Telegraph - Super Simple Blogging

Alan Levine's Cog Dog Blog is one of my absolute favorite blogs. I skip over many others in my Feedly list to read his posts first. I almost always learn something new when I read his blog. Yesterday, I learned about super simple publishing tool called Telegra.ph

Telegra.ph gives you a simple place to publish your writing and pictures without the need to create an account on the site. To publish you simply go to telegra.ph and start writing. You can include pictures in your writing, but you cannot include videos. Your writing will be given its own URL that you can share with those you want to read your work. The whole process of publishing on Telegraph is quick and easy. Here's my first Telegraph entry.

Here are the shortcomings of Telegra.ph. Once you close your browser, you cannot go back and edit your writing. The other limitation is that every new piece that you write will be given a different URL which means that people can't simply follow you like as they might if you had a full fledged blog.

Applications for Education
Telegra.ph could be a good tool for those teachers who are looking for a way for their students to share their writing online without the hassle of having them register for a blog or use the ugly interface of a publicly published Google Doc.

HSTRY is Now Sutori

Over the last couple of years HSTRY has become a popular multimedia timeline creation tool. One of its best features is the option to include quiz questions in the timelines that you share with your students.

Over the weekend HSTRY rebranded itself as Sutori. Other than the name, nothing else has changed on the platform. If you currently have projects in HSTRY, they are safe in Sutori. You can log into Sutori using your HSTRY credentials. Likewise, if you have created an online classroom in HSTRY all student account credentials are the same in Sutori. All timelines that you have embedded into blog posts will remain unchanged.

Learn more about how to use Sutori, formerly HSTRY, by watching the video embedded below.

Flubaroo Adds a New Feedback Option - Stickers & Badges

Back in June when Google added a scoring option to Google Forms many people wondered if Flubaroo was still a necessary Add-on. The answer to that is yes for anyone who wants to grade quizzes that have multiple correct responses, fill-in-the-blank questions, and for those who who want do more advanced grading tricks like case-sensitive answers, extra or partial credit, and numerical ranges. And now Flubaroo offers another feature that you won't find in Google Forms' built-in grading tool.

Flubaroo now offers the option to include a sticker/ digital badge when you distribute grades to your students either through Google Docs or through email. Flubaroo includes some standard stickers that you can use or you can upload your own stickers to use.

To include stickers in your Flubaroo grade distribution simply select the "advanced options" when you are sharing grades. Then select "sticker set-up"to choose the stickers that you want to use. You can choose a grade cut-off line for when a sticker is or isn't distributed to students. See the complete process here.

Applications for Education
Distributing stickers probably won't change the way that you score quizzes, but it is a nice option for giving students a bit of visual feedback.

If Flubaroo is new to you, take a look at my playlist of tutorials embedded below.