Category Archives: leslie fisher

A Little Something from Waffle Bytes

Melinda Waffle from Calhoun ISD blogged some great notes and resources from Leslie Fisher’s “The Web You Might Not Know About.” Instead of posting a link to her blog, she’s graciously allowed the post to be re-published here on MACUL’s blog.  Thanks Melinda!

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AT MACUL 2012 Conference attending the Leslie Fisher session:  The Web 2.0 You Might Not Know About…
(Finally up after my battery died 15 minutes before the end of the session…)

RockMelt – Free browser for Mac or PC
Social media browser – connects to social media but leaves you on current page

Evernote Clearly can be attached to any web browser – will extract story out of web page and save to Evernote; schools.evernote.com for school accounts; can now add audio recordings; bought skitch app for drawing; solution for iPads in multiple hands (teacher on student accounts); Evernote Peek adds flash card capability for iPad

Twitter – soapbox moment about uses for Education :-)
Added ability to receive tweets with no twitter account, uses text messaging.  Use twitter widgets to place tweets onto webpage (real time updating…).

www.coveritlive.com – backchannel room, can go to it at anytime to see as is.

www.todaysmeet.com – free backchannel chat, pretty open

www.gosoapbox.com – allows interaction between speaker & the audience; create questions, vote to promote; similar to the Purdue’s Hotseat.  No longer free

typewith.me – collaboration site online; can load a pdf on there and collaborate it. Can now get up to 100 people into the room, can be in room on mobile device; has time slider to review material.

www.pinterest.com – tool for sharing resources; virtual pinboard; organizable by topic, ideas, etc

Wunderlist – To Dos in one location (any platform); collaborative to dos;

Zamzar – file conversion site (free!)

en.linoit.com – online cork board to post stickies, other resources, etc; it’s an iPad it

www.scoopit.com – organize a topic in one place; create boards, when browsing can add links from sites to your boards; people can subscribe to the board (schools using as school newspaper)

join.me – simple group meetings; change, or take control of the screen

www.weebly.com – create websites easily; two sites you can create for free; weebly for education – the teacher can control privacy

www.wufoo.com – create drag & drop forms online;

Eventbrite – schedule events easily; keeps track of waiting list on limited room events.

www.classdojo.com – student engagement & reward tracker; teacher can load behaviors & students for tracking

www.smalldemons.com – learn more about literature

www.remind101.com – teacher creates account; others join via text/email; no phone/emails exchanged and the teacher can communicate with students/parents

wiffiti.com. – message board.

www.jetjaw.com – polling/feedback online, can conditionalize by answer

www.kaywa.com – QR Code management

www.polleverywhere.com  – new wordle support (see word cloud of open ended question answers)

www.storify.com – take tidbits from everywhere & mash together

For the Love of Leslie

Man, people love Leslie Fisher.  This room (W1-54) is filling up and there won’t be many seats left by the time it’s ready to begin.  Leslie Fisher is invited back to the MACUL conference year after year…I think she’s on retainer.  Her Gadget presentation is probably one of her most popular, but I know her sessions on iLife and Photoshop also receive rave reviews.

<buzzing room>

Here’s a link to Leslie’s handouts page, although I’m not sure it’s her latest presentation.  I’m not going to list every gadget, but hopefully those that have a special level of awesome.

Check out Jack’s office…definately a certain level of awesome…in a goofy sort of way.

Leslie has a great point about Twitter.  It’s not the tweets about coffee and birds flying by that are important to teachers.  It’s the connections between educators about what they’re teaching that make a difference.  It’s something that’s already been discussed on the blog quite extensively.

She’s covering a lot of sites that I’m covering at my BYOL session this afternoon…is that good or bad?  It’s OK.  :-)   Right now we’re looking at Evernote, which is an awesome tool that helps you manage information in the form of notes.  The notes can be text, images, audio, whatever.  One thing that’s awesome is that Evernote has an OCR tool that coverts images to text…and it works pretty well!  Includes a desktop client for Mac and Windows as well as a web tool.

<wireless is bogging down a bit>

Teachers should love the Flip Video Camcorder.  It’s a small camera that shoots good video and hooks directly to your computer via a built-in USB port.  Quick and easy to use.

Make sure you check out the live blog post for more details of Leslie’s gadgets.