Origo One is a new YouTube channel offering one minute math lessons for teachers and students. The first few videos in the series seem to be aimed at elementary school teachers. In the first video that I watched Origo One explains why teaching the "use ten" strategy is better than having students count on their hands to complete multiplication in their heads.
The second video that I watched featured the idea of having students look for pairs of numbers in the real world to reinforce the concept of doubles or multiplying by two.
Applications for Education
These Origo One videos aren't breaking new ground, but they do offer a nice and concise representation of some elementary school math teaching strategies.
One of the challenges of sharing Google Drive files is keeping track of who has access to your files. In some cases you might only want someone to have access to the file for a limited time. In those cases you'll have to remember to go back and change your sharing settings. This week the Google Apps team announced a new solution to that problem.
Over the next couple of months Google will be rolling out a new option to set an expiration date on shared files. You will be able to set specific expiration dates for specific users who have view and or comment access to your Docs, Sheets, and Slides.
Read more about Google Drive expiration dates here.
Dotstorming is a cool tool for hosting collaborative brainstorming sessions. The neat thing about Dotstorming is that you can have everyone contribute their ideas on an online corkboard then vote for their favorite ideas. When Dotstorming launched you could only add text and picture notes. In the last week an option to include video notes was added to Dotstorming. To add a video to a note simply paste a YouTube URL into a note.
Another new feature of Dotstorming is the option to remove participants from a session. As the creator and administrator of a Dotstorming board you can simply hover your cursor over a name and then select "remove" to kick that person out of the session.
Learn more about how Dotstorming works by watching my how-to video embedded below.
Applications for Education
One of the ways that you could use Dotstorming is to post set of answer choices for your students and have them vote for the answer that they think is correct.
Dotstorming could be a helpful tool in planning Edcamp schedules. Have folks post their session titles and short descriptions then give everyone a few votes to determine which sessions will be held.
5 Tips to Improve Your Critical Thinking is the latest TED-Ed lesson. The introduction to the lesson is a bit long for my liking but once you get past that the tips are solid. The lesson presents critical thinking as a process of five steps. The last step is the one that students will probably struggle to implement, "explore other points of view."
From Evernote to Google Drive to CamScanner there are plenty of mobile apps that you can use to snap a picture of a whiteboard or paper note and have that turned into a PDF. Now Microsoft is trying to get into the same game with the latest beta version of OneDrive for Android.
In the latest beta version of the OneDrive Android app you can open the app, tap scan, and digitize any physical note. The note will be saved as a PDF in your OneDrive account.
Applications for Education
If you or your students are already using OneDrive then you will probably appreciate this new feature as it will make it easy to save sketches and notes. If you're not already using OneDrive, this is not a reason to switch to it because there are other apps that do the same thing.
