Educators interested in discovering the latest apps that promise to make learning and teaching engaging for students were in for a treat this past January as the self-professed "chief geek" Leslie Fisher provided them with plenty of ways to energize the curriculum.
The talk was one of two sponsored by the LHRIC's Technology Leadership Institute and held at the Edith Macy Conference Center
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| Leslie Fisher speaks at the January TLI event. |
Ms. Fisher, who serves as director of Fisher Technologies, Inc., provided a myriad of resources for those who might be feeling a bit overwhelmed by the sheer volume of new technology coming at them on a daily basis.
Some of those include the following:
Evernote – Ms. Fisher described this application as "gadgety but informative." The latest version, known as Evernote Clearly, captures everything, including text, audio, photographs and more, and makes blog posts, articles and web pages clean and easy to read.
Livescribe.com – a paper-based computing platform that consists of a digital pen, digital paper, software applications and developer tools. Central to the Livescribe platform is the smartpen, a ballpoint pen with an embedded computer and digital audio recorder.
Class Dojo – improves student behavior and engagement by awarding and record real-time feedback. It also captures and generates data on behavior that teachers can share with parents and administrators.
Edcanvas – this allows users to create step-by-step guides on any topic. They will also be able to integrate video, audio, stills and links from YouTube. Ms. Fisher suggested that teachers use it as a tool to create quizzes for students.
Smalldemons.com – a web-based literary database, otherwise known as a "storyverse" that visually indexes, annotates and connects the people, places and things that are found in books.
Scoop.it.com – a curation service containing news and social media. Scoop.it allows users to create boards or web pages around a single topic. Users can use a Scoop.it page to aggregate educational videos, online quizzes, spelling resources, and other similar stuff.
For educators teaching an active news item, Scoop.it's curation tools can be used to create a page that is constantly updated with the latest items on the topic.
Learnist.com – a good site to place nuggets of information or also to grab information from others, said Ms. Fisher.
Weebley.com – a free service that allows users to create websites quickly and easily.
Wufoo.com – a form manager that Ms. Fisher believes is much easier to use than Google Forms.
Fur.ly – users can collect the urls of various websites, enter the addresses into the fur.ly website and wait as the site creates one url for all of them.
Remind101.com – a safe way for teachers to text message students and keep in touch with parents.
Other cool applications that Ms. Fisher talked about include augmented reality for the iPhone and iPad, a video showing Google's powered glasses (not yet on the market) and Aurasma, an augmented platform operated by Hewlett-Packard.
To find out more, visit Ms. Fisher's website at www.lesliefisher.com.
