Archive for the ‘productivity’ Category

Special ed [heart] Jott

July 15, 2008

You may already know about Jott, a fantastic cell phone service that will convert your voice to text. You may have wondered, “how is this useful for me besides giving me another way to make a shopping or to-do list?”

I wanted to highlight a couple of uses that are especially suited for Special Education. When you see them, you may get some other ideas about how to use this tool. Please leave a comment below to share them.

Jott for documentation

If you are a administrator, resource specialist, or some other provider of services that demand you document your interactions and interventions with students, Jott can save you a lot of time. Here is an example: at my school, we have been implementing RTI (Response to Intervention) the new federal special education (IDEA) model. This involves a lot of documentation of interventions. I introduced my administrators to Jott. Now, after an intervention with a student, they step out to the hall, call Jott, leave a message, and voila - their message is converted to text, and sent to their email, leaving a paper record. I’ve heard of social workers, and others using it in a similar manner. It’s really great for field notes.

Jott for differentiation

One trick I recently learned is that the speech to text goes both ways on Jott. You can have RSS feeds from news sources, or your class blog to Jott, and it will turn it into an audio feed that students can phone in to Jott and hear. This is great for students who have an audio delivery accommodation on their IEP. Instructions for how to do this can be found by scrolling down to Step 6 Mobilecast. -ALICE MERCER

Slideshare on using Jott for RTI documentation

Cellphones in Learning blog

Cell phones in learning wiki

Related Stuff:

Note To Self: Make More Notes To Self

Monday by the numbers

July 14, 2008

Top 10 Office Supply Hacks - Get some extra mileage out of the supply closet. Lifehacker has 10 bonus uses for everyday office supplies. Keep snack foods fresh by using binder clips as chip clips. Did some clod write on your white board with permanant marker? Dry erase ink will make it come right off. You’ll want these ideas handy before class starts again.

17 Writing Secrets  - Want to bump your students’ writing from good to great (or at least from middling to halfway decent), Writer’s Digest presents these 17 writing secrets to help students make good word choices, and remind them of the importance of fixing stuff that’s kinda wordy and lame revision.

101+ Web Resources for Students - Courtesy of StudentHacks.org, this list is pretty much what it sounds like. It features everything from dictionaries to Shakespeare’s complete works to resources for the yearbook staff. If your students are looking for some handy Web tools, this is a great place to start.

100 Helpful Web Tools for Every Kind of Learner - Different students learn in different ways. What works for visual learners may not make sense to a kinesthetic learner. If you’re fixing to differentiate your instruction, check out these tools that cater to different learning styles. -BILL FERRIS

Photo credit: MarkyBon on flickr

Monday by the Numbers

May 5, 2008

Get Smarter: 12 Hacks That Will Amp Up Your Brainpower
Exercise your mind with these 12 strategies from Wired designed to max out your brainpower. Tips include exercising wisely, putting the right kinds of information in your brain, and even finding out the optimum dosages of caffeine.

40 Ways to Spice Up Your Spelling Words
Who doesn’t love memorizing spelling words? Your students, probably. Plenty of adults have trouble with spelling, meaning it’s probably even tougher for kids. Help them out by making your spelling words more interesting with these ideas.

50 Handy Tricks
File this under “Grab Bag.” Instructables presents this list of 50 Handy Tricks encompassing nothing in particular. You’ll learn how to do everything from taking blink-free photos to making a bow-and-arrow out of skis. Not necessarily teaching-related, but a creative soul like you can certainly figure out a way to build a lesson plan around reupholstering your couch with duct tape, can’t you?

10 virtually instant ways to improve your life
Want to add some quality to your quality of life? The folks at Stepcase Lifehack have some ideas, most of which can be summarized by the word, “relax.” Avoiding drama, not being a perfectionist, and not taking things personally will all help you make a fitter, happier and more productive life for yourself. -BILL FERRIS

Photo credit: Kaptain Kobold on flickr

Send Files and Keep Your Dignity at drop.io

April 9, 2008

I’m always sharing some kind of large file with friends and co-workers—photos, PowerPoint presentations, or zip files with years worth of documents. Sometimes, these just get too big for e-mail, so I’m stuck using a file-sharing service on the Web. Sure, there are tons of sites for sharing large files, but most of them use infuriating tactics to entice me to buy a premium membership.

After months of using services that forced my friends to wait for downloads to begin, I found drop.io, a free service that allows me to upload files quickly and allows my friends to download them quickly as well. Drop.io doesn’t ask users to sign up, log in, or divulge any information beyond how long shared files should stay on the server—drop.io will store them for up to a year. Once you’ve created a “drop,” you can add files to it by e-mail, web, phone, or fax. Drops stay private until you publicize them, too, as opposed to other file-sharing sites that are indexed in Google.

Drop.io limits files to a sizeable 100MB and has several options for displaying and storing different kinds of files. The interface is elegant and ad-free, which means that I no longer suffer the embarrassment of sharing files with colleagues, only to have them see inappropriate or ridiculous banner ads. –ROSS WHITE

drop.io

Related Stuff:
Back that Thing Up: Backup to Email
Back up Your Data with Mozy

 

Teach Your Brain to Dance

April 8, 2008

Brain DanceFrom what I can tell, Mind Mapping is all the rage right now, and I should probably learn how to do it. In fact, you should, too. Lucky for us both, that information is made available at Brain Dance’s Meta Learning Handbook. The online walk-through is based on the information in Patrick T. McGee’s Brain Dancing handbook. Ideal for students, Mind Mapping is a great visual way of processing input and doling out clean, organized output. It’s a tool that can be used to help you read more efficiently and retain more information on what you’ve read.

Using this visual-based way of thinking, “Brain Dancing” will help you also improve your memory and learning skills. We’d love to hear from anyone who has given this a try, or if you want to be a guinea pig and test it out. Let us know if this site has your gray matter doing the cha-cha. -JEREMY S. GRIFFIN

Brain Dancing for Students

Put Your Scheduling to a Vote with Doodle

March 27, 2008

You can’t beat the power of democracy. It’s useful both as a system of government and a way to decide what time to schedule a meeting. As great as democracy is, though, you may have noticed that a lot of people don’t vote in elections. That’s probably because the democratic process isn’t as easy as Doodle.

Doodle lets you create polls in about 90 seconds. I created one to decide my dinner plans. You can help me make up my mind here. If you need to set up a staff meeting or plan the day for the music department bake sale, Doodle can do that, too. Just enter possible dates and times and forward the link to the poll to the folks you want there. They can then vote on the times that work best for them.

Unfortunately, you can vote more than once, so it’s not ideal for classroom use. What Doodle does do is help you wrangle dates and opinions from other people with a minimum of sweat. Isn’t democracy great? -BILL FERRIS

Doodle

Back up Your Data with Mozy

March 13, 2008

If a hard drive crash scares you more than a house fire, you need to back up your data. Pictures, documents, music, all of it could be history. Fortunately, you can back it up safely and cheaply with Mozy.

Mozy gives you your first 2GB of data free. To salvage more than that, it costs a measly five bucks a month. But you can store a lot with 2GB–that’s a good chunk of photos, a few vital albums, and even your unfinished novel you’ve been kicking around for years. -BILL FERRIS

Mozy

Related Stuff:
Back that Thing Up: Backup to Email

Note: I heard about Mozy from Leslie Fisher at the NCaect conference. She’s knows about lots of gadgets and do-dads. Check out her site!

Excel at Excel with Keyboard Shortcuts

February 19, 2008

I’m a virtuoso at Microsoft Word. Whether it’s mail merges, macros, and the Ctrl-arrow key trick to skip ahead a word at a time, I can do it all. But I use Excel like a Yankee trying to talk Southern. I can do the basic stuff like sums and averages and such, but I don’t know the time-saving tricks that separate the advanced user from the dude who tries to shoehorn a text document into a spreadsheet because the tables in Word are so crappy.

If this sounds familiar, TechJive can help you become an Excel master with a listing of Excel shortcut keystrokes that streamline common tasks like selecting columns and rows, or cycling through various worksheets. Plus, helpful users post their own shortcuts in the comments, making this a valuable resource next time you need to update your grade book or put together a budget proposal.

Give some of these a try, or enlighten others by posting a comment. As for me, once I get these keystrokes down I can attempt to dominate another Microsoft program. That’s right, I’m looking at you, Minesweeper. –BILL FERRIS

Excel Keystrokes via TechJive