apps

May 10 2012

Application Development – for Teachers & Administrators

VDOE is partnering with the Center for Innovative Technology to develop an application development program – Apps4VA (www.apps4va.org). You may be familiar with the concept of apps competitions or hackathons? It’s a growing trend for organizations, both public and private, to turn to the public for ideas on how their data might be used and for the development of new applications to analyze them. Apps4VA will roll out a series of events and competitions for outreach and to encourage the development of apps to improve education using datasets from the Virginia Longitudinal Data System (VLDS). Here’s a pretty good explanation of VLDS data: http://youtu.be/MAV9pO5ve0c.

How can teachers get involved?

(1) The Apps4VA program will kick off on June 1-3 at the NOVA EDU Startup Weekend event, which will be held in the Microsoft offices in Reston, VA. Startup Weekend EDU events, for the unfamiliar, are 54-hour events where educators, hackers, hustlers, and designers come together to pitch ideas and build products. Ideas are pitched for potential education related businesses and teams are formed. The organizers create an environment where teams can collaborate, inspire and code to their hearts’ content…don’t worry about meals, snacks or energy drinks – it’s all covered. Throughout the weekend expert mentors are on-site to help teams think through challenges. Come Sunday night, teams demo to a panel of judges (think serial entrepreneurs and VCs). Startup Weekends are excellent ways to work with many awesome folks you’ve never met, push your limits, learn new skills, and jumpstart your creativity. Interestingly enough, the stats show 80% of Startup Weekend alumni are still working with their new “company.”

We need teachers with ideas to attend! Registration is open at: www.novaedu.startupweekend.org (teachers have a discount and Virginia teachers may be eligible for a travel stipend). For more information, contact Brooke Bell at (804) 513-2736 / brooke.bell@cit.org.

(2) In late August, Apps4VA will conduct two open competitions – one for the general public and one for Virginia public high school students. The Apps4VA Open Competition will ask participants to build a software application using the VLDS data. The Apps4VA High School Competition will ask high school students to outline an application that would use VLDS data in a presentation. (They also have the option to build a fully working app as well.) All competitors may apply other publicly available data sets to create their apps (this combining of data is known as a “mashup”). We are hoping that teachers will spread the word about the high school competition to their students and encourage them to participate? Students can participate as individuals or form a team and can win money for themselves and their school. Attached is a poster highlighting the competition. More information may be found at: www.apps4va.org.

We want to encourage the very best teachers in Virginia to participate in these exciting programs. Please consider participating or sharing this information with any teachers you think might be interested. The ideal educator is passionate about innovation, technology, entrepreneurship, enhancing education, etc. We encourage participation from teachers from all over Virginia!

Please contact me with any questions.

Brooke Bell Center for Innovative Technology Brooke.bell@cit.org

Information Overload!!

Apps4VA Web site: www.apps4va.org Facebook: www.facebook.com/apps4va Twitter: www.twitter.com/apps4va

NOVA EDU Startup Weekend Web site: www.novaedu.startupweekend.org Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/DCStartupWeekend Twitter: http://twitter.com/sw_dc (#novaedu)

By John Hendron • Learning for Teachers • • Tags: apps, vdoe

Nov 4 2011

iPads Land at GMS/GHS

Mr. John Dacey was our first teacher to try iPads in the classroom this year at GHS. Mrs. Cantor and Mrs. Cooley helped me with this video to communicate the cart’s availability.

Folks might be wondering which apps are installed?

They are running iOS 4.35.

3D Brain
Adobe Ideas
Algebra Touch
Camera Protractor Lite
Coaster Physics
Comic Life
Contig (Math Game)
Data Analysis
Diigo
Doodle Buddy
Dragon Dictation
Dropbox
eClicker (Response System)
Professor Garfield Fact or Opinion?
Flipboard
Professor Garfield Forms of Media
Garage Band
GeoMaster Plus
Google Earth
Google Search
History: Maps of the World
iCatch Squares (Math Game)
iBooks
iMovie
K-12 Periodic Table
Keynote
LogoDraw
Molecules
MotionMath HD
NASA App
Pages
Plain Text
Professor Garfield on Cyberbullying
Professor Garfield on Online Safety
QR Code Scanner
QuickGraph
Qwiki
Science360
Sketchbook X
Stats of the Union
Virtual Cell
Wikipanion
Wolfram Alpha
Wolfram Algebra
Wolfram Pre-Algebra

Next out of the door will be iPads for GES, BES, and RES.

By John Hendron • Resource of Interest • • Tags: apps, ipads, secondary

May 26 2011

Google Account Change

If you have gotten married and have a name change, we’ve got a video for you! If you have requested your name be changed on any number of accounts here in Goochland, the one for Google takes some effort on your part.

We will create a new Google account for you.
You will follow the instructions in the video (linked below), such as:
Login to your old account,
Create a collection (folder) and change the sharing settings so that your new account is the owner,
Repeat this process for sites or calendars you wish to migrate;
Let us know when this is done,
We’ll delete your old account.

By John Hendron • Learning for Teachers • • Tags: apps, google, name, podcast, video

Jan 27 2011

Google Goodies – February, 2011

These are notes for the presentation by John and Bea at EdTech 2011 in Ashland, Virginia. We both became Google Certified Teachers in December of 2009.

Slide

Do you think you know what Google is? Google makes its money from advertising. But their mission is to organize the world’s information, making it universally accessible and useful. In addition to its search engine, Google offers a variety of Web-enabled services such as free e-mail (Gmail), a news service, apps for the desktop (Google Earth, Google Sketchup), maps, Google Voice, and of course, YouTube.

Google’s now got a phone platform that’s popular (Android) and another project to simplify computing by taking away most of what we think of as a operating system (ChromeOS). They also make a nice browser for PCs and Macs.

We are going to look at some of our favorite Google Services, and in addition, Google Apps for Education. We’ll share our experiences using GoogleApps both for teachers and for students.

Keep in mind there are two basic types of Google Accounts – those tied to an organization, and those we might call “personal” accounts. A Google account is tied to an e-mail address, which might also be a G-mail address.

Goodies we are sharing:

Google Book Search
Google Maps (including MyMaps)
Google Search Options (these are located on the search page sidebar)
Google News
Google News Archive Search
Google Squared
Google Reader – there are now a number of client applications that sync with this service
Google Voice
Google Insights
Google Trends
Google Googles
Google Voice Search
Google Apps for Education
Google Docs Help
Google’s You Tube Channel (lots of tutorials)
Google Apps Certification

This is the third year for Goochland using Google Apps with teachers and the second with student accounts. Our first year of student accounts included access to Gmail for students; this year we were unable to afford email archiving, so we no longer offer the student e-mail accounts.

GoogleApps can be configured via LDAP and with a single-sign-on feature. However, we are currently managing the accounts via the Google Apps Dashboard using a mass upload at the start of the year. We use a system to track student accounts by using their graduation year in their account ID. This way, we can search for students by using their graduation year in the IDs and remove students as they graduate.

We feel introducing GoogleApps to teachers first is ideal… they acclimate to the shared environment, the concept of wikis, etc., and then they clamor for these features with students. We have a great penetration of GoogleApps with teachers now, and it’s helped that our administrators have demanded its use.

Some example uses of Google Apps for teachers/staff:

Citizenship 21
G21 Faire
iLearn Mini Site
Secondary Course Guide Mini Site
Student Portfolio Example
Our introduction to GoogleAppls for teachers

In addition to these examples and tools, we’re big fans of Google Earth and Google Sketchup.

By John Hendron • Resource of Interest • • Tags: apps, education, google

Jan 5 2011

iPad Guide for Administrators

From the twitterverse comes this PDF guide for school principals on the iPad. In evaluating apps on the Apple iOS platform, I, myself, have been keeping two different eyes out on apps.

Apps for school administrators
Apps for students

The guide referenced above talks about Evernote, iAnnotate, iBooks, and Omnifocus. These are well-regarded apps, but different from the ones I use. There are some trends I’ve found when choosing which applications to share with school leaders.

Apps that sync. I recommend Simplenote and Notational Velocity as a killer combination. Simplenote is an app for the iPad/iPhone that can sync your plain-text notes to their server. NV is the app on the Mac that ties into this same database. Write a note one place, have it instantly availalbe everywhere else. Some call this cloud computing.
Focus. OmniFocus is available on both the Mac and the iPad, but I’ve gone with one called Things. I have difficulty in consistently using it, but it does work well as an organizational manager. Both Focus and Things follow the “Getting Things Done” philosophy by David Allen.
Calendars and Mail that Sync. Having your e-mail available on every device, plus your calendar items, is awesome. We use iCal on the Macs, tied to the iOS calendar, using Google’s CalDAV syncing. This is another example of cloud computing.
Data Collection. iPads and iPhones are great data collectors, whether it’s a voice memo, a photo, or data you type into the device. We’re currently using FileMakerGo as a solution to do classroom observations using FileMaker Server.
Information Management. RSS has proven to be one important technology in trying to manage all the information we might find of interest, from education blogs, to online articles, and even school news. I like Reeder, an RSS aggregator for the iPad, but I also like Flipbook, for its ability to show content across platforms in a visually interesting way. Instapaper is an app I’ve yet to share with administrators, which allows you to “read content later,” even without an internet connection.
Documents and Editing. I’ve yet to pick my favorite PDF/Cloud/Office app. I have been using GoodReader a lot as its matured. Some folks like some others for opening and editing Office documents, in addition to the cloud-formats like Dropbox or Google Docs.

Hopefully by March, I can publish which apps we find have been most beneficial. At the same time, we’re looking at educational apps for both elementary and secondary applications.

By John Hendron • General News • • Tags: apps, iOS, ipad

Jan 20 2009

Methods for “Green” Meeting and Collaborating

Introduction

Using your laptop and an Internet connection, you can help save resources by using online tools to meet, collaborate, and learn with one another. This guide details some tools and methods teachers and staff in Goochland County have available.

Google

Google Apps offers several document formats that can be shared and open by users simultaneously. Word processing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations can all be shared with colleagues and visible on each person’s screen. We recommend hitting the “save” button within the Google interface after changes are made on each machine. This syncs the shared document with Google’s servers. When you’re connected to a shared document that is being edited, you can use the “refresh” button on your browser to update the version of the document when others have made changes.

Previously, Google Apps included a chat window, but currently does not. For the latest changes to Google Apps, visit their help pages.

Sometimes getting to Google’s Apps can be tedious. Learn how to integrate their applications into your Mac OS X Dock.

New to Google Apps is Google Sites. This is a “do it yourself” wiki system that supports a host of easy to use features. Insert Google Docs into your wiki, add comments, and even upload files. You can share your wiki space with the public, or just key personnel within Goochland.

Finally, Google’s Forms offer a way to collect data. When the data collected is exported into a tab-deliminated file format, our desktop application InspireData makes a great partner in helping visualize your data and gain insight to what you have collected through the form. To learn more about the synergy of these two applications, check out my video podcast.

Adobe

Adobe’s new Acrobat.com is a Flash-based version of document sharing and collaboration tools that is currently free to use. All you need is a free user account and an e-mail address.

Adobe Buzzword is Adobe’s collaborative word processor. Comparable to Google Docs, it offers a “slicker” interface alongside a different set of tools.

Acrobat also allows you to store your files on their server, and share them with other Acrobat.com users.

Unique to the Adobe tools is Adobe ConnectNow. This part of Acrobat.com allows you to screen share, video chat, and text chat with other people. Upload files to the shared room to distribute, and conduct meetings. Since our laptops all have built-in microphones and cameras, you should be ready to go after updating your Flash player.

iChat

iChat on Mac OS X Tiger offers text, voice, and video chat. With a high-bandwidth connection, you can join up to 4 people together in a video chat, and 10 in an audio chat. iChat is great for exchanging files, hosting your own chat room, and for keeping the “audio lines” open while you edit a document in tandem with Google Docs or Adobe Buzzword.

Those using Mac OS X Leopard (10.5) have a new version of iChat that offers even more flexible collaboration tools. With this version of iChat, you can now share photos, Quicktime movies, and Keynote presentations during a video chat. This way, you can walk someone through key concepts while they see the slides and hear your voice. In turn, you see their reaction as you converse together.

Leopard’s iChat also offers a new feature called ScreenShare. This allows either chatter in a two-way call to take over another person’s screen, or observe their desktop. This can be used to offer technical support on demand, or to demonstrate the use of software. During the voice chat and screen sharing, either user can switch views to view the other person’s computer screen.

Skype

Skype is an application-based chat and VoIP tool that can be used free on computers and also for a fee used with phones. While folks within Goochland would likely elect to use iChat, Skype is a great alternative, especially when you’d like to connect with educators outside our division, and whether they will connect by phone, PC, or Mac.

Skype offers a public chat room feature where you can join many users together. They also offer video chat, not unlike iChat A/V.

Conclusion

Sometimes nothing beats a well-organized, face-to-face meeting. Yet, in a climate where budgets force us to save every dime possible, a new class of technologies are available to help us work together when we are physically apart.

GoogleApps (both Docs and Sites) offer us a place to share documents. You can share with folks so they can view your document, or so they can edit. You can even view and edit simultaneously with other users.

Adobe Acrobat.com, a new website, offers document sharing and in-browser editing. Even more compelling is their ConnectNow service that combines voice, text, file sharing, and screen sharing all in one browser window.

iChat is great for presenting ideas to a colleague if you’ve been upgraded to Mac OS X Leopard. Remember that both parties need to be using iChat version 4. iChat is likely the easiest tool to use, and can be used to exchange files and talk with voice and/or video.

Skype is a great alternative for sharing online with users of other platforms. Especially compelling is their Public Chat service.

Whichever tool you use, remember a few tips.

Be precise about when you will meet virtually, and which tools you will be using.
Be sure everyone has credentials to use the tools before the meeting time.
While some folks are timid about video chats, seeing a colleague’s face can improve communication.
When joining with more than one other person, consider methods to manage working together. Perhaps a leader can be established to help lead the discussion and assign turns for talking.
Finally, remember you can combine these tools. Sharing the editing or viewing of a common document with voice communications is a great way to make quick work. And no one cares if you’re wearing slippers!

By John Hendron • Learning for Teachers • • Tags: acrobat, adobe, apps, collaborate, google, googledocs, green, online