Group items tagged

ntroducing a Hangouts app for Virtual Classrooms If you use Hangouts on air (or consider using them) for education, and miss any of the features below: - A full featured registration module to manage attendees - An all-in-one Event Planner/Scheduling/Conferencing app - A comprehensive e-mailing system with fully custom automatic invitation emails, reminder emails and follow up emails - Allow non-plussers attend your classrooms signing in with their Facebook or LinkedIn profiles - Run private HOAs (directly generate unlisted YouTube recordings) - Give the mic to a viewer on-the-fly and make them participant, the time of a question - Get fixed URLs for your permanent virtual classrooms (with or without scheduling) - View a map with geolocated attendees - View your attendees as avatars in a 3D virtual classroom , create a sense of presence, see who's raising hand,... - A unified & moderated chat for participants and viewers engaging in the same chat then you should look into +Business Hangouts : Business Hangouts is an app built for Google Hangouts by Altadyn using the Google Hangouts API (not built by Google ).

"Mobile devices are mainstream. In fact, according to our newest research more consumers in the US, UK, Germany, France and Japan use a mobile phone (feature phone or smartphone) than a computer (desktop or laptop)."

Just announced - Chromebooks dropped to the sub-$200 price point.  Some of the differences:  $50 cheaper, a 320 gb HDD instead of a 16 gb SSD, a VGA port, only 3.5 hours of battery life.

Well, I guess we did not have to wait long. Seems to have a lot of the features that I use in Springpad webapp, and is connected with Drive. I look forward to test driving it on my Nexus 7, and in Chrome in the weeks ahead.

A Google version of Evernote looks like it is on the way. I'm excited, since I already live in Google Apps during the day, I would love having all of my notes in Apps too. Currently using Scratchpad (A Chrome Extention) which ties into Drive, but this looks more feature rich.

Seems to be primarily a database, but has great flexibility and incorporates a lot of collaboration features. May work as a prospect database for some ministries. I'm exploring using it for client tracking for our local pregnancy help center. I'd love to hear if anyone's already using it and how.

Haven't tested this out yet, but seems like a great feature. Looks like it is a free and paid service level thing. I was skeptical of Proclaim's price to value ratio, but the more we use it the more it seems to be worth the monthly/annual expense.

Great tip. Macs have this feature too in some Apple apps (Mail, Pages 5, etc.) under Edit > Start Speaking. There also a chrome extension called "read & write" for this on the web. Article makes a good point that this is better for "lighter" fare. :) Also, hadn't heard of this blog until now, and will now be following it.

With cloud storage continuing to make progress as broadband continues to make inroads to more people and speeds increase, I hope features and transparency in using them grows. I have and use to various degrees iCloud, SkyDrive, DropBox, and Google Drive (used Insync for a while). My favorite is still DropBox and the space limitations are not an issue for most people. Speeds of Cloud storage will never be the same as LAN or WLAN speeds for large file storage, so frequent access to large files in the cloud is not a realistic possibility yet (ever?). While an argument could be made for backup, well I think CrashPlan, Mozy or Carbonite (as well as others) have that market covered. While I like the Arstechnica brief pros and cons (http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2012/04/cloud-storage-a-pricing-and-feature-guide-for-consumers.ars), I would love to see more in depth pros and cons from long term usage. iCloud for instance while great for iOS backup for our families 2 iPhones and 1 iPad, there is no transparent way to mount the iCloud volume for direct or cached data storage. On the other hand, the Shared folder on the Dropbox volume is nice for my wife and I to share working files across our two or three computers for work. Awesome. SkyDrive has a hook in MS Office which I have tested and works nicely, but it is limited in device support. GoogleDrive is really new, so I am still working through using it. I suspect this will continue to evolve over time.

April 3 to 9 Olive Tree is giving away a Free e-copy of the ESV Bible which is one of the translations being considered for adoption by the WELS. Olive Tree's Bible Reader is my choice for lowest cost, richest features of available cross platform digital Bible Study tools. Nice paralleling of multiple translations along side original and nonenglish language editions (Greek, Hebrew, Latin, etc.). Large library of Bibles and commentaries to chose from. Better prices and far less blotted than Logos.

Free online typing tutor optimized for classroom use.  And it just got better with improved teacher management tools.

New feature to help with e-mail management/productivity

I have to give credit to NBC morning news. They featured this app and I thought the education folks on WelsTech would be interested in this.