Hello!
This week's Apps are all about communication and collaboration. I had the pleasure to watch a series of webinars on this topic and here are the three top "take-away" items that I came up with.
Remind 101
This FREE app was designed for teachers who want to "reach out" to students and parents via the SMS-Text Messaging world. It works very simply...
The teacher subscribes to the service and they are fiven a (free) US phone number THAT IS NOT THE TEACHERS PRIVATE PHONE NUMBER. You then have the students and parents "text" that phone number. The system will automatically text the parent/student back to get them to enter their name. They are now enrolled. The Teacher can never see the actual phone number that system is sending to, so all texts are private!
Now when a teacher wants to send a reminder to a whole class about a field trip, homework, etc. - open the app on a Mac, PC, iOS device or 'Droid device, type the message and away it goes!! Really easy to use and so simple.... here is their video
http://youtu.be/fUkhoTrUhkU
For ANY school that wants to create student portfolios OR a super easy way to send pictures, videos and class engagement messages home, this is fabulous! Simple to set up, private and wonderful. Once your class and students are entered, you simply use your cell phone to take a picture, video, audio, etc, post it to Three Ring, set the sharing (student only, parent only, and so on) and it is done!! Let's say that "little Chaim" has done a great drawing, snap a picture and post it to the parents right away. It just takes seconds....
For a student portfolio, every test, hand in, piece of work etc. gets recorded and posted to the students account. This can become a multi-grade record of progress.
Now, this app DOES allow for Hebrew text, but.... when English is added to the middle of a sentence, it gets confused. So the Ivrit teachers CAN use this, but it is best to keep all of the labels/comments in Hebrew OR English.
It is.... NOW FREEEEEEEE!!!! This is a fantastic "all in one" platform that, when coupled with the Microsoft Drive, rivals (and some articles even says that it surpasses) Evernote.
One-Note is available on ALL major platforms now. As a matter of fact, it is on the top of the Mac App download list!! War has been declared!!!!
Final comment.....
I was reading a fascinating article about how many schools and organizations feel that they are a few years (or more) behind in the type of technology that they were teaching their students to use. The author of the article disagreed with this observation as he works in the "higher educational" world, at schools that are on the "leading edge" of use of technology in classroom and workplace. Nice for him to have a big budget! (
http://gettingsmart.com/2014/03/three-years-behind )
I know that, for our schools, we are primed and ready to start "pushing the envelope" from a systems point of view but are we prepared from a teacher point of view? Do our teachers know about the UNESCO and ISTE standards on what it means to be 21st Century educators? Have we given them training and rubrics that they can use to successfully integrate these principles into their classroom? I am not so sure...... so, next week, I will write about an EXCELLENT teacher oriented, somewhat on-line, program that could do just that.
Except for "emergency updates," that's it for this week. Have a great Shabbat.
