MuseForJews

Links you’ll love – 11-14-14

I think I’ve written about Chirbit before, but it may be worth another visit. Chirbit is a nifty little website for working with audio. You can record or upload a message and then make it available to others (who can then comment on your Chirbit) via weblink or QR code. It will also “speak” text that you type into the website. What I found most useful, though, is that Chirbit will extract the audio from a YouTube video. Any Chirbit can be downloaded as an .mp3 file.

iPad app tip: Let’s say you’re doing an activity with your class and you want to get instant feedback to assess for understanding. Or maybe you’re doing a poll or survey. Let’s say you also don’t have iPads or laptops for your students, but you still want to have a feedback mechanism that assures privacy (no student wants to be the one to raise his or her hand and say “I don’t understand”) and gives you student-by-student results. What can you do? One option is to download the free Plickers app to your phone or iPad. Then print out the plickers cards for your students (get it? Paper + clickers = plickers). Create your assessment (it’s a lot like using Socrative or Nearpod), hand out the cards and scan with the app. It’s very cool, extremely low tech, and we got rave reviews from the fifth graders with whom we tested it last week. Visit Plickers for more info.

Love New York? Love Jewish books? This map is awesome. It’s the Jewish Book Council’s literary map of New York City and it marks the landmarks, descriptions, and allusions found in the works of some of our heritage’s greatest writers. Fun!

Google Tip: OMG! This is terrific. Did you ever think it would be useful if you could create an email contact group on the fly while sending an email? C’mon . . . you know you want to do this! Here’s how:

Create the email, placing the recipients in the “To” section
Once all your recipients are listed, click on the word “To.” Click right on that puppy
This should bring up a dialogue box where you could include other recipients. If you look at the bottom of that box, though, you’ll see the magic box that says “Save as group . . .”
That will save your group to your contacts for future use. It may take a few minutes for it to appear – but this is a handy tip!

November 14, 2014 - Posted by Tktchr | Links You'll Love | educational technology