More Digital Tools

You may be wondering about the additional tools we used in this course that we built.  This page will share more information about the secondary focus tools used during our online class.

Blogger is our platform for the blog which contains the course materials.  You have a Blogger account through your student Google accounts.  Did you know that Blogger allows you to:

• Easily embed video and sound (mp3) files
• Click on "HTML" and embed widgets directly onto the blog
• Schedule your posts - which means create today and post tomorrow ... or next week!
• Create a widget under 'layout' - do you see the Twitter hashtag and diigo lists running along the side?  That is how these pieces were added!
• Create stand-alone pages - for really important information that doesn't change (ie FAQs)
• Easily use a widget to allow people to sign-up for your new blog posts to be sent immediately
• Connect your Google + profile and your blogs
• I'm sure this list will expand as we learn more this month!

MentorMob is an easy to create, collaborate, and share a playlist.  This container tool gives you a way to pull and organize content you want to share with your audience.  Check out this 1 minute YouTube video to learn more.

Picasa is an online photo editor and organizer.  Many of the original images found on this blog have been uploaded to our student Google accounts via Picasa and then shared as 'public' - copy the link and paste it into the blog.  The simplicity of this process is amazing (and very much appreciated!)

Symbaloo is a webmix that houses tiles (links) to other tools.  It is a great container for teaching and also allows you to change the background of the tiles so you can do tiered work with students or categorize in other ways.

Want to learn more?  Click HERE to view a YouTube Playlist for Symbaloo.

Screen-cast-o-matic - is a tool we can't live without!  You can do screencasting quickly and easily to teach a topic, explain a common mistake, present something online, really the list is endless.  Record your voice over your screen movements or even add your webcam for extra personalization.  Our favorite place to store videos is YouTube (through your student google accounts) and then provide your audience with a link.  LPS employees can do a workorder to have this program downloaded to their computers.

Tubechop - have you ever wanted to show a piece of a YouTube video, but not the whole thing?  Then  this tool is for you!  Add the video you want to show to this tool and mark the piece you want to show and use the newly created link to share with others!

Vocaroo - possibly the best and easiest to use online audio recorder out there.  You will notice that you can embed the audio recorder with code in the 'HTML' portion of your blog editor OR you can post a link which will take you directly to the file online.  Your third option would be to download an .mp3 file and then upload to Blogger.

Want to learn more?  Click HERE for additional links and information on Vocaroo.