This week is school vacation week here in Maine. I usually take this week off to go ice fishing on Moosehead Lake. Unfortunately, that's not happening this year. Instead I'll be "staycationing" and working on some projects around home. While on my staycation I'll be sharing some of my personal favorite tools. The first is the MIT App Inventor.
The MIT App Inventor is a free app development tool that has been available for free for the last decade. It's a great tool to use to introduce students to some programming concepts while letting develop apps that they can actually use on their phones. While it might seem complicated at first glance, after they have mastered a few basic concepts students can create some amazing applications through the MIT App Inventor.
This morning I used part of my snow day to create a video tutorial on how to create your first Android application through the MIT App Inventor. Watch the video then try making your first app. Or watch the video in one tab while following my instructions with App Inventor open in another tab.
Good morning from Maine where we're going to have another cold and snowy weekend. Every morning this week was below zero (Fahrenheit) when I let our dogs out. This morning is the same. Fortunately, it should warm up to about 20F by the middle of day. It'll be nice for a little bit of skiing and then some fun indoor activities like assembling jigsaw puzzles (if our cat can stay off of them). I hope that you also have something fun planned for your weekend.
This week was another week of 100% online instruction for my high school computer science students. We've now had more online days than in-person days this year. If ever there was a year to illustrate the point that school is much more than just academics, this is the year. My students clearly miss having in-person interactions. I'm trying to make it fun when I can, but it's still not the same as in-person classes. Next week is a vacation week and then we'll be back in-person. I can't wait!
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Earlier this week I answered an email from a reader who was looking for suggestions for tools that her elementary school students can use to make short audio recordings. Since most elementary school students don't have active email addresses, I suggested some tools that don't require any registration or log-in. In the video included at the end of this blog post I demonstrate how to use the following free tools to create short audio recordings. Those tools are Vocaroo, Online Voice Recorder, and Twisted Wave.
Vocaroo I've been using Vocaroo for more than a decade. It's incredibly simple to use. Just head to the site, click the record button, and start talking. When you're finished recording hit the stop button. You can listen to your recording before downloading it as an MP3. If you don't like your recording you can create a new one by just refreshing the Vocaroo.com homepage and starting again.
Online Voice Recorder Online-Voice-Recorder.com offers the same simplicity of Vocaroo plus a couple of features that I've always wished Vocaroo had. One of those features is the ability to pause a recording in progress and resume it when I want to. The other feature is the option to trim the dead air at the beginning and end of a recording.
Twisted Wave Twisted Wave offers many more features than either of the tools mentioned above. But at it's most basic level you can still just head to the site, launch the recorder, start talking, and then export your recording as an MP3 all without creating an account on the site. For those who are looking for a way to save audio directly into Google Drive, Twisted Wave offers that capability.
Watch this video for a short overview of all three of the services mentioned above.
Back in September I wrote a review of a new online whiteboard tool called Whiteboard.chat. I like it because it allows teachers to create whiteboards for their students. Teachers can then remotely monitor the whiteboards to see what their students are doing on those whiteboards. It's great for doing things like asking students to solve a math problem and then watch as students work out the solutions on their whiteboards.
Since my initial review of Whiteboard.chat back in September, the folks behind the service have been steadily adding more features to the service. Some of those new features include:
More background choices including options for sheet music, lined paper, and graphing paper.
New symbols and clipart including cute alphabet animals.
Templates for flowcharts and mind maps.
Virtual math manipulatives.
Recording audio and video notes to add to whiteboards.
Inclusion of Microsoft's Immersive Reader to provide read-aloud capabilities.
Just as before, Whiteboard.chat can be used by you and your students without having to register or sign into an account. You can learn more about how Whiteboard.chat works, including the teacher and student views in my new video about the service.
Russel Tarr, a history teacher and developer of ClassTools.net, recently released a new template called the Wikipedia Timeline Generator. This free tool will take a Wikipedia article and generate a timeline based on that article. That's not all it does. You can edit the entries on the timeline to correct dates, to edit the information associated with the dates, delete entries on the timeline, and add new dates to the timeline. Timelines created with the Wikipedia Timeline Generator can be embedded into web pages and or shared with the unique URL assigned to your timeline.
In this short video I demonstrate how to use the Wikipedia Timeline Generator hosted by ClassTools.
Applications for Education
The ClassTools Wikipedia Timeline Generator could be a good tool to use to create an easy-to-read summary of a biography or a historical event. I might consider having students use Wikipedia Timeline Generator as a starting point for an assignment in which I ask them to provide more details in each timeline entry or ask them to fact-check the entries in a timeline.
