Education 2.0 & 3.0

There are loads of AI image generators available but which are the best free ones to use and how accurate are they?

Brainstormer is a new online brainstorming tool that is easy to use and helps solve the "what do we do now?" problem that often arises at the end of group brainstorming sessions. Brainstormer solves that problem by letting members of the brainstorming session vote for their favorite ideas. 

One way to boost your distance teaching during (and post) this pandemic is through  creating and sharing screencasts and instruction videos with your students. In today's post we are sharing with you some of our favourite Chrome applications that you can use to record your screen and create instructional video materials to share with your students or embed in your virtual class.

Otter is a web tool and mobile app that allows you to record audio and generate live transcriptions of your recordings. With its AI (artificial Intelligence) capacities, Otter provides automated meeting notes for popular video conferencing services including Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams. 

If you are looking for a good and free tool to create educational posts, Anchor is definitely one of the options I would recommend and here is why. First, Anchor is easy to use: simply log in to your account on the web or install the mobile app (supports both Android and iOS) and start recording using your device-integrated mic or an external one. You can also import recorded audio you have on other apps and use it with your own recordings. Most importantly, Anchor allows you to invite friends and colleagues to record with you provided they use the Anchor app.

First, I want to acknowledge what an uncertain time this is. As many of our jobs are shifting to virtual settings, I want to share tools that may be useful as you create online resources to provide information and work virtually with colleagues.

All of these resources have free options.

The Rice University-based publisher OpenStax announced Thursday that it will provide free teaching resources through the end of the spring semester to support faculty transitioning to online course delivery in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

For those of you who haven't seen it yet, here is a collection of some good web tools to help you create digital quizzes. You can use them to design interactive quizzes, questionnaire, forms, polls and many more.  The tools are easy and simple to use and no software installation is required. Check them out and share with us your feedback. Links of the tools are under the visual.

Screencastify is a tremendously popular screencast recording tool. A large part of its popularity comes from being easy to use on Chromebooks. In fact, last fall I helped eighth grade students use Screencastify in conjunction with Brush Ninja on their Chromebooks to make simple animated videos. As great as it was Screencastify wasn't without limitations.

Okay, we may not use every single tool every single day but you get the idea: These are our favorite homeschooling tools and resources and we use them extensively. In fact, there’s very little outside this list that we consistently use.

How can you improve school education with augmented reality lessons? Schools that are using the flipped classroom in Austria, 90 percent want to continue using the pedagogy. A survey on the subject shows that e.g. mathematics and English has improved dramatically by flipping the classroom. Some of the advantages are the expansion of space and time and the opportunity to receive much more personalised teaching and learning opportunities within the classroom.

A collection of emerging tools just right for humanizing your online course.

Peruse the buffet, click on the links, and sample what looks intriguing and helpful to you!

It’s been fun Google, but it’s time to say goodbye.

Have you noticed?

Google’s entire business model is based on you surrendering to their corporate surveillance. That’s it. All they do is repackage mass corporate surveillance into convenient, free, trendy applications that suck up all your data. Your private data helps Google dominate the online advertising market.

You are the product.

The other key issue to consider here is that Google is tracking and recording your activity in order to build a user profile, which can be used for various purposes.

Here’s a round-up of full-featured and reasonably priced eLearning tools that will kick start your creativity and help you design compelling course content.

Breakout Rooms is one of the most popular features of Zoom. A similar feature is now available in Microsoft Teams. Just like in Zoom you can assign your students to a specific breakout room or have them randomly assigned to a room..

The launch of Vimeo Record earlier this week made me think that perhaps it was time to write a comparison of popular screencasting / screen recording tools. For this comparison I selected the five options that pop into my head whenever I'm asked about screencasting (which has been almost daily since March). With the exception of Flipgrid all of the tools in this comparison have free and paid options. This comparison only addresses the features that are available to educators for free. If you'd like to see the comparisons in a chart format, I have embedded a chart at the end of this post (if you're reading this in email or RSS you'll need to click through to the website to see the chart). 

With many schools now practicing blended learning, it can be helpful for educators interested in blended-learning programs to know which edtech tools are being used. For over five years, we at the Christensen Institute have been collecting data on blended-learning schools from around the world. In 2016, we launched our redesigned Blended Learning Universe (BLU)—a hub for resources and research, including a directory of schools practicing blended learning.

With online teaching and learning becoming the norm for so many teachers and students during the COVID-19 climate, it is important to be aware of what makes an engaging, creative and effective web-based teaching and learning experience.

Over the last week I've received a bunch of emails and Tweets from people looking for my suggestions on tools and tactics for teaching online if schools are closed due to COVID-19. I'm going to start this post with some tips for giving online instruction then get into some recommended tools.

Why pay full price for Microsoft Word when there’s an absolute bevy of great free word processors out there that can do the job just as well? If you’re a student or an educator working on a machine where a Microsoft Word subscription hasn’t been provided for you, you’ve likely been stuck pondering whether you’ll be forced to shell out for the full Word program in time.

Fear not! As said before, there are a select handful of free word processors out there that match Microsoft Word in many respects and surpass it in others. We’ve sifted through every word processor we could think of and narrowed them down for our definitive list of the 4 Best Free Word Processors For 2020.

29 tools to help with your content writing Use a selection of these tools to boost the quality of the content you write Writing relevant and user-friendly content is harder than it seems. You need.

Writing relevant and user-friendly content is harder than it seems. You need to ensure that your text reads clearly and with no mistakes in order to maximize the impact of your message. It’s a real balancing act, which is why a range of content writing tools have been developed to ease your writing journey. Here are 29 of the best online content writing tools to help with all manner of different writing challenges, such as grammar, spelling, writing for SEO and copy editing.

A really useful resource from the University of Edinburgh: a Reflection toolkit with material both for those doing the reflection and for those facilitating or assessing reflection. Additionally there is a literature review on reflection, and a substantial bibliography.

Checkology is a website designed to help students learn to be discerning consumers of online, print, and television media. Checkology has a free version and a premium version. This review is only about the free version of Checkology.