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Sunday, December 28, 2014

Movenote - Recording within Chrome

Have you ever heard of Movenote? It's an add-on for Chrome that ALSO works from within Gmail.  Movenote makes it really easy to add a recorded explanation to a picture or slides from your computer or Google Drive.


For example, in order to remind my students of a spelling quiz today, and where they can find the rule that they needed to practice for today, I went into Gmail, and clicked on Movenote:






...then recorded and sent it to them via email:




 


AND they could either reply to my message by making a recording, themselves OR by sending me a note!

Here is an example of how you can learn to use it for a Flipped Classroom lesson, where you want to teach something BEFORE class, so that the students can practice and implement it IN class, when YOU are there to help them (that is the philosophy of Flipped Classroom.. but that’s for another installment).










I hope that is clear enough for you to feel ready to play around with it. It’s great to teach to your students, as well, for their oral presentations!


Digitally yours,

@dele








Saturday, December 6, 2014

Busy? Aren't we all!!!!

Having trouble finding time to meet up with your colleagues? Your friends? Your kids? 

We are all so busy, but there are things for which email just doesn't cut it. Sometimes you just have to meet up at the same place, at the same time (at least virtually). There are programs that can help you do this. My personal favorite is "Doodle". I've used it to set up meetings with students, and today, to find a mutually convenient time to set up a Google Hangout with two colleagues who are just as busy as I am. 

After logging into my Doodle account, I proceeded to "Schedule an event":





I filled in the title, the location (in this case, it is a virtual meeting, so our location is just listed as "Hangout")  a description that accompanied the invitation, my  name and email. 




The next stage is choosing the dates:



...and then the times that work for me, according to my own calendar for the coming week (if there not enough time slots, you can add more):


I then send out the invitation, adding the email addresses of the people I want to invite (not shown here for reasons of privacy of innocent colleagues who are not responsible for my propensity for blogging ;-). 

With this program, I also have the ability to track whom I have invited and who is still missing (this option is helpful when you are inviting a lot of people, for example, when I need to schedule meetings with  my students, but since the meeting I set here, there are only two other participants, using that option was unnecessary).  




Within an hour, I had both responses and was able to set the date and time of the meeting:




...and schedule a Hangout (something I will write about next week if anyone expresses an interest).





Have you ever used a program like this one for finding times for meetings? If so, please share the one YOU use! If not, do you see this program as being useful? If you use it, let us know how happy you are with the results!

Digitally yours,

@dele