 Okay. Okay, good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event. Yes, you can call us a webinar, we won't be offended. Where we cover anything that may be of interest to librarians. We do the shows every Wednesday morning live at 10 a.m. Central Time, but they are all recorded. So if you're unable to join us on Wednesday mornings, that's fine. You can always go to our website and see the recordings of all of our sessions. Going back to our very first one, which is January 2009. So we're on our fifth year. This is like a 216th episode or something like that. Well, I've been working on those files. We do all sorts of things here. Presentations, interviews, little mini training sessions, book reviews. Basically, if it's related to libraries, we'll put it on the show. We're not picky. We do have commission staff, Nebraska Library Commission staff that do presentations, and we bring in guest speakers, too, which we have a mixture of today. Once a month, generally the last Friday, last Wednesday, last week of the month, we do a more techie-based one, Tech Talk with Michael Sowers. Michael Sowers next to me is our Technology Innovation Librarian here at the Nebraska Library Commission, and he comes on once a month to do updates on the tech news of the month and sometimes have guest speakers on interviews, whatnot. And so that's what we're doing this morning. So I will hand over to you, Michael, and you can take it away and do your thing. All right. Thanks, Christa. So this month's Tech Talk, I do have some news that I'll share at the end, but what I have done this month is brought in Richard Byrne, who is the blogger at Free Technology for Teachers, which currently has over 45,000 subscribers, and I'm one of them. And I know we have some people who are attending today in the audience who are regular readers there. So I'm trying to turn over to Richard's microphone. Richard, you've muted yourself. You need to unmute yourself on your side. Oh, there we go. Can you hear us? Yeah, I can hear you. All right, there we go. The joy of having people in remote. So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to give Richard presentation control, and he's got a short presentation for us. We've talked to him ahead of time, and he is more than happy to take questions as he's going through his presentation. So if you've got a question as he's talking, feel free to just go ahead and type that in or raise your hand and turn on your microphone for you. So Richard, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, what you do, and share what you have for us. All right, so thanks for having me. First of all, let's move it about me. For those of you that haven't seen what I do from the shameless commerce division of my life, I primarily run the blog FreeTechForTeachers.com, which is actually decided to load slowly right now. There it is. And I started this blog about five and a half years ago as part of a project to fulfill a grant requirement my school received. And one thing led to another, and here I am talking to you. My background in education, I taught high school social studies for eight and a half years prior to that. I taught English language arts class for a year, a job I was woefully under qualified for, but I was willing to try. And before that, I was a trainer at FedEx Ground, formerly known as RPS. So that's my background in education and today for the last 12 to 15 months now actually, my full-time job has been running FreeTechForTeachers.com, iPadAppsForSchool.com, Practical EdTech, and doing a lot of professional development workshops with schools around the world. Just came back from a short trip to Costa Rica where I got to observe a really neat program from the Ecology Project International that's working to get local kids involved in conservation. So a really interesting project that I'll probably be blogging about sometime in the next week. So that's my background. And today I'm going to kind of share some of the resources that I've really promoted over the last year or so. Some of you may have seen me talk about these before or write about these tools before, but most of them have gone through some updates in the last six months and I would like to kind of highlight some of those. Just one last little piece about me. If you subscribe to the School Library Journal, I do have a monthly article that comes out about technology that you can find there as well. So rather than using slides today, I'm going to share my live desktop. I always prefer to do this over sharing slides because sharing slides just gives you a static shot of the tool. This gives you a much more realistic look at the tools that I'm talking about. And I've kind of organized these things into three general categories of discovering information, discussing information, and demonstrating what we've learned or how the students demonstrate what they've learned. So I'm going to start here with a neat discovery tool that, again, has been out for about a year and a half now. It's called Guru. You can find it GuruLearning.org. They actually have an iPad app that goes along with the website, so you can use it either way. But it's really a neat tool for finding curated collections of resources around math, science, social studies, ELA. The collections include video clips, they include text-based articles. It's a nice tool for students when they're starting to research a topic and they're starting to look into a topic because it kind of gives them all the basics in one nice package. We can just take a look right now at one of the featured collections that's going by. So here's our Memorial Day collection. We can jump into that collection if my computer will. There we go. I just click on the study button here and we can see, you know, in this case we've got a little picture about Memorial Day and we'll go on to our next portion here as they've framed up some resources from history.com and then they've framed up a video that we could watch about Memorial Day as well. So it's a nice tool for students and you can create your own collections if you log in. I think that's a really neat tool if you want to design your own little collection of materials specific to something that you're teaching that your students are learning about. So moving on from Guru, I want to share my favorite video site for students and educators and it's called Next Vista for Learning. Next Vista for Learning was started by a teacher in this rush in Hurley, one of the most entertaining speakers I've ever seen in my life as well, but Next Vista for Learning was started with the purpose of having students create videos that teach a lesson and having teachers share videos that teach a lesson. All the videos are reviewed by a real person before they go live. They have to meet the criteria of teaching a short lesson in order to be featured on the site. You can download all the videos that you find so if your school doesn't have a great wireless network, they don't have a great internet bandwidth, you can download them ahead of time and play them directly from your computer. And then also on Next Vista for Learning will run contests throughout the year. The contests are great because they give you little prompts about a video project. A lot of times we're thinking, well I want to do a video project but I'm not sure which direction to go in or it's kind of like a creative writing prompt only in this case it's for videos. Let's just take a look at some of the videos that we can find right now and you can see we're divided into three categories, the white bulbs are kind of the lessons, the global views are so white bulbs are more of a the how-to thing, global view is more of a conceptual idea and then Seeing Service is to highlight projects that people have done in their communities to help others. Let's just take a look at one of the white bulbs. So here's a new math video. I have not watched this math video yet but it'll give us an idea of what this site is like. So we click through and we pull up solid figures and here we go. Richard just a quick question because it's just the way go to Webinar works. Can I assume that there's some audio going along with this video? We're not hearing it. Yeah yeah there is. The audio didn't get broadcasted there. Sorry about that. Yeah no that's fine we just wanted to let people know. Yeah so the audio didn't didn't get broadcasted there unfortunately but what I want to highlight before we move off to next Vista is you'll see that this was created as part of one of the recent contests and you can jump through and see all the all the finalists here and all the finalists all the contest winners are chosen by teachers who attend workshops or attend conferences where next Vista for learning is giving presentations. And so it's really you know it's not just some arbitrary panel it's actually real educators that end up voting on these and promoting these videos to the top of the list and again if you want to download them we can download this video as well. Now of course we've got YouTube and you know YouTube love it or hate it. It does have some really great material that our students can can use to review a topic. I will put my bias out there and say that I'm not a huge proponent of the foot classroom model just because in my in my area where where I live and where I work we have some major obstacles to overcome to to make the foot classroom work one of them being internet access period. A lot of our students don't have internet access at home but so moving on from my bias about the foot classroom I will say that if your students do want to find some good review materials there's often a lot to be found on YouTube and if you want to organize materials for your students from YouTube Guru that I mentioned earlier is a great tool to do that with because we can pull in materials that are from YouTube but also pull them in from other resources as well. One of my favorite YouTube channels right now is Crash Course John and Hank Green they've written written books along this along these topics as well but we can find see these great series of videos on history science and now they've expanded into literature as well and if you do want to have students or yourself make some make some video lessons one of the apps that I really like for the iPad is called Nomiya Nomiya Teach and Nomiya Teach came people that started the foot classroom or the foot camera many years ago but it's eventually got bought out by Cisco but they took some of the money that they made and started this site called Nomiya the Nomiya site itself is kind of like guru where you can go and find a find collections of instructional videos but the Nomiya Teach app which is a free iPad app can be used by yourself or by your students to create demonstration videos instructional videos and the nice thing about it is unlike some other apps where you can't include your face in the Nomiya Teach app you can actually include yourself you can use video of yourself for your iPad as opposed to just being a whiteboard publication I do like making videos I think it's a great medium for students to really engage them and and the processes that they enjoy one of the great things about a video project is at the end of a video project you can get your students together and you can sit down and you can watch your videos together and spend half an hour watching the videos or however long it takes and for the most part kids really enjoy that review process of showing off their work and looking at their other other students work in a way that they couldn't do with a written project a report you know the the end of a two-week project in which students write a report you're not going to sit down and have every student read every report the other one for the other students wrote in part because you just have time for that but also because it's not terribly exciting but a video project can get everyone involved and that the nice thing about a video project that I like is that it's so accessible to everyone besides your students if you want to have the the principal come in and stop by for five or ten minutes and see what your students have done I think that's a fantastic thing that you can do as opposed to going to the principal's office and saying hey look at the 25 awesome essays of my students wrote you know your principal probably doesn't have time for that but they do have the five or ten minutes to stop into your classroom and look at the video so one of the tools that I'm really excited about that that launched this year for making videos is called video you can find it at video.co and it's a tool for making animated videos by dragging and dropping artwork into place and then you can add in there add your narration to it or add a soundtrack in the background I'll just show you 30 less than 30 seconds here of a demonstration of it again we're not going to hear the sound but you'll be able to see how it works as you can see all they've done here to these are pieces of artwork that were in the catalog so what we've seen there all the all the elements of that 22nd clip were created just by dragging and dropping artwork that's in the video tool so fantastic tool it works online so you don't have to download any software to your computer and if your students have a a mac at school and a pc at home they can keep working on their projects wherever and of course you can go and look at other people now a thing links a tool that I've written about a number of times and they just launched a new iphone and ipad app just launched it yesterday actually so now all the things that used to be able to do with it online you can do on your ipad or your iphone let's take a look at what thing link does thing link allows you to create interactive images you can upload any picture that you have as a png or jpeg file and you can add these little interactive pin marks to it let's just take a look at one that's here in the gallery so this is a public gallery and we'll just take a look at this picture here and in this particular picture we'll see right check out some of our favorite video projects and these pin marks include the option to play a video and so these this person just came along and they added these little pin marks we've got some related pictures i'm going to go ahead and log into my account and i'll show you how you can make your own picture interactive so here in my account let's say i want to take a picture that i have and i'm just going to upload a picture that i have on my desktop so i've got this picture of killman jarrow that i might want to work with or this picture of people diving underwater let's drag that over and so that pictures uploaded now now that it's uploaded i can just click on it and add this little pin mark and i might say this was a picture taken in the pacific ocean i see diving in the pacific and i could put a link into any set that i wanted to just say pacific dot com i have no that's a real website or not but i'll just put that in for now but one of the ways i've seen this used by teachers and students is to upload a picture like this one and have students identify okay what kind of plant is this and when they add their description they'll write about the type of plant that is and they might put in a link to the source of the information they're using they put in a link to a video clip about that particular plant they could also put in a link to another picture or put in a link to an audio recording about that particular plant i'm going to save this picture and allow anyone to edit the picture and so as the teacher i may start the project by uploading this picture and then share it out and tell my students they need to go ahead and now they need to add their own pin marks to this project hey richard again question for you now yeah yeah go ahead yeah on back on that service you were just showing us um you you kind of partially answered my question in in the you can you can share the image can you share the image and and whatever you've done to it outside of thing link like embedded in a blog post or something or is it pretty much locked into this service here so you can you can embed this picture into a blog post or into a into a wiki page and it will work in that web page or that that blog post just like it does here on the site as well okay so let's just go ahead and i can show you quickly if i can share it you can see i can grab this embed code for it i can copy and paste that and wherever i put it the the image still works and back in my settings here when i was using the edit button if i had if i say allow anyone to edit they can even edit the picture while they're on the blog post as opposed to having to come over here to thing link they will have to have a thing link account in order to do that but once they have their account anytime they see that picture they can go ahead and and start to add their own pin marks in fact that's a great question because i recently saw the bleacher report which is a sports blog has started doing this has started to include include images and and asking people to to tag the pictures as well it's been a great conversation starter on some of their blog posts great thanks you're welcome so great question so read write thing as i mentioned at the beginning i taught language arts for a year and read write think is a tool that i think anyone who teaches language arts or anything remotely close to teaching language arts should really have really have bookmarked read write thing provides lots of great lesson plans they also provide a lot of neat interactive tools including a poetry app for the ipad that i that i think is great they also have a an app for creating fictional trading cards about historical people about historical events characters from books you want your students to develop develop a fictional trading card about characters from the great gatsby that's a i think a really interesting way to get kids involved in analyzing the things that they're reading now as a teacher or as a anyone really who's using the web we all have our our favorite services for bookmarking things if you are still bookmarking things to your computer by the way please stop doing that so that if your computer crashes or you something you get a virus or something to that effect you don't lose all your bookmarks the end of every school year i i still get lots people ask me how do i get all my bookmarks because the it department is taking my computer for this summer and i'm not going to be able to get to them so please find an online service you like for bookmark the a new service that i really like in the interest of full disclosure i have kind of been advised this company a little bit it's called edgy clipper edgy clipper dot net if you're looking at it right now it looks a bit like pinterest and i've actually described it as kind of being like what teachers would want pinterest to be if they could design it from the ground up so edgy clipper as you can see i can i can bookmark sites i'm currently looking at the community page where anyone who has used the service can share their bookmarks or share their links the difference between using edgy clipper and using a services designed for general consumers general web users so edgy clipper was designed for teachers in addition to bookmarking links i can also upload pdfs i can upload documents that i have stored on my computer i can make those documents or my public or private i can create a group just for my classroom so if i want to have all of my students even my students who don't have email addresses uh at contributing to a group page of bookmarks or a group page of resources i can do that i can keep it private uh or i can go ahead and i can make my bookmarks public clips take a look right now we've got you can see that adam who's actually the founder of edgy clipper has just pinned this in the last 22 hours and if i want to go ahead and take a look at it here's a blog post that he liked i can go ahead and i can reclip it so now it becomes part of my own clipboard and i'll just put it on that clipboard so now it's become a part of my own clipboard that i can share publicly as i've done here or i can put it on to a private clipboard so a couple of the neat aspects that are available in edgy clipper right now i think uh teachers are really going to enjoy moving forward and speaking of keeping up with uh what what's new in our field i was a i was a long time user of google reader i think many of you probably use google reader as well google reader is shutting down in july july 1st so you have about 32 days to find a replacement for a google reader the tool that i'm using primarily to replace google reader is called feedly you find it feedly dot com and i like feedly because it works on the web as you can see right now i'm using it and at feedly dot com and i'm logged into my account it also works on ios and it works for android i like the magazine aspect of it the mini magazine aspect of it i can quickly scroll through just like i could do in google reader but i can share all of my favorite things from here directly out to you any number of services including twitter facebook pinterest google plus uh evernote where i bookmark all my resources where i can mark them save for later here and come back and read my read my favorite articles later this a long article that i don't have time to really read i want to make sure i do read it i'll just put it in my save for later column and i can again share out to all my favorite services as i like you'll notice i have created a number of groups over here on my left hand side so i've got a tech news tech business my edtech leaders group these were all imported directly from my google reader account so if you're still using google reader you want to import directly into feedly you can do so richard yes we do have a question from the audience about the feedly there um are you able to give someone a link to your bookmark so they could use as a sort of subject guide so like i want to let's say i'm in my my edtech leaders column here could i share this whole group is that the question right no i can't share this whole group out uh i'd have to send out the individual articles but that makes a great segue into the next service that i was going to mention which does have that capability uh called flipboard flipboard yep you're welcome flipboard.com is an app for the ipad and for android it doesn't have a great web interface the way that the way that feedly does uh which is the reason why i don't use it as often but if you're if you're addicted to your ipad or your android tablet this is a fantastic tool for you because you can create your own digital magazines you can create a digital magazine and that magazine is formulated by all the things that you subscribe to or bookmark as you read through feedly i'm sorry as you read through flipboard so if i want to share that magazine out and i i've made magazines that i've shared out with other people they subscribe to my magazine and they'll see everything that i think is important so if i wanted to make a subject guide you know i'm not a favorite educational technology blogs i can make a magazine and say these are the best educational technology blogs please subscribe to my magazine no anytime my bookmark or anytime i share something in that magazine everyone else who subscribes to my magazine sees those updates as well so we can take a you want to take a quick look at it and kind of browse through and you see make your own flipboard magazine like i said it doesn't have a it doesn't have a web interface that's as good as feedly but you can bookmark from the web from your web browser to feedly so if i'm using my web browser i can say i want to send this to my flipboard magazine and i just turned on my screen capture tool there we go there we go now my computer's uh now my computer's kind of bogging down but here we go so just a switch kind of a switch from looking at information and finding information into planning or working with the information uh text to mind map is i'm a big fan of mind mapping because i i think it's a great interface for kids to really see the connections between topics uh and text to mind map i i like and i've used with my own students in the past because it does a really neat thing for me so you take the left hand side of the screen i have an outline i didn't just type an outline and on the right hand side of the screen the outline becomes a mind map format so for my student who prefers the outline format over the web format we have that and my student who prefers the web format over the outline format they have that as well we can download our finished product when we like and it's super easy to use because you don't have to create an account in order to use it so let's just create a new outline and we'll call it new england weather and we'll just say spring and we just say cold and muddy and we'll say summer is also cold and buggy and i might want to change it up and say midwest weather and now i'll start a new subtopic now let's hit draw a mind map and you see everything that i've connected here it so all my things that showed up under new england weather show up here in the mind map nice little tool for planning a project or i don't want any kind of now as i mentioned earlier i'm a i love having students make videos i also like the idea of having students make quick podcasts that they can use to kind of document what they've learned or document their thoughts record their thoughts and share their thoughts and you don't have to use any fancy tools really to make a podcast today uh do you just want to do a simple recording sound cloud we can find soundcloud.com it can be used on the web can be used on android or ios to simply create a short recording you could be recording your voice you could be recording some music that you're playing you can share the work to the whole world or you can keep your work private if you want to use your sound you're recording in another project for example if i wanted to make a recording in soundcloud and then use it over here in my video project i could do that because i can download my my recording now let me go ahead and i'm going to log into my account here and we'll put down a spot to make sure i remember all my accounts and let's just double check but what soundcloud also offers i think is really neat is the option to comment on your recording directly at the spot that you're prompted by prompted with the thought so for example here's one of my recordings as i play it and i granted you're not going to be able to hear it so i can pause it right there at two seconds in and write a comment and say please consider that so anywhere in my recording i can insert these comments one of the neat things neat ways i've seen this used is by foreign language teachers or world language teachers to correct students on their verb conjugation or the or their pronunciation of a particular word the students record in soundcloud using one of the apps or using the web and teachers can reply exactly where the student needs to hear it so they're at six seconds in we can add another comment i decide i want to share this out again there's a link we can embed it we can embed this recording into our thing link for example that back here if i wanted to allow my students to add some recordings they could add a recording right here with their soundcloud so if i wanted to grab that soundcloud link i could add it to my thing link project and again if i want to use this in my multimedia project my video project i go ahead and i can download that recording now another tool for helping students kind of make presentations or work with media is pixlr pixlr is a free video sorry not video image editing suite you can use the pixlr tools online you can also use the pixlr tools on your mobile device it could be your your android or your ios device they have some very basic and quick apps for cropping pictures you just need to resize the picture to some much more advanced tools that you can use for editing the layers in a svg file for example so it's kind of up to you how much editing power you need but all the tools are free and you can start with one of the simple tools and move into some of the more advanced tools and if your students need a good place to find pictures that they can legally reuse in their presentations in their blog posts or in in their video projects pixabay.com is my favorite place to find public domain images i like pixabay because all the images are available as high resolution images as i mentioned they're all public domain you can create a pixabay account if you like and you can download pictures to your heart's content you can also download pictures without creating an account however if you try to download pictures without creating an account you're limited to the resolution it is not available as a high resolution unless you create an account accounts are free great place to find pictures i absolutely absolutely love it i just want to get them out of the habit of going to google images google images is not a great place to find public domain pictures pixabay it is absolutely fantastic place to find public domain images and let's just do a quick search here i wanted to search for a picture of a boat i need a picture of a boat for my presentation here's a picture and i want to download it there we go i can choose from the resolutions that i need let's go ahead and download the 640 mega pixel picture and now it's downloaded to my computer one thing to keep in mind is that pixabay is supported by advertising so you do see advertisements for images from image resellers like shutter stock or sometimes big stock images show up these images over here are not available for free just to point that out to to you and it's important to point that out to students or anyone else you're going to show this the site to is these tools over here these images here on the right under shutter stock are not available for free but everything you see here is available for free let's go back to my search results all these pictures again available for free for me to download and you can see some of it is clip art and some of it is just great high resolution artwork now speaking of presentations i'm making a presentation a haiku deck is my absolute favorite ipad app right now for making a presentation one of the things i love about haiku deck is as i'm creating my presentation if there is a word that i really want to emphasize i can type that word into my slide and haiku deck will search for creative commons licensed pictures that are available that match that image or match that word all the images are high resolution they fill the entire screen that's a really important thing to teach students about presentation design is to use high resolution pictures whenever possible so you don't get pixelated looking pictures the other nice thing about haiku deck is that it kind of intentionally limits how much text a student can put on a slide and it shows students very quickly that the more they type the smaller their font gets one of the rules that i always had for my students is that your font size could be no smaller than twice my age so every year obviously the font is getting bigger but what that meant for my students is they always had to have font that was at least 48 size 48 which does two things that limits how much text the student can put on a slide and it really forces students to think about the visuals as opposed to the text so they're not relying on bullet points and talking off the bullet so haiku deck free application a few weeks ago they announced that they got three million dollars in venture capital funding to use it to move this technology into a web application as well so i'm looking forward to that coming along very soon and two quick tools here for getting feedback from students sikrativ is a tool that i've used for the last two years i think it's a great tool for polling your audience asking students some informal questions getting formal feedback you can also use it as a quiz tool if you want to ask students to jump into a quiz and you can get the get the feedback from them in a quiz format where their name is attached to their work or you can use it as an anonymous feedback tool i'll give you a quick little look at how it functions as a teacher so i'm going to log into my account which is this lecture panel so if i go ahead and i'll log in let me put in my name and i'm going to set up a room very quickly for you to participate in one of my informal quizzes so here's my teacher panel that has just popped up on the screen and i'm going to go ahead i'm going to give you my room number which is five two two three four and so if you want to participate here i'm going to put this in the chat box if you want to participate what you need to do let's go to the following link which is m.sikrativ.com and i just sent that to everybody and one of the chat organizers can push that out to the whole audience that would be great but what this allows me to do is if you go to m.sikrativ.com and you enter my room number which is five two two three four you can participate in one of my quizzes it looks like i'm not allowed to send out a message to everyone i'm only allowed to send it to chat organizers so i apologize for that but what this allows me to do is let's say i want to make a short answer quiz i can make my quiz anonymous so if i'm asking students a question that's maybe a little bit sensitive in its nature for example if i wanted to ask my students how did it take you to read last night's assignment if i'm working with students who are struggling readers they might not be so willing to raise their hand and say well it took me an hour to read the the two pages but if i asked this in an anonymous format where i don't know what student said what i can get a much more honest survey of my of my class that way or i can use an activity it looks like we have some people join the room so awesome or i can use a quiz-based activity in which i have pre-made quizzes on any number of topics and i have it i have a bunch of them here in my account i have a my mountain quiz and i can just have a teacher-paced or student-paced assignment so if i want to say that each student you only have 30 seconds to answer a question i can advance them through each screen so crad have recently added the option to include pictures in my questions so if i wanted to for example upload a screenshot of a math problem i can do that and ask you to answer questions and based on that but since i have a couple of people in the room here i've got five people in the room and i can tell because as a teacher here it tells me who's in the room i can do a quick short answer question and i can simply say here's the question complete the sentence complete the phrase keeping up with the blank i'll make that anonymous and we'll start the activity and if you're participating remotely right now you'll be able to your screen will change you'll be able to answer the question and you can put in anything you want keeping up with the Kardashians the joneses there we go that's a common one the big pile of laundry that you have right now whatever it is we've got three joneses the thing i love about the joneses responses that we always get different spellings of it and when we're done i can say end of the activity and i can grab a report of the responses if i had asked you to put in your name the report would include your name and your response the nice thing about this is even if i ask you for your name when i'm showing this screen your name doesn't show up so i can still show this in front of the class and say okay we're going to vote on the best response we don't see that the Billy wrote librarians and that Susie wrote joneses we just see the responses so it's a nice tool but we still want to show all the responses to students you can do that that's a secretive tool and a new tool that came out last fall the use of a very similar concept is a creative the idea of having this room where my students can respond to me using their their web browser or their ipad or their android device it's infuse learning infuse learning again does the same thing as the crab with two differences that are worth noting number one infuse learning allows students to draw responses freehand so i can ask a question and ask you to perhaps solve a math question and a lot of us solving a math question is easier to do if we can write out the answer as opposed to trying to type out the answer or if we want to ask someone to diagram you know here's the question please diagram your response we can have students diagram response the other nice piece about infuse learning is that you can have questions dictated to students so if you want to include an audio recording you can do that through infuse learning but otherwise the same concept applies another tool that that's been around for a while but has recently gotten a bunch of updates called padlet used to be called wallwisher padlet's a great tool for again getting that kind of informal feedback from students we can write on a giant sticky note wall padlet works in your web browser it well it's great to on an interactive whiteboard if students come up and drag and drop and rearrange notes also works on your android or ipad device let's go ahead and let's just build a wall here quickly and it just takes a second one of the things i can do now is i can just go ahead and start hiding notes here's my name and say this is a note you can write up to 160 characters you can include a link on a included a link to a picture or a link direct to a website i could do that can also upload a file so let's say i have something save on my desktop like this call me maybe video i can drag and drop it in so that people can go ahead and they can grab that attachment or i can take a picture with my webcam now i used wallwisher or padlet as it's now called with a number of my classes to quickly share notes while we were reading an assignment all right we're going to we're all going to read this section of all quite on the western front as you read put your notes on the wall then we'll discuss the notes when we're done reading that day now i can modify this wall to give the title to include a nice little widget or icon in the upper left currently i'm using the freeform response so i can write notes anywhere i want but if i change the layout into a stream format then all our posts become much more organized in a vertical alignment but i think most important here is the privacy option if i'm logged into my account i can make a wall private so that only the people i add by email can see it but i can also make it password protected so that anyone can see the wall but if they want to add a note let's say they can write on the wall and they have to put in the password so if i want my students to write on the wall but i don't want everybody in the world to see to see it i'll tell my students here's the link to the wall and when you get there you need to put in the password open the password of max max is named one of my dogs so go to the wall type in the word match when you're asked for a password and now you have access to the wall so it's a nice tool that you can go quickly from public to private depending on your needs another nice tool for kind of collaborative note taking and sharing of notes is called video notes video notes we can find it video note dot or video not dot yes kind of a funny url but video notes is a tool that allows you to watch a video on the left hand side of your screen and take notes on the right hand side of your screen and your notes can be shared with anyone you want to share them with it integrates with google drive so if you're a google apps for education school this is a tool that your students can use without having to create a new account they can simply watch the video and take notes together on a video it's a nice way to show a video hey as a social science teacher i love showing videos because there are all kinds of great little video clips out there but oftentimes it was we'd watch a video then we'd stop and talk about it and if you wait until the end of the video sometimes the students questions have gone by or their comments have gone by but if they can react in real time you can have a much deeper conversation i think that we'll wrap up with the four last quick tools here class charts nice tool that that's again a new new tool that launched this year it's a tool for classroom management you can create seating charts you can and on those seating charts you can give student each student feedback on their behavior for the day their their progress for the day they can earn little badges that you assign to them or completing a certain number of tasks or completing a task and it's a nice way for students to see how they're doing throughout the course of the day or throughout the course of a week and you can share this work with parents so the parents can log in and they can see how the students are doing as well the nice thing about it is someone who was a substitute teacher for a while i always appreciated it when i could get a seating chart that showed students faces so i knew which students were supposed to be aware class charts allows you to do that if you want to upload pictures of the students into your seating chart you can do that and then you can share that seating chart if you have someone who's going to be a class for the day su media or su media is a nice tool for again mashing together audio video picture clips from around the web and putting it into one nice presentation i'm going to wrap up with this one last tool here uh i'm sorry one two three d catch is a nice free application from autodesk autodesk produces a lot of applications for modeling one two three d catch allows you to take any physical object and turn it into a virtual manipulative but just by taking a series of pictures around the around the object i took a for example i took a picture of my dog many pictures of my dogs and stitched them together and created a 3d object of my dogs that students can manipulate on their ipad or on a web browser and last but not least is a tool that comes from another teacher and i love tools that are developed by teachers for teachers this one comes from class tools dot net which is run by russell tarz the educator in the uk one of the many tools that he's put together is the sms generator it's a tool for creating fake text message exchanges between fictional characters or historical characters and we can go ahead and we can create just a little note here on you know hey ben it's george how are things going in france type a note so we can type i know i know about it that's just put in some more note here here's my reply over on this side george i have secured the loan from the french help is on its way so in this case what would a text message exchange from george wasp and ben franklin look like again simple little tool it doesn't require students to create an account i think it's a good way to engage students in short creative writing project so on that note i'm hoping there's some questions or maybe there's some questions that have popped up and i'm happy to uh have to answer them all right richard thank you very much that was i you know i christ and i both sitting here taking notes going yeah i play with that we got to play with that um just to let everybody know uh christa has been logging all of the urls of all the sites that richard showed us and will be in the show notes with the recording so if you missed something we will we will happily uh provide you with a list to get everything back to and if you do have any questions uh feel free to you know type them into the chat or raise your hand we'll happily turn your microphone on i've got a couple for richard while we're we're going in here um and not necessarily specifically about the tools themselves but uh the the you're you're the site free technology teacher free technology for teachers um you post a lot um i guess it was wondering if you just talk for just a minute or two about what what is your process do you make sure you sit down once a day do you schedule things out how is it you actually pull this this slide off uh that's a great question um i'll give you the short version of it is my goal is to write five blog posts a day Monday through Friday uh and to do that i read i have a massive list of rss subscriptions that i that i go through throughout the day uh and i will say that to write five blog posts a day uh the the hardest most time consuming part of it is actually trying out the resources so that i can give some perspective on how they work and how they how they might fit in the classroom i also get a ton of emails from uh companies that are starting up or press press people but generally my my criteria for picking the resources that go on the blog uh it has to be something that i that i feel like uh a teacher or a teacher librarian or or a school administrator can feel comfortable using in a relatively short amount of time uh could you spend an hour with the tool and then feel comfortable enough to use it in your classroom because you know most of us are not technology teachers we're not teaching technology classes we're you know we're teaching something else right and the technology is supposed to help us with that and support us with that so that's one part of the criteria uh some of the other other pieces of it uh i try to stay away from tools that have you know really intrusive advertising uh i also try to look more and more for tools that are supported uh with a somewhat sustainable business model uh because i think we've all been burned at some point by uh by a favorite resource shutting down or a favorite resource uh switching business models so that it starts to uh you know charge for things that that he used to offer for free so that's kind of my process uh and i spend you know it's a full-time job for me now when i was teaching full-time and writing the blog full-time it was like working two full-time jobs you know so i probably spend eight hours a day to generate those to generate those blog posts and some of the blog posts are shorter some of them are longer the how-to things right now i'm working on a pretty substantial blog post about how to use the new version of google maps that will take me a couple of hours as opposed to uh a couple of minutes sometimes to write an actual blog post because the you know like i said the hard part is the trying out the tools the writing the blog post itself is generally relatively short great thanks richard um we have a question from someone in the audience um a public librarian actually and she says i'm a public librarian and i'm a little surprised but not critical that teachers are using online tools that require students to make an account particularly something like google drive which is tied to google gmail um can you comment on this uh in terms of creating accounts uh well i'm not a not a school law expert by any source of the imagination uh however but but with things like google apps google apps for education in particular a school can can be the administrator of the account so that they can see where students are are signing in and you can use the google apps for education that way without even having to create a gmail account students can can use google apps for education without creating gmail uh the fact of the matter is our students are going to have email accounts period uh you know i've got a i've got a niece who's has an email has her own email account at seven years old right uh but it's monitored by her parents her parents kind of oversee it and look at it uh you know so in terms of you know do you have to have an email account to sign up for all these services no i try to look for services that sometimes don't require email accounts there are some other workarounds uh there's a gmail plus one trick that allows students allows teachers to create emails for students that they can then monitor so it's just that's kind of the nature of using web tools is that often you do have to have an have an account create an account but i do look for tools that don't require that and and i would say too probably you know you would you would follow your schools rules and regulations and things like that on that um this these are not unique issues i'm sure almost all schools are dealing with this at some level but yes this is a question from a public librarian who doesn't work in school so like i didn't also the same situation i didn't realize there is the google apps specifically for educators that are built that is built for that purpose so this isn't just saying to your students go out randomly and make a gmail account is we have a thing created specifically by google for us as schools to use and a lot of these accounts like uh for example the edgy clipper tool that i've mentioned has built into it the function for the the teacher to create accounts for students that students don't have to have an email address for uh the on the edgy clipper the teacher can in fact reset student passwords that a student forgets a password i think that's that's a huge tool as someone who's uh taken students to a computer lab you probably at some point run into frustration where students have forgotten their passwords and it's really helpful as a teacher to be able to or a teacher librarian or the or the computer lab supervisor to reset the passwords quickly for students as opposed to making them wait for an email back from the service to reset their password now now forgotten passwords that's something a public librarian can relate to so okay i got one more question for you um and it's kind of a little bit of a left turn from what you've been talking about it's something i'm personally interested in i'm reading your bio it says you wear a google certified teacher yep what is that and how do you become one all right so the google certified google certified teacher status uh that you can get that by attending the google teacher academy uh the google teacher academy was started i think in 2000 late 2007 early 2008 i went through in 2009 uh you do have to apply for it they have two or three of them every year and they accept 50 educators sometimes teachers sometimes school administrators sometimes teacher librarians uh choice ones a well-known teacher librarian uh she and i were in the same same cohort actually in 2009 uh see the program is not a a training program per se it's not a how to use google apps it's more about what can you do with google apps and it's designed for getting educators together to talk about how you can get students get your school to move forward in the use of technology using google applications but uh google is very uh open about saying that sometimes there are other tools that may be better than what google offers and we were free to talk about those as well uh so it's a day so day and a half program uh the hard part is really getting in the hard part is the getting accepted into the program and then from there it's uh after the after you've gone through the program there's a a community that supports each other it's a closed closed community of google certified teachers for ongoing discussions throughout the year they have some they recently had a a reboot camp uh basically what they called it uh for past google certified teachers to get together again uh now there's also the google certified trainer program which is a little bit different google certified trainer program anyone can sign up for and and do on their own it's a stealth paced program google provides all the tutorials and all the materials you will need to pass the exam you have to pay to you have to pay to take the exams and there is a series of exams to get a google certified trainer status so there is a there is a difference there between the two they often they often overlap uh often google certified teachers are also google certified trainers but you can't be a google certified teacher without going through the google teacher academy great all right thank you i was i was i mean it's one of those things where i know i could google it but you know why not ask if he's actually done it so yeah thank you thank you for that i appreciate it um any other questions coming in from the audience at this point no no okay just so share a link that um you'd actually did a bog post about the google teacher academy apparently last year sometime so we'll have a link to that as well in the delicious links that we put together for the show great oh and i'll i'll just mention that there is going to be a google teacher academy in chicago in july it was just announced i think it's july 23rd to 25th i could be wrong in those dates i'm going from my my memory but uh the application for that is is available now all right great well richard i want to thank you uh very much i'm i'm sure everybody who has been uh watching and everybody who watched the recording will get plenty of resources to to play with i i i'm always uh i always enjoy but i'm also dismayed by the end of sessions like this because i have 17 more sites that i need to go play with now and and have to find the time to do that so um thank you uh for that so with that um uh we're gonna take back control here richard just one last thanks to you and um i've just got two things i want to briefly talk about before we wrap things up and so let me just share my screen here okay um i usually have just a couple of bookmarks and things to uh talk about and i've just got two in this case um the richard made made an offhand comment during the q and a there about how um uh sites that we've been using for a long time changing their business models a little bit well that has happened with flicker if you are not a regular person who logs into flicker or even if you are you may or may not have heard about um yahoo who owns flicker has done a serious redesign of how flicker works um and overall i'm liking it um you don't necessarily have to pay for a pro account anymore a lot of what used to be the pro account features are now available in free account including a terabyte of storage for your images um but there have been some other changes uh to to flicker regarding um display sizes and the interface and things like that so um don't take a lot of time to talk about flicker itself but if you haven't logged in in a while definitely something that you want to take a look at the other thing i want to talk about real briefly here and i'm going to attempt to run a live demo um google i o which is the developers conference uh happened just a couple of weeks ago and one of the things that they announced they announced a lot of things is kind of a how google voice search has changed just a little bit now some of you may be aware of i'm here on the google homepage that there's this microphone in the search box well they've changed how that microphone works and eventually the way it's going to work is you'll actually if you are using chrome you'll be able to say okay google and google will wake up and actually do a search about what you're talking about next that has not happened quite yet but what i am going to do here is i'm going to just do a couple quick sample searches to show you how this works cross our fingers that this actually will and this like i want to stress does only work in chrome at the moment so i'm going to go ahead and click search by voice and say yes you can use my microphone who is barack obama according to wikipedia iraq and saying obama 2 is the 44th and current president of the united states the first african america will be office so um i don't know how well you might have heard that but you can see here that it has done the search it it took what i spoke turned it into a search and because over here on the right you have this info card from him and it's actually spoken back to me some information but now what get where it gets really interesting is it it is starting to pay attention so it now knows that i've searched for a barack obama so now i'm going to ask my next question how tall is he so you can see here it's actually paying attention to context i didn't say who he was it just figured out that i must be speaking about him so i'll just do two more quick ones to show you how this continues to work who is he married to barack obama spouses michelle obama since 1992 and one last one how tall is she michelle obama is five feet 11 inches tall so you can see they're really starting to contextualize how you're searching you don't necessarily have to literally type in exactly what you're looking for um some other samples i've seen are like directions where you can say something like what is the weather in omaha giving me the weather and then i will say how do i get there and it will give me directions to omaha so it's something you might want to play with uh you know install chrome real quick try that out um it's really going to start changing how people search i think so with that i'm going to go ahead and say that uh tech talk is uh done and thank richard one more time for that uh for his presentation his resources and hand hand it back over to christa okay great thank you thank you michael and uh richard um yes that is a wrap up for today um i said the show's been recorded so you be able to listen to that and watch it later all of the links were captured into the commission's delicious account including the ones that michael was just talking about too so you have all of that in there and when we put the recording up so i hope you'll join us next week when we are talking about the this year's one book one nebraska for 2013 which is oh pioneers um by willa kather and i'm just going to open it up so you can see um where we will have actually andy jewel will be with us he is the editor of the willa kather archive which is a website hosted at the university of nebraska and linkedin and the co-editor of the new book selected letters of willa kather and so he's going to be coming on the show next week to talk to us about um her and her writing and specifically of course oh pioneers which is the one book one nebraska book um for the state um that we're um for 2013 for what we're doing currently so um please sign up and um join us for that next week i believe right now also the three books for the the the finals the three finalists for linkedin have been announced i don't remember what they are off the top of my head okay all right so please sign up and join us for that next week also um n compass live is on facebook so if you are a facebook user you can go ahead and like us there and you will see um notices of when we have new shows coming up when the recordings are available um when something's going about to start i just posted this morning you can see login right now and see join us on today's show so definitely follow us um like us that we're doing and then that we are all set for the today and thank you very much for attending and we'll see you next week bye bye