TED-Ed recently published a new video that addresses the question of why we say "like" and other filler words in our conversations. The video is full of interesting pieces of information about why we use filler words and how they can serve a purpose in conversations. For example, saying "like" is often serving the same purpose as an "um" in conversation. Another neat thing I learned from the video is that a filled pause can help toddlers identify uncommon or new words. The video is titled Why Do We, Like, Hesitate When We, Um, Speak? and you can see it with its associated lesson on this TED-Ed page.
Watching this TED-Ed lesson reminded me of a good tool for practicing presentations so that you don't use too many filler words. That tool is Microsoft's Presenter Coach which is available in the online version of PowerPoint. Presenter Coach will give you feedback on the pacing of your presentations, your use of filler words, and your use of sensitive phrases. In this video I demonstrate how to use Presenter Coach in PowerPoint.
Last spring I got quite excited about a new online whiteboard tool called Whiteboard.fi. A lot of other people did, too. This blog post that I wrote about Whiteboard.fi had more than 100,000 hits! The success of Whiteboard.fi didn't go unnoticed by other educational technology companies as evidenced by the announcement that Kahoot has acquired Whiteboard.fi.
The announcement that Kahoot published was short on details on about what the acquisition of Whiteboard.fi means for both services going forward. Initially, it appears that Whiteboard.fi will continue to operate as normal. My guess is that Kahoot plans to integrate some or all of the functions into of Whiteboard.fi into the Kahoot game platform.
If Kahoot were to integrate Whiteboard.fi into its game platform we could see options for teachers to use a whiteboard function to draw or write math problems and or diagrams. We could see options for students to reply to questions with free-hand drawings and writing on individual whiteboards. I'm curious to see what the engineers at Kahoot and Whiteboard.fi develop together for teachers and students.
In this week's Practical Ed Tech Newsletter I outlined the things that I look for when I am considering installing a new browser extension or add-on. At the end of the newsletter I included directions for installing and removing extensions in Chrome, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge. Those directions were provided as a series of screencast videos. The one about installing and removing Chrome add-ons is available to view here and as embedded below.
On a related note, here's the difference between signing into your Chrome profile and your Google account.
In this week's Practical Ed Tech Newsletter I outlined the things that I look for when I am considering installing a new browser extension or add-on. At the end of the newsletter I included directions for installing and removing extensions in Chrome, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge. Those directions were provided as a series of screencast videos. The one about installing and removing Microsoft Edge add-ons is available to view here and as embedded below.
