Thursday, July 28, 2016

Minnesota eLearning Summit 2016 - Easy Formative Assessment Options For Mobile Learning

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Come experience quick online and app-based formative assessment and quizzing options on your iPad, Chromebook, or other mobile devices and learn how to engage your students and gauge their understanding of your lesson or class material. Session participants will learn about specific apps and online tools and how to repurpose other apps and online interactive tools to create collaborative learning opportunities that will allow you to gauge student learning on the spur of the moment or designed in advance and incorporated in a learning management system.



Resources
Presentation

Traditional Quizzes
Kahoot
Create a game or copy one shared on the Kahoot site to check your students' knowledge and understanding in a fast-paced competitive manner.
Google Forms
Build a quiz from scratch or tap into the new Google Forms templates available on Google Apps For Education accounts to quickly design a quiz that can be sent to students, linked from a website, or embedded.

Socrative
Use Socrative to build a quiz from scratch or import quizzes from colleagues.

Plickers
Plickers is a simple but powerful tool for collecting real-time formative assessment data without the need for student devices.
Free card sets

Poll Everywhere
Poll Everywhere allows you to turn any internet-enabled devices into a student response system.

Other Ways To Check For Understanding
Voxer
Voxer combines voice, text, photo and video sharing for real-time or asynchronous conversations.

Padlet
Padlet makes collaboration and idea sharing easy by allowing you to post text, links, images, and video.

Flipgrid
Flipgrid allows you to easily promote discussion and collaboration in and outside of the classroom walls.

DocentEDU
DocentEDU helps you to turn the internet into your lesson by helping you to add vocabulary support, questions, open-ended response, videos, and much more to webpages that complement and supplement the content of the courses you teach - all with just a few clicks!


VoiceThread
VoiceThread allows your students to join the conversation from anywhere and add their voice, thoughts, reflections, and doodles to the discussion.

EdPuzzle
EdPuzzle can be used to tap into the wealth of video content available on YouTube or created by you with the addition of questions and stops for reflection to ensure that students are tuned in and not missing out due to distractions.

Camera App - video
Don't forget that the camera app on mobile devices is a great way for students to capture a spur-of-the-moment or well-planned video reflection that can be easily submitted and give you insight into their understanding of your course content.


Tuesday, July 26, 2016

Minnesota eLearning Summit - Publish Amazing Interactive Books With iBooks Author & Book Creator

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Looking for creative ways to create a textbook tailored for your students’ needs or with up-to-date information to supplement your textbook, to distribute in your classroom or school, to make available through your learning management system, or even to publish commercially or to share globally? iBooks Author for the Mac computer and the Book Creator app for iPad, Android, and Windows are the answer! Come learn how to create interactive books with this amazing easy-to-use Mac software and widgets and multi-platform app that make creating an eye-catching, engaging, interactive book as easy as 1-2-3.



Resources
Apps featured:
iBooks Author (runs on Mac computer)
Book Creator (available for iOS, Android, and Windows)
iBooks (runs on Mac computer and iOS devices)
Reflector 2 (runs on computer)

iBooks Author
This application allows you to easily create your own textbooks, long or short, by dragging and dropping content into templates. Built-in and third party widgets allow you to create interactive elements that help students to engage with your content as they read.

Content that you can drag into your iBook:
Images (png, jpeg, jpg)
Word documents
Pages documents

Widgets:
  • Keynote - Keynotes, Powerpoints
  • Gallery - multiple images
  • Review - self-check quizzes
  • Media - video
  • Interactive Image - drag labels to appropriate location on image
  • 3D - add 3D images to can be rotated and manipulated
  • Scrolling Sidebar - add long text to a page
  • Pop-Over - pop up boxes with additional information about parts of images and diagrams
  • HTML - add all sorts of content from the Internet that can be linked to or embedded

Third Party Widgets:
Bookry
This website service allows you to create interactive widgets that you can customize with content from the internet or from your own files. Widgets can be downloaded and dropped into iBooks Author to add the interactive feature to your book.

BookWidgets
This subscription website service allows you to create interactive widgets that you can customize with content from the internet or from your own files. Widgets can be downloaded and dropped into iBooks Author to add the interactive feature to your book.

iBooks Author Getting Started Guide
The iBooks Author Getting Started Guide is a great iBook available from Apple iBooks Store that guide you step by step through the process of learning to use iBooks Author by having you create an iBook. Sample media files are included in the book to help you get started without needing to gather all of your own files.

Example Textbooks
E.O. Wilson's Life on Earth Textbooks
Unit 1: Unity & Diversity of Life on Earth
Unit 2: Guided Tour of the Living Cell
Unit 3: Genetics
Unit 4: Animal Physiology
Unit 5: Plant Physiology
Unit 6: Guided Tour of Biodiversity
Unit 7: Guided Tour of Ecosystems


Book Creator
This simple-to-use but powerful app allows you to easily create your own books or textbooks with your own content to customize for student needs. Books can be collaboratively created or exported in ePub format and read in iBooks or as PDFs.

Content that you can add to your book:
Images
Text
Video
Pen tool allows for handwriting
Audio narration

Sample Books
Pinterest Library of Books Made In Book Creator

Getting Started with Book Creator
Tutorials and Support

iBooks
This app for iOS and Mac computers allows for the creation of libraries of ibooks, ePubs, ebooks, and PDFs so that students can take books with them on the go and open up books that were previously read. Depending on the format of the books, students may be able to highlight and take notes while reading, sync notes across devices, and automatically create study cards from highlights and notes.


Reflector 2
This Mac and Windows computer application allows iOS users to mirror their device screens to the computer to allow for projection for the whole class via an LCD projector connected to the computer. Teachers/instructors can mirror their own iPad content or have students share for the whole class as well.