4/19/2013

Embed a video from Google Docs

In our school system, youtube is blocked, so I wouldn't be able to upload any class videos and share them with my students.
Fortunately, I can embed videos strait from Google Drive. Instead of explaining how it's done, I thought it would be more appropriate to put a quick video together showing you how it's done. I chose not to add sound, but you certainly could.




I would appreciate comments and suggestions on how this could work for a flipped classroom.

4/10/2013

Awesome Note as a Classroom Tool


Source: http://sebastian.laxell.fi/files/awesome_note-300x300.jpg


Last time, I wrote about how great Awesome Note (aNote) is. Many of you loved it and I’m grateful to everyone who took the time to read that post. I left something out of it, though. This blog is dedicated to technological learning tools, and I never said a word about how to use aNote to either learn or teach. Let me correct that oversight now.

Teaching

  • Grading bulky projects like the vinegar/ baking soda volcano- Take a snapshot of the project you need to grade. After syncing with Google, go online and grade the project. This way, you don’t have to stay after to grade nor do you have to worry about lugging the projects home.  
  • Opportunistic slides- Have you ever seen something that you would love to show to your students? Snap a picture and add it to your notes. After syncing with Google, you’ll be able to create a nice, classroom friendly visual aide.
  • Lesson Planning- If you teach more than one group of kids, you’re bound to ask this classic question: “Did I tell you all this or did I just tell it to the other students?” A lesson checklist gets around this conundrum. Typing the list in Docs ahead of time makes this a breeze.  
  • Share your notes- You can adjust the privacy settings in Google Docs. That means that you can make one or all of your aNote folders viewable by whomever you want. This way, you can easily add class notes to a shared folder by doing nothing more than typing a note and syncing.


Learning
Note: Evernote is much better for archiving information, since it recognizes and can search any words on any picture you upload. The problem is that it costs money to upload a large number of snapshots to Evernote at one time. If you want to upload more, be prepared to pay.

  • Making notes about what you read- Snap a picture of the book or worksheet and make some notes about that section.
  • Photograph the board, overheads- Photograph the teacher’s board while she’s lecturing. Later, you can go into Docs to add some notes.
  • Pics of handouts- Snap pictures of handouts or sections of the handouts for future reference.
  • Create reference cards- Create some simple notes in Google Docs and sync them to aNote on your phone or tablet. That way, you’ll always have them handy.
  • Share folders, share notes- I mentioned this in the section on teaching. You can share Google Docs folders. That means the folders you’ve synced with aNote can also be shared with whomever you like.
  • Online Study Groups- Google hangouts allows you to work collaboratively on a Google Doc with the people in the hangout. You could start a hangout with classmates and pull up notes that you’ve taken in class.

One more thing. Using aNote to collect all this data could take up gigabytes of valuable space on your device. It’s easy to transfer notes if you sync with Docs. Just move the notes out of the folder called Awesome Notes in your Google Docs account. It doesn’t matter where you put them. Maybe you could make a folder called “Old Notes”. Once those files are out of the Awesome Note folder, the notes will be erased from you device during your next sync and safely stored online.