5 ways you can use Loom to create sweet remote learning activities

I love Loom.

Simple to use. Simple to share. It’s free for teachers and kids. And it works great for both face to face classrooms and remote learning environments.

If you’re already a Loommate and love using Loom too, you may be in the wrong place. This post is for Loom newbies and how we can use the tool as part of effective social studies instruction. So feel free to browse through a list of History Tech posts highlighting historical thinking resources and strategies. (But you’re not gonna hurt my feelings if you skip past the quick Loom introduction and scroll down for the tips.)

Loom is a free, ready to use screencast recording tool. What’s a screencast recording tool? Basically it’s a button you push that records your screen while at the same time recording your face and voice, saving them all together in a downloadable and shareable format. And it does all of that in a matter of seconds.

Need a quick example?

Flipgrid is free. No, seriously. Not like before. Totally, completely free for ALL the features

I really like Flipgrid. It’s easy to use. It’s collaborative. It’s visual. It works across all platforms.

And now?

Now it’s free.

Yup. It’s free. And not in the lower tier, fewer options, not as powerful or cool, I can’t afford the Paid version so I’m using the crappy version kind of free. Free as in . . . totally free to access all of the cool, up until a week ago it used to cost money features.

So now I really like Flipgrid.

Here’s the deal. There used to be several versions of Flipgrid. A free version and two expensive versions. And while you could do some really cool stuff with the free, less featured version, the paid versions were so much cooler. As in: you got unlimited grids, unlimited topics, more choices on video length, responses to videos, and replies to those responses. You could move and duplicate grid structure and content. Embed fully-functional grids into other environments such as an LMS or class websites. Assess, document, and provide quantitative and qualitative feedback to individual students in a private, simple way.

You know . . . all the cool stuff. But it cost money.

But several weeks ago,

Flipgrid is not a misfit toy: 10 ways that it can engage kids and improve historical thinking

A few weeks ago, I got hooked back into Flipgrid. I joined several years ago and messed with it a bit. Talked with others about it. Used it a few times. And then, like a lot of the new tools I get the chance to play with, I threw it on the pile with the rest on the Island of Misfit Toys.

Not that it was broken. Some other shiny thing caught my attention and I moved on.

Then last month I needed something quick, easy, and fun to use with a group of elementary teachers for a reflection activity. So . . . Flipgrid. And it was awesome. I’m back.

Not sure what Flipgrid is?

Missing your Zaption? Try EdPuzzle

You may have already made the switch. If you have, quietly move along. You’re probably happy with EdPuzzle and there’s nothing to see here.

That leaves two kinds of people. Those of you still be looking for that perfect Zaption replacement. And those of you who never went down the Zaption road at all and have no idea what we’re talking about.

Quick recap:

At its most basic level, Zaption was a way for you to take a video clip from a variety of sources including YouTube, Vimeo clip, Khan Academy, and other educational video outlets and add interactive elements such as multiple choice questions, open response boxes, text, images, and drawings. Students responded to the elements you embedded. You tracked their responses using Zaption’s analytics feature. Everybody was happy.

You should have noticed the past verb tense going on. Zaption was a great tool for annotating videos and embedding formative / summative assessments tools into video clips. It was a great example of a push / pull edtech tool – giving teachers a way to push content and assessment out to students and a way for teachers to pull in work back from students.

But Zaption no longer exists, having sold out to something called Workday. No idea what Workday does but what it means for Zaption users is that a very cool tool won’t be available after September 30.

So.

If you’re a Zaption user who hasn’t found a Zaption replacement, I got you covered. And if you never used Zaption but the idea of integrating a very cool push / pull video annotation tool sounds like something you want to take out for a test drive, I’ve got you covered too.

Top Ten Posts of 2015 #3: 5 tasty YouTube channels perfect for history geeks

I’m sure most of you are doing the same thing I’m doing right now. Spending time with family and friends, watching football, catching up on that book you’ve been dying to read, eating too much, and enjoying the occasional nap.

Between now and the first week in January, you’ll get a chance to re-read the top ten posts of 2015. Enjoy the reruns. See you in January!

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Yup. I’m a history geek. I’m a member of the History Book Club, I love maps, I stop and read every historical marker before driving past, I spent most of a morning several months ago quizzing the docent in the Northfield, Minnesota history museum on the 1876 raid by the James Gang, and I have the Band of Brothers DVD series memorized.

So where do I go when I need a good YouTube history video?

Here are five very sweet YouTube channels that are great places to start:

Print out a YouTube video. Handy tool or shiny gadget?

Yup. Print out a YouTube video. Holy sweet Googly tech trick, Batman!

When you are watching any video on the YouTube website, the storyboard (the images that appear just above the play bar when slide your cursor along it) for that video is automatically downloaded in the background. The Print YouTube tool stitches all of those storyboard image frames into one large poster that you can then download as a PDF or print out.

To get started, you drag the Print YouTube bookmarklet to your bookmarks toolbar. Then open any video on YouTube, click the bookmarklet link, and the storyboard images are instantly generated. These storyboards offer a visual summary of videos and you can generate them for short videos as well as full-length movies.

But mmm . . . this seems like a perfect example of the question we should be asking every time we find out about a new tech tool: