Apple Clips iOS App
The Technology: Apple Clips iOS App
Clips is a free iOS app that allows you to combine video with animated text, graphics, emojis and music. It’s an easy-to-use app that has enough bells and whistles to keep it interesting, but not enough complexity to make it frustrating for new users. It’s very intuitive and students should have no problem mastering it.
To create a video, you can either shoot new, live video or select an existing video or photos from your phone’s camera. Then, you can choose to add add text, graphics, voiceovers and music to create your final product. Once the videos are complete, you and your students can save your videos to your phone’s camera roll. It can also be easily shared via email, text-message or a variety of social media services.
To use Clips, download and install the app.
In Your Classroom
- Use Clips to create a “How-To” video. For example, if you will be doing a challah cover project with your students or other type of art project, you can use Clips to demonstrate exactly what to do, step-by-step.
- Next time you visit a food pantry or soup kitchen, video the different steps of the event: boarding the bus, arrival, and serving food. Then assemble your shots into a montage documenting the trip.
This is a “Technology Tuesday” post via Behrman House, edited by Ann D. Koffsky . You can find more Behrman House Technology Tuesdays here.
Webroom
Webroom is a free, easy-to-use, web-based collaborative meeting space. It can be a handy alternative to Skype or Facetime.
You can schedule a Webroom meeting in advance or choose to begin one immediately. With Webroom, participants are invited to join a meeting via email- it does not support joining by link. Webroom does supports video and audio chat, and allows you to share links, whiteboards, and uploaded files with other participants in a meeting.
Visit webroom.net to register, create an account and set up your first meeting.
In Your Classroom
- Webroom is a great way to “meet” with colleagues or students while in your pajamas at home.
- Students can use webroom to collaborate and work together without relying on their parents to drive them somewhere– a nice touch for religious schools where students often don’t live near one another.
This is a “Technology Tuesday” post via Behrman House, edited by Ann D. Koffsky . You can find more Behrman House Technology Tuesdays here.
Popplet
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This is a “Technology Tuesday” post via Behrman House, edited by Ann D. Koffsky . You can find more Behrman House Technology Tuesdays here.
Free Images and Fonts
Check out these free resources for images and fonts:
Stockio
Stockio is a free website featuring photos, fonts and videos that you can use for personal or commercial use with no citation necessary. Just sign up for a free account and search by keyword.
OpenClipArt
OpenClipArt offers free clip art that can be used for personal or commercial projects.
Dafont and 1001 Free Fonts
Dafont has one of the largest selections (over 33,000!) of free fonts that I’ve every seen. You can search for fonts by category or by name, alphabetically. All are free for personal use. Some charge nominal fees for commercial use. 1001FreeFonts offers a similar service.
In Your Classroom
- Teach students about using copyright-free images rather than images without permission straight from Google. You might use it as an opportunity to discuss what Jewish values says about using intellectual property.
- It can be a lot of fun to download new fonts to your computer, but be aware that they can often take up a lot of hard drive space.
This is a “Technology Tuesday” post via Behrman House, edited by Ann D. Koffsky . You can find more Behrman House Technology Tuesdays here.
Google “Add-ons”
If you’re a Google apps user, you may have noticed “Add-ons” in the menu to the left of “Help.” Add-ons are third-party (which means they’ve been developed by people outside of Google) products that are often free and are designed to take Google apps just a little bit further.
Add-ons are developed for specific Google products, so there are different ones for Google Docs, Google Sheets, etc. It’s worth taking some time to check out the Add-ons store to see what timesavers you might find. For instance, some add-ons include:
- EasyBib: Easy bib helps users create automatic bibliography and citations entries in Google docs.
- Avery Label Merge: Allows you to take data from a google spread sheet, and print Avery labels from it.
- Word Cloud: will take the text you’ve entered into a Google doc and generate make a word cloud out of it.
- Template Gallery: Gives you access to many templates others have created for Google Sheets.
- Group Maker: Will help you make random groups out of a list of students you have in Google sheets.
For more information about add-ons, here are some additional resources you might want to check out:
- Alice Keeler Add-ons
- Edsurge: How to Utilize Google in Your Classroom
- Top 10 Google Add-ons for Teachers
This is a “Technology Tuesday” post via Behrman House, edited by Ann D. Koffsky . You can find more Behrman House Technology Tuesdays here.
Escape!
Breakout or escape rooms provide an engaging way to integrate problem solving into your classroom. Basically, it’s a game where players use hints and clues to solve puzzles, which lead them to more hints to solve more puzzles. The payoff is “escaping” the room or breaking into a locked box.
There are commercial escape rooms popping up all over, and this has not gone unnoticed by educators who seek to leverage the craze and use it as an engaging activity for their students.
If you’re interested in purchasing a breakout box to use in your classroom, check out BreakoutEDU. You can buy their ready-to-go lock box with programmable locks, a lockout hasp, and hundreds of ready-to-use puzzles and downloadables. It will also share with you cool ways that other educators are using the product.
BreakoutEDU’s product comes at a steep price, though. If you’re interested in creating your own Breakout box, this post has some great tips and list of the supplies you’ll need to purchase (hint: if you search for “breakout game” on Amazon, you’ll get a bunch of results that include locks, a lockout hasp, and locking storage boxes). You may even have some of these products already.
Any breakout game has the same premise: start with a story of some kind that poses a challenge. A typical breakout narrative includes a dilemma (someone or something is missing, or has been captured) and the directive that the students will need to solve clues to open the box and save the day. BreakoutEDU has resources for organizing your story on their site, including an organizer template.
Technology can be easily integrated in a breakout game, including QR codes (solve a clue, get a QR code to scan and get another clue) and Google forms.
For more information about creating your own breakout, you can view these videos:
Introducing Breakout EDU, Elementary Breakout; and read this article.
In Your Classroom
- Hanukkah is coming, and an Escape room can fit the Hanukkah story perfectly. Create a room where students have to find the pure oil, so that they can light the menorah!
- This is a sure-fire way to engage your students in an end-of-unit activity that is going to be way more fun than anything else.
- Breakout games can be a terrific ice breaker– and not just for kids! How about a breakout faculty meeting? Or a way to introduce new families to one another?
- Ask older students to creating a breakout game for younger students. It can be a terrific way for everyone involved to review content that they’ve already mastered.
This is a “Technology Tuesday” post via Behrman House, edited by Ann D. Koffsky . You can find more Behrman House Technology Tuesdays here.
GooseChase
GooseChase is a free app and website that makes electronic scavenger hunts easy to create and even easier to play.
To create your own game, or “GooseChase”, first give your game a fun, catchy name. Then, create a list of missions that players need to complete as they go through your chase. For each mission, you can ask your players to submit:
- A photo of something they find
- A video of their team completing a silly task
- A reply to a question via text, or
- A pin of their location via GPS.
To play, each team only needs one person with the GooseChase iPhone or Android app on their device.
If you’d prefer to run a GooseChase without prepping a whole new game, you can also choose to use one of the many existing games that have already been created by other teachers in GooseChaseEDU’s game library.
To use GooseChase, signup for a free account on their website. A premium subscription is available if you think you’ll be creating more games for more teams, but I would suggest starting with the free account to see if this is a good platform for you.
In Your Classroom
- Break out of the boring staff professional development rut and create a GooseChase for your faculty.
- Going on a field trip? Create your own GooseChase to help your students explore and enjoy your destination on a deeper lever.
- After your GooseChase is complete, create a slide show of the photos the players submitted to complete their missions, and present it to the school for a fun recap.
This is a “Technology Tuesday” post via Behrman House, edited by Ann D. Koffsky . You can find more Behrman House Technology Tuesdays here.
Cam Scanner
CamScanner is an app that I turn to frequently. As you might guess, it’s an app for, well, scanning documents. It’s turned my phone into a scanner and almost completely eliminated any need to use anything else.
CamScanner is very intuitive to use. Just hold your device over the document you want to scan and proceed. Once you have an initial scan, the app will crop, brighten and straighten out the image. Scans can be exported in a variety of formats including pdf and jpg and can be easily emailed or uploaded to social media. Best of all, the quality of the images made using CamScanner is significantly superior to anything photographed with the iPhone camera.
In Your Classroom
Cam Scanner makes it incredibly easy to take high-quality photos on the fly. Use it to:
- Document students’ work
- Save documents to your phone that you’d like to be able to quickly reference
- Share documents with others or with your own cloud-sharing
To get CamScanner, download the iPhone app or iPad app. You can create an account to access cloud storage space (limited to 200 MB for the free account or 10G if you spring for a premium subscription) or just save your scans to your device.
| This is a “Technology Tuesday” post via Behrman House, edited by Ann D. Koffsky . You can find more Behrman House Technology Tuesdays here. |
Jewish Interactive
Jewish Interactive is a not-for-profit organization that makes ios apps and Macintosh and Windows software that your students will love.
Here are just two of their offerings:
Ji Tap: With JI Tap, you can build your own Jewish themed games. (It’s very similar to the ios app, Tiny Tap, which we covered in Technology Tuesdays here.) And here’s a plus: the JI website also features lots of pre-designed, JI Tap games that you can download and play right away.
JI Studio: Using JI Studio, students can create interactive books and posters featuring images, imported photos, audio clips, and Hebrew text. The vast selection of graphics, sounds (shofar blast, anyone?) and Hebrew texts is incredibly impressive!
Student creations can be shared via email or posted to the web. Visit Jewish Interactive’s website to sign up for a free account, and check out their various tools, all of which are free at this posting. Educators can opt to upgrade to a premium account, which gives access to data and other features.
In Your Classroom
- Use JI Studio to create an interactive Rosh Hashana card complete with audio greetings. What a great way to start out the New Year!
- Import photos from your camera roll into JI Studio to create an interactive tour of your synagogue.
- JI Studio includes prayers and Torah texts, which makes it a great tool for recording a student’s oral Hebrew progress. Start the new year out with each student making a recording, and then continue as the year progresses. Students will have an audio portfolio of their progress by the end of the year.
| This is a “Technology Tuesday” post via Behrman House, edited by Ann D. Koffsky . You can find more Behrman House Technology Tuesdays here. |
visme
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The Technology: Visme Everybody knows that old quote about how many words a picture is worth. It’s true! And with the website Visme, you can create your own infographics and other visually based content easily. You can build your infographic using the images that Visme provides, including layouts, shapes, text, graphs and backgrounds. Or, you can choose to upload your own images. It also allows you to insert video or music into your infographics. When you’re finished designing your image, you can download a watermarked low-resolution .jpg and embed your infographic on a website or share it on social media for free. (Higher resolution images without Visme’s branding are available with a premium account). Sign up for a free account at Visme. In Your Classroom
This is a “Technology Tuesday” post via Behrman House, edited by Ann D. Koffsky . You can find more Behrman House Technology Tuesdays here. |
About
Debbie Harris is the director of educational technology at the Sager Solomon Schechter Day School in Northbrook, IL. Involved in Jewish education for over thirty years, she has an education degree from Northwestern University with a concentration in instructional media and a master’s degree in professional Jewish studies from Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership. She is skilled in using and teaching desktop publishing, video editing, presentation and animation software; and consults and presents regularly on integrating technology into Judaic studies. Her students podcast, blog, edit video and create claymations. She co-chaired the technology track for CAJE 33 in Vermont, is a SMART Certified Trainer for SMART Notebook, and a 2011 recipient of the Grinspoon-Steinhardt Award for Excellence in Jewish Education.
When not learning, teaching or writing about technology, Debbie likes to sketchnote and craft. She likes to knit, do calligraphy, sew, watercolor, paint fabric and just generally play with fun toys like scrapbooking supplies and anything with texture. Debbie travels to California every summer to paint tallitot with high school aged campers. Finally, she is incredibly proud of her two daughters; Lori, who teaches English at a community college; and Allie, who is the director of the URJ’s Camp Newman in California.
Look for her at:
Debbie Does Desktop
Flickr
Twitter
Diigo
YouTube
Ravelry
Email Debbie here
MuseForJews 