Infuse Learning vs. Socrative vs. Clickers

I like the Clickers. Don’t love ‘em but . . . yeah, they’re okay. I mean, they do some cool stuff but they’re expensive and can be difficult and time-consuming to set up.

What’s a Clicker? Good question. There are lots of different brands out there but they all work basically the same – a Clicker is a hand-held device that allows students in your classroom to give you feedback, answer questions, and vote in response to questions that you provide.

The technical term? Student Response System.

And if you have a set of Clickers and you have a system for using them that works for you, stick with it.

Instashare – handy iOS device workflow solution

As long as iPads and iPhones won’t allow access to some sort of file structure, there will be workflow problems in your classroom. If you’re using any sort of iOS device in your classroom, you know what I’m talking about.

You’ve got 25 kids sharing iPads pulled from a cart. They’re all busy working on the very cool activity you worked hard to design. They’ve created some awesome stuff. But it always come down to the workflow question – how do you quickly and easily get their products off of the iPad and onto your computer?

There are steps you can take. Clunky steps – like setting up Dropbox accounts or Google Drive accounts or commercial accounts like School eLockers. (Greg Kulowiec and Jonathon Wylie have created some nice examples of their workflow solutions.)

But they’re all still clunky.

Apple had the right idea when it added AirDrop to their latest computers. As long as two or more computers were reasonable close to each other, you could drag and drop files onto the Airdrop icon in the Finder and . . . viola, instant file transfer from one device to another.

And it works most of the time. But it isn’t designed to work between mobile devices and a computer.

Reflection gets even sweeter & now has competition

Several months back I wrote about a sweet little piece of software that let you mirror / airplay your iPad (or iPhone) to your computer. Called Reflection, the software let you mirror your iPad screen via an HDMI or VGA projector.

Rather than spending $100 on an Apple TV that many district tech admins hate because it doesn’t play nice with their servers, you could spend $20 and get basically the same mirroring effect.

Well, it just got sweeter.

One of the problems with earlier versions of Reflection was that it was Mac friendly only. In fact, it only worked on Lion. But . . . wait for it.

It now also works on Windows XP or better and any Apple system 10.6.8 or better.

Sweet.

You can download a free trial and check it out. But I’m pretty sure you’ll like it. It’s drop dead simple to use. Make sure that your computer and iPad are on the same wireless network. Slide your iPad’s multi-task bar all the way to the left and tap the Airplay button. Select your computer from the list and turn on the Mirroring button.

You can password protect access in the software’s preferences to keep the kid in the back of the class from hijacking your presentation.

There is a “full screen” option that will simply put the frame on a grey background instead of your desktop. This allows Reflection to function as a full-screen app in OS X rather than having the iPad’s screen fill the Mac’s entire display. You can also select different resolutions and frames.

But wait! There’s more.

There is another option. AirServer, a very similar type of software, recently came out and offers exactly the same sort of service. Airplay via a wireless network directly to your computer, allowing you to mirror your mobile device over a projector.

So. Comparisons.

AirServer is cheaper by a dollar – 14.99 to 15.99. But if you’re downloading to a PC, AirServer drops to $7.99. Plus AirServer offers a better selection of educational prices. AirServer seems a bit more stable and seems to play nicer with a wider range of apps. But Reflection seems to do better at not falling behind when trying to mirror graphic intense apps. Both tools give you the freedom to roam around the classroom untethered and to let your kids connect to the projector quickly and easily. (I especially like how you can now use your iPad or iPhone as a very powerful document camera!)

But I’m going with AirServer because it fills my screen completely. It just looks better. But you’ll want to test drive each of them yourself. At $15 bucks, you really can’t go wrong either way.

QRpedia – Easy QR codes from Wikipedia for classroom use

As an increasing number of people access the internet from their mobile phones, Wikipedia needs to become increasingly mobile. Wikipedia recently created a new mobile front end but how do you get to a Wikipedia article in the first place, especially if you don’t know what you’re looking for ?

Introducing QRpedia.
QR codes – barcodes for the internet – have been around for decades and the technology is increasingly being used in everything from street advertising to museum object labels. QRpedia takes the concept one step further to allow a single QR code to send you seamlessly to the mobile-friendly version of any Wikipedia article in your own language. This system is unique to Wikipedia because no other website has manually created links between languages across such an incredible breadth of topics.

This is a screenshot of the Wikipedia QR code page for the Battle of Gettysburg.

Take advantage of this by creating Wikipedia QR codes for topics in your textbook, for example. Copy the code onto sticky mailing labels, print them out, peel them off and paste into textbooks on the appropriate page.

Copy and paste a QR code into your lecture notes for kids to access during discussions. Paste the code into your handouts. Print out a big version of a code and hang by the door as kids leave the room as review or as outside reading.

Pretty handy stuff!

iPad favorites for improving student “workflow”

I’ve been messing with a ton of Apple and iPad stuff in the last few weeks. Some of it interesting. Some of it frustrating. All of it fun.

Part of what we’ve been working with has been trying to find useful ways to deal with what Apple and educators are calling “workflow.” Put simply, workflow is the process of getting student stuff off the iPad into the hands of the teacher.

And it’s harder than it looks. Maybe Apple’s new iCloud will help solve some of these issues. Until then, we’re living by the seat of our pants. But there are some apps that seem like they can help us.

PaperHelper

This handy app splits your iPad screen in half providing you with a Internet Browser and a Document writer. Kids doing research can easily copy and paste content into a text editor. But what I really like about PaperHelper is that it has a feature that allows kids to save their final copies to a web site with a unique URL. The teacher heads to the web site, types in the specific code and downloads the student work.

The even cooler thing is that the download process works on both “regular” computer browsers and browsers on an iPad. Pretty slick.

Mover+

Mover+ is a lot like Bump, the app that let you easily slide contact info between phones. The difference is that Mover+ lets iPads (or iPods / iPhones) on the same WiFi share more file types than just contact info.

So kids can send teachers images or video taken with the iPad camera, any image created in Sonic Pics or Comic Life or any app that stores stuff in the Camera Roll or copied text from any text creation app. The larger the file, the longer the “sliding” takes but it’s even slicker than PaperHelper.

Printopia
Okay . . . this isn’t really a mobile app. And it works just on Macs. (I searched near and far for something like this for Windows and found nothing. Though your version of near and far is probably different than mine so there’s probably something out there.)  Printopia is a piece of software you install on your computer that is actually designed to take advantage of the iPad’s AirPrint feature. But it also allows content to be sent directly to your computer rather than a printer.

Kids create a document on their iPad, select the Print option and, if the iPad and your computer are on the same WiFi, they’ll see a list of “printing” options. One of the options is Send to Mac. The kid selects that option, clicks Print and a PDF version of their document slides onto your screen. Super slick.

So if you’re still trying to find solutions to the student / teacher workflow using Apple mobile devices, these might just be what you’ve looking for.