For the last 18+ months my former colleague Mike Morrell has raved about Quick Key. Quick Key is an app that turns your iPhone into a bubble sheet scanner. This morning I learned from Mike that Quick Key is now available as an Android app too.
Quick Key has two parts to it that when combined make it very easy for you to quickly grade multiple choice and true/false quizzes. Here’s the basics of how it works; create your quiz on the Quick Key website then print and distribute a bubble sheet. After your students have completed the bubble sheet you simply scan the sheets with your iPhone (it works on iPads too, but the resolution is grainy) and the grading is done for you. From the app you can send grades to the classes that you have created on the Quick Key website. If you enter students’ email addresses into your class rosters on Quick Key, you can have grades emailed to students.
If you follow me on Twitter you might have noticed that I started a fun hashtag last night called #dogsofed. I did it just to have fun and help people connect on a common interest of education and dogs. Lots of people shared pictures of their dogs through the chat. Then this morning Tom Grissom upped the fun a bit by posting an awesome audio story about his dog, Wego the Wonder Dog. Tom's story is a great example of the possibilities of telling stories with audio.
Listening to Tom's story about Wego the Wonder Dog got me thinking about making a story of my own. I decided to use Shadow Puppet Edu to create my story about my dogs Max and Morrison. Shadow Puppet Edu is a free iPad app that you can use to create audio slideshow videos. The app offers an integrated search tool for finding pictures from the Library of Congress, to search for images from NASA, and to find Creative Commons licensed images from Flickr. You can also import pictures and videos from the camera roll on your iPad. After selecting a set of images students you can arrange them into any sequence by simply dragging and dropping them into order. Then to create a story press the record button and talk while flipping through your images. My story is embedded below.
You might have noticed that on the first slide I had a magic wand effect to highlight each dog. That is one of many effects that you can add to your images in Shadow Puppet Edu. You can also zoom and type over your pictures. Completed Shadow Puppet Edu projects are automatically saved to your iPad's camera roll. You can also export your projects directly to YouTube.
Update: On October 17, 2020 the new owners of the domain tozzl.com threatened to sue me if I didn't take down this post. Needless to say, I don't recommend that anyone go to that site, ever.
A few weeks ago I reviewed a new backchannel/ message board tool called Tozzl. Then two weeks ago I had this horrendous experience with TodaysMeet. As a result I'm switching to using Tozzl for most of my backchannel needs. Tozzl allows me to create sections for chat, file sharing, and YouTube videos within one backchannel. I can also import the feed of a Twitter hashtag into my Tozzl backchannel. In the video embedded below I provide a demonstration of how to create a Tozzl backchannel.
