a few little helpful websites and web-based functions (like this citation generator). But I am also one of those people who love to learn new things- and learning some basics of programming could come in real handy for an educator who likes to explore with technology.

That’s where CodeYear (by Codecademy) comes in. If you sign up at this site, they will email you a new lesson every Monday to continue learning programming/coding basics. The nice thing is that you get to use their editor- no other programs to use, no compiling, etc. You start off learning Javascript, but can also progress to learn other languages:

You earn buttons for your profile to brag about how smart you are:

This site is a really nice setup to learn new languages in a non-threatening way. Oh, did I mention it’s FREE!

Give it a try!

http://cloudmagic.com

Let me be upfront here: this blog post will not do justice to everything that CloudMagic can do. Now that we have that out of the way, let me do my best to tell you how awesome this is. This video gives you a good idea about this… thing.

For those of us who live in the digital world, we have our documents, data, and information spread out over many different platforms such as multiple Google Docs accounts, a few Gmail accounts, a Twitter account (or two), and don’t forget Dropbox, Evernote, iCloud, Google Calendars, and more! Finding that information can be (and usually is) challenging. For example, I have two Google Docs accounts (one personal, one professional) and I am constantly moving back and forth between the two. In which account did I save that document? Where did I see that- was it a Twitter post or a Facebook message?

Frankly, none of us has time to go log in to every account on every platform and search for what we need. And that’s why CloudMagic totally rocks.

Here’s how it works:

1. Sign up for a CloudMagic account (yes, it’s free).
2. Register/link your accounts- yes, you can register multiple Google accounts, multiple Twitter accounts, etc.
3. CloudMagic does the rest!

When you need to find something belonging to you, just access CloudMagic using the browser extension, mobile app (iOS or Android), or CloudMagic website. Enter the search term and it’s found instantly. And I do mean instantly- it blows away the time it takes for a normal Google search. It will search all your assets instantly and display results. Click on one of the hits for a preview of your data. Then you can open it instantly in the native application.

Here’s a sample of a search of my stuff when I entered “QR Codes” in the search field:

Give it a try- it will become one of your indispensable tools that you rely on daily!

http://www.quietube.com/

OK, first off, let me just say that this website itself doesn’t really do anything. But it does provide you with a cool little bookmarklet for your browser that will forever revolutionize how you show videos to others, especially students.

Once you install this bookmarklet, here’s what you do…

1. Visit a website with a video from YouTube, Vimeo, or Viddler (more to be added later).
2. Click on the bookmarklet on your bookmarks toolbar.

Magically, the video will open in a separate, blank page that hides all the comments and suggested videos. These comments and suggested videos can sometimes be vulgar and inappropriate to show students, so this is a way around that! You’ll even have your choice of a light or dark background!

Here’s the tutorial video that shows it well from their own website:

Isn’t that awesome? From this day forward (if you are lucky enough to have access to YouTube in your classroom), this is how you should show YouTube videos!

Oh, and one more thing… showing videos this way skips the video advertisements at the beginning of most videos! That’s right- skips the ads! What’s not to love about that!

You can even send links to YouTube videos to others that will open within the Quietube shell, like this one: http://quietube3.com/v.php/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwOCY0nPDG0 (if you’re an educator, you’ll enjoy this great video from Kevin Honeycutt)!

This has some potential for classroom uses! In the past, we have used Google Earth for these purposes- but this is so much easier!