Featured: 11-25-2013 Kahoot!

Kahoot! delivers educational content through asking meaningful questions in real-time, resulting in a social, fun, and game-like environment.

Build quizzes, called Kahoots!, on any device using a simple drag-and-drop tool. Include embedded images and video.

Project the quiz onto a screen or interactive whiteboard to engage and focus students who quickly join through their personal device, seeing their name appear (without needing an account).

Students play against each other, answering questions in real-time through an easy-to-use interface, while you facilitate and discuss the content.

Kahoot! allows learners to both respond and create with any device that has a web browser and works over wifi or 3G/4G. Students can share their knowledge by playing their Kahoot back to classmates. You can assess the quality of student questions, while the other students answer the questions.

 Watch a video demonstrating the basics of the Kahoot! website for the K-12 classroom.

Formatively assess individual knowledge and adapt learning. Kahoot! data provides you with a ‘snapshot’ of each learner's current understanding and tracks longer term progress.

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Featured: 9-12-2013 Net Texts

Net Texts helps schools replace or supplement traditional textbooks with customized multimedia courses delivered to students' iPads, Android tablets, and laptops.

Teachers can use NetTexts' Content Management Website to select existing courses or to create new ones by mixing and matching items from the NetTexts library with their own educational material. Courses can include videos, slideshows, e-books, PDFs, text, audiobooks, and Web links.

Students then use the NetTexts iPad, Android, or web app to download and view these courses. Students will feel more engaged and have more ownership of their learning, whether reading the latest assigned e-book or watching a 'flipped classroom' video.

Net Texts consulting services help your school get the most out of Net Texts. Teachers will be trained how to use the content management site and mobile apps, how to find Open Educational Resources, and how to create high quality content.

Net Texts can build customized OER courses based on teachers' recommendations, syllabi, and state standards. A school or district can replace textbooks with a multimedia curriculum based on OER, saving money on textbooks for years to come, as Net Texts courses can be updated with new material at any time.

 Watch Introducing Net Texts: The Digital Backpack for Your iPad

Net Texts courses contain teacher-created material as well as Creative Commons-licensed and other open education resources from the Web.

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In the iCloud

As many of you are already aware, Apple revealed its new iCloud service Monday. Scheduled to go live in the fall, the iCloud service will store documents, books, pictures, music, and more within the cloud and automatically push them out to all your devices using iCloud. That includes iMacs and MacBooks as well as iOS devices. You can also sync applications between Apple devices over the Internet.

In my opinion, this is a huge step forward in making technology user friendly and easily accessible. I find it unbelievably exciting that changes made to a document on any device I choose to use will be updated on every other device where I have that document stored. If I edit a Keynote presentation on my iPad, those changes will be pushed wirelessly to my iPhone, my MacBook, and my iMac.

The free iCloud service gives you 5GB of storage for e-mail, documents and backup. Music, books, apps, and pictures don't count in that amount.The iCloud Photo Stream wirelessly pushes any pictures you take with your iPhone or iPad onto all your other devices and keeps them stored in the cloud for 30 days.

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Battery conservation tips by Matt Klein

Battery conservation tips by Matt Klein, Small Dog Electronics

• Lower the display brightness all the way down. Doing this will generally double the estimated remaining battery life if you were set to full brightness beforehand.
• Disable keyboard backlighting.
• Ensure that Energy Saver is set to spin down hard disks when possible.
• Put your computer to sleep whenever you’re not actively using it, like when you’re on the phone, in the bathroom, or walking the dog.
• Eject optical disks. They spin almost all the time, taking power, even when they’re not in active use.
• Have lots of RAM installed. This helps prevent excessive virtual memory use (virtual memory is hard drive space that’s turned into virtual RAM. When the computer needs more RAM than is physically installed, it’ll dip into virtual memory reserves, and cause the hard drive to work more than it really has to.
• Use your iPod for music, not the computer; don’t charge your iPod unless absolutely necessary.
• Turn off auto-save features in your word processor. This feature spins up the hard drive all the time, consuming lots of power.
• Don’t keep unused applications running in the background.
• Mute the sound.

It’s not always practical to use your laptop is such a minimal way.

This was originally written for MacBooks. I have deleted Mac-specific tips. - tab

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