Last fall I wrote about the Poetry 180 project hosted by the Library of Congress. Now that National Poetry Month is here, it's a good time to revisit the post that I wrote about Poetry 180 at the beginning of the school year.
Poetry 180 is a Library of Congress project that was created when Billy Collins was the U.S. Poet Laureate. The purpose of the project is to provide high school teachers with poems for their students to read or hear throughout the school year.
Collins selected the poems for Poetry 180 with high school students in mind. I didn't look at every poem in the list, but of dozen or so that I looked at, none would take more than a few minutes to read in a classroom. Speaking of reading in class, Collins encourages teachers to read the poems aloud or have students read the poems aloud. To that end, here's his advice on how to read a poem out loud.
This afternoon I hosted another live Q&A session on my YouTube channel and on Facebook. If you missed it, the recording of the session is now available as embedded below. The questions that I answered during the broadcast are included below the video.
A teacher is using the extension audioplayer for slides with students recording their own voices for each slide. The google slides and recording are on the teacher's computer when the teacher shares the slides the recordings won't play on another teacher's computer. Can you only play the recordings on the computer in which they were recorded?
~Karen
I am wanting to do some PD on augmented reality in the classroom. Aurasma is the app that I have always used. HP has now purchased Aurasma and is now charging for the use. What would be your favorite replacement for Aurasma?
~Robin
Our life skills students operate a coffee shop in our library. The life skills teacher want them to be able to "clock in and out" and asked me if I know of any way they can do so using a website or Chrome app. Do you happen to know of anything that might work? Thanks in advance.
~Eli
For National Poetry Month, I want to "hide" lines of a poem around the Media Center and have students use their iPad cameras to "find" them. I'm looking for a way to take a line of a poem and overlay it to a trigger image..so a student scans the trigger with their camera inside whatever app it might be and the line will pop up. It doesn't seem like it should be that difficult to create, but I'm having trouble finding a resource that doesn't require students to set up accounts.
I looked at HP Reveal and it does exactly what I want, right up to where it wants the viewer to set up an account and then follow my channel before they can view the images.
Can you think of an app that would do what I want? Essentially, I want it to work like a QR code scanner....only instead of using QR codes, it uses trigger images.
~Leigh
Now that YouTube’s annotations are gone, what do you recommend for adding interactive elements to video?
~David
Would you consider doing a Practice Ed Tech podcast? I would love to be able to listen on my commute!
Microsoft Forms is a good tool for creating online surveys and quizzes. Setting answer restrictions is one of the overlooked features of Microsoft Forms. Creating answer restrictions allows you to specify the type of input that you'll accept in response to a question. As you can see in my new video, setting answer restrictions can be useful in making sure that your students enter numbers instead of words.
Applications for Education
In addition to being useful in ensuring that students enter numbers instead of words, using answer restrictions can be a good way to give students clues toward a correct answer on a form. For example, if the answer to a question is "25" you can set an answer restriction that is "greater than or equal to 20." Then if their answers are under 20 they will instantly know they're not correct because they won't be able to even submit the answer.
Now that Google has shutdown Goo.gl many people have been looking for a new way to create QR codes for Google Forms. Goo.gl was convenient because you could shorten a URL and get a QR code in one place. My recommendation now for making a QR code for sharing Google Forms is to use QR Droid Zapper. QR Droid Zapper lets you make a QR code for sharing all kinds of things from webpages to contact information to files to Google Forms. It's an easy tool to use and doesn't require any kind of registration in order to use it. Watch my new video to see how easy it is to use QR Droid to create a QR code for a Google Form.
Applications for Education
As I mentioned in the video, a QR code provides an easy way to share a Google Form and quickly get all of your students on the same form. Of course, as mentioned above, you can use QR Droid to create a QR code for any webpage that you want all of your students to view at the same time.
Tomorrow at 4pm Eastern Time I'll be going live on my YouTube channel to answer another round of questions from readers like you. If you have a question about educational technology that you'd like me to answer you can put in the form below or just join the live broadcast and submit your question this afternoon.
