Crowd Sourced Ideas for Using PicCollage, Canva, PicMonkey, and Thinglink in Education

Today, I facilitated a workshop for the Mississippi Bend Area Education Agency in Bettendorf, Iowa. To start the day we created some visual stories to represent what we thought good teaching and learning environments look like. We then took those visuals and dropped them into Thinglink to add video and audio media to the visuals. Finally, we shared our creations on this Padlet wall so that the whole group could see benefit from seeing each other's work and ideas about using visual story creation tools in their classrooms. The wall is embedded below. The tools we used include PicCollage, PicMonkey, Canva, and Thinglink. The outline from the workshop is available here.

Created with Padlet

Interactive Model Skeletons

eSkeletons is a great website produced by the Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. eSkeletons features interactive models of mammal skeletons. Select a model from the menu on the home page then click on any bone in the model to view it in detail. After select a bone to view you can choose from a menu of viewing angles. In many cases eSkeletons offers a short video display of the bone you've selected from the menu.

Applications for Education
eSkeletons gives students the option to compare bones across models. Select two or more animals from the menu then select a bone and a small gallery of comparative images will be generated. eSkeletons offers a glossary of terms and a legend to help students understand what they are viewing. Even without the models, the glossary is a good resource for anatomy students.

Numbeo - Compare the Costs of Living in Cities Around the World

A few months ago I shared a couple of activities that are designed to help students gain a better understanding of the cost of living. Numbeo is a neat resource that could help students see the differences in the costs of living between cities.

Numbeo claims to be the world's largest database of user-contributed data about the costs of living in cities. Some of the sets of data that you can see find in Numbeo include property values, transportation costs, and healthcare costs.

Applications for Education
Numbeo's database is user-generated so you will want students to take the information with a grain of salt. That said, Numbeo could be good resource for students to use to compare the costs of living in two or more cities. After comparing the costs of living in two or more cities, ask your students to try to determine the things that account for the differences in costs of living between two cities.

How to Create Augmented Reality Layers of Information on Aurasma

Earlier this week I wrote a lengthy post that included ideas for using the augmented reality app Aurasma in the classroom. Today, I ran a workshop in which we created some of our own augmented reality layers through Aurasma. If you would like to learn the process, check out the short video embedded below.

Kaizena Adds Support for Giving Audio Feedback on Google Presentations

This is news that I have been waiting to announce for days! Kaizena now supports adding audio feedback on Google Presentations. Kaizena is a tool that integrates with your Google Drive account. With Kaizena authorized to access your Google Drive account you can highlight portions of your students' work and add voice or text comments to it. Until today you could only leave voice comments on Google Documents, now you can leave voice comments on Google Presentations too.

To use Kaizena to leave voice comments for your students your student should share their Documents or Presentations with you. Once they have shared their Documents or Presentations with you, open the shared file through Kaizena. With the shared file open you can highlight a portion of a slide then click the microphone icon to record your voice comment. Your students will see the comments after you have saved them. Greg Kulowiec outlined the process in this post. You can also watch the video below to see how the new feature works.