Vetted iPad and Android apps

The Texas Computer Educator Association asked a bunch of their teachers to go through popular apps and report back on the ones that seem useful. This is really cool for three reasons:

1) You don't have to do waste time vetting these things yourself before using them with kids.

2) The free apps are marked and easy to see.

3) They sorted them into categories like subject areas, grade levels, special needs, personal use, etc.

Here is the link for the iPad apps and here's where you can find android apps.

You Tube Tricks

Sick of scantily-clad women and advertisements for male enhancement popping up after showing that YouTube video clip to your kids?  If you use Google Chrome as your web browser, you can install an extension called You Tube Options. Just search for it and click "install" and you'll be able to turn these off.

Want to share just a small clip instead of the entire video? You can set this up ahead of time by using this easy YouTube web clipper. Tammy Worchester Tang made this and presented it at the TCEA conference this weekend and it's super easy to use. You need to have a Google account, though, because it opens as a Google Spreadsheet.

You can make a YouTube playlist on your YouTube account and then share that entire playlist on your web page for parents and students. You can also play all the videos in the playlist at once, without stopping. (This would be great for short, informational clips or indoor recess.)  I've experimented with this here.

Evernote URL Links

Do you use Evernote? If not, you should. It's been an awesome tool for me to save recipes, receipts, web sites, and notes from conferences and everything's searchable!  I just found out that I can share these notes with friends by simply giving them the URL to the note.  Then, other friends who use Evernote can download them into their Evernote trunk. Even if you don't have Evernote, you can still view them on your device. Super cool. 

It's really easy to do. When you're ready to share your note, just click "Share"  (top right- above note) and select "copy URL to clipboard". You can then paste that note in an email or on your web page.

Already have your own website? Automatically post your favorite links!

If you already have a web page but never remember to update sections like "student links", etc., consider saving your bookmarks in Diigo. You can tag the site with something like "parentlinks" or "studentmathgames" and easily send sites with those tags straight into your web page?

 Check out this page for how it works!

 This works great for Blogger, but not for Wordpress, so be aware.

TCEA Conference

This weekend, I attended the Texas Computer Educators Association conference and left energized and overwhelmed. I have so many new ideas, but each one needs to be examined and unpacked a bit. I started this site for that purpose and to test out some of the ideas from the conference here, instead of on my classroom page. I hope it can be of use to someone else out there, too!