A Must Have Tool for Creating Educational Video Presentations

May 17, 2016
Movenote is an excellent application for creating video presentations. It allows you to ‘record video alongside documents or pictures to create an integrated video presentation with slides.’ Movenote is ideal for flipped or blended learning classrooms. As a teacher, you start by uploading your documents, then  record a video explaining the different points covered in your slides. You can use your computer or iPad’s camera to do that. Then you synchronize your recorded video with your slides. The final product will be a video presentation where your video gets to appear side by side with your slides.

To create slides you need to upload your materials either from your computer or from cloud storage services like Google Drive and Dropbox. You can add pictures from your gallery or take them directly with your camera. Next, you record your video by allowing Movenote access to your camera. While recording, you can simultaneously change slides by swiping so that your final presentation will ‘play out with the exact same timing’. You can share your video presentations via mail, embed code, generated URL or through social media websites. Movenote has also added a new feature making it possible for users to disable camera when recording your presentation.The Guest Free version of Movenote comes with very few features, premium versions ($4,99/month) has more features to offer.

Watch the video below to learn more about Movenote

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Check Out This Comprehensive Collection of Libraries Providing Public Domain Materials for Teachers

May 17, 2016
A few days ago we shared with you an important collection featuring a wide variety free audio books for teachers. In today’s post we are adding another equally important resource from Internet Archive. This is basically a comprehensive collection featuring thousands of libraries from all across America. The American Libraries collection provides you access to a treasure trove of educational documents, texts, monographs, research papers and several other materials. It ‘ includes material contributed from across the United States. Institutions range from the Library of Congress to many local public libraries. As a whole, this collection of material brings holdings that cover many facets of American life and scholarship into the public domain.’

This is a huge collection and you may want to use the integrated search functionality to quickly locate resources on the page. You can search for libraries by name and once you find your library click on its title to access the books digitized by the Internet Archive for that library. Within a library, you can search books and documents by title, date published/archived/reviewed, creator and views. Each book you find there comes with detailed bibliographical information and is available for download in multiple formats including: EPUB, PDF, Kind, Full Text and many more. Enjoy

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Google Released A New Interesting Group Sharing App

May 17, 2016
Google announced today the release of a new service called ‘Spaces’. This is basically a group sharing app that allows members to share, discuss and comment on topic-specific content they are sharing within a Space. Anyone can instantly create a Space and invite others to join it using a generated link via messaging, email etc. Spaces are topic-focused hubs where you and your designated friends and colleagues can interact and exchange content. For instance, students working on a collaborative project can create a Space for their project and start sharing links, content and hold discussions and even realtime conversations about their work.

Spaces comes with a number of built-in services including Google search, YouTube, and Photos so users can easily search for, find and share content without having to switch apps. Users can also use the search box within Spaces to quickly locate anything they have previously shared including images. ‘From study groups to house hunting to weekend road trips and more, Spaces lets you easily get just the right people together around any topic.’Spaces is available for Android, iOS, desktop and mobile web for all Gmail accounts.

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3 Important Tips to Boost Students Confidence (TED Ed Lesson)

May 16, 2016
In a previous post we published here in EdTech and mLearning, we talked about Chrome Lab’s  9 character strengths that characterize successful students (namely: grit, gratitude, purpose, self-control, social/emotional intelligence, curiosity, zest, mindset, and optimism).Along similar lines, we are sharing with you another important character or, let’s call it a macro-character as it embeds several micro-characters or attributes. It is confidence.

Related: 7 Wonderful TED Talks on Learning from Failure

To be confident means, among other things,  to have a growth mindset, be willing to take risks and adventures, embrace your mistakes and learn from them and be open and adaptable to different situational contexts. Confidence thrives on optimism and hope because a confident individual is on an everlasting quest for betterment and advancement. Additionally, if you are to create a recipe for success in school (an in life in general), confidence will absolutely be among the top ingredients.  Confident students show more courage and resolution in face of challenges and hardships. They are also more inclined to learn from their mistakes and feel comfortable exploring different learning possibilities.

Given the importance of confidence in building powerful personalities and successful learners, here is a wonderful video from TED Ed to share with your students in class. This is an animated lesson explaining what confidence is all about and suggesting 3 main tips to boost ones confidence. You can access the full lesson with comprehension and discussion questions from this page. Enjoy

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Talking About Change: Getting from One Trapeze to Another

Guest author, Doug Leonard writes about change in this interesting post.

"It’s not so much that we’re afraid of change or so in love with the old ways, but it’s that place between that we fear. It is like being between two trapezes. It’s like Linus when his blanket is in the dryer. There’s nothing to hold onto."
                                        --- Marilyn Ferguson, American Futurist

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Trusted Digital Signatures

Our good friend Patrick Cormier, former CEO of the Canadian Centre for Court Technology, now Vice President for Business Development at Notarius wrote a great piece on Digital Signatures that he has allowed us to re-post below.  I think you will find it interesting...

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Another Technology to Plan For: Blockchain Contracts

As we all know, courts have to deal with contracts between parties.  And courts also very often have to verify the authenticity of information.

There is a lot of work going on using Blockchain database technology.  So it is time to learn about and plan for its use in the justice system.  We discuss below.

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