embed – iLearn Technology

Tagible-Create Customized Learning Video Channels

March 17, 2014Kelly Tenkely3 Comments35186 views

What it is: HOLY SMOKES! This is the coolest new tool! I’ve spent the morning building out our Anastasis Tagible page (link at the bottom of the post), and I feel like my head is spinning with possibilities.

Tagible is a brand new video manager site. It allows you to create a completely customized channel for all of your school/classroom videos. Videos can be imported directly from your YouTube or Vimeo channel. Once you set up the import feature, Tagible automatically imports any video that is added to your channel. Best of all, Tagible gives you the ability to tag videos with categories and then tags within that category; videos and customized channels are really easy to create. The channel that you create is easy to share with anyone through social media or it can be embedded directly on your school/classroom website.

Features:

Create a one-stop-shop for ALL of your videos that is completely customizable and branded just for your classroom or school.
Tag videos in new ways using categories and sub-tags, this makes it simpler than ever to find exactly the video that you are looking for.
Create customized channels based on categories and sub-tags. Each time a new video is added with a category/tag, it gets automatically added to the channel.
Embed channels on class or school websites. The embedded channel is ALWAYS up-to-date because all content tagged for that channel gets added automatically. (Set it up once and let Tagible do all the work!)
Tag videos under multiple categories and subcategories.
Connect your school/classroom YouTube or Vimeo channel to automatically populate your Tagible channel with content.
Customize your Tagible site with your own backgrounds, color schemes, and logos. (This is SO easy to use, you can even drag and drop images for your background onto the “upload here” buttons!)
Import any video from YouTube or Vimeo (not just your own). Curate video to create a customized channel just for you and your students!
Share your videos easily using Twitter, Facebook, and email.

How to use Tagible in your classroom or school: There are all kinds of video management tools, but Tagible is absolutely the most useable and useful for schools! Video is such a rich way to share learning. Our students are constantly uploading video projects. Tagible would make a fantastic video portfolio. Create a “Team” page for your classroom and then create a sub tag for each of your students. As your students upload video to your YouTube channel, tag it in Tagible with the student name. Now each student can have their own “channel” of their learning journey. This becomes a living portfolio that continually gets added to throughout the year (or years). Record student presentations, class participation, special events, etc. Whenever a video gets tagged with that student, it automatically gets added to their channel. You can share a student’s specific channel with their family, now they don’t have to wade through everyone’s video to find their child! If your students have their own blog or website (Weebly.com or Wix.com are awesome for this!) they can embed their channel directly on it. Now all written, photographed, and video work is accessible in one place.

Create learning channels for your students. Import the videos that your students can access to learn from, or be inspired by. Each video can be categorized according to unit and topic. Students can go through a units “channel” to access all learning videos that you recommended for the unit. This is definitely textbook of the future! I’m excited to utilize this idea for our inquiry units. As the students and I find video, we can add it to our own customized learning channel. This channel can then be embedded in student projects, websites, and shared through social media.

Set up a video learning station on classroom computers. As your students are rotating through learning centers, one of the centers can be video relevant to the learning. The great thing about using Tagible: you don’t have to be concerned about students clicking on “related videos” on YouTube that aren’t yours.

As a school, create a professional development tool for your teachers. Create a professional development category with sub tags like: assessment, technology, philosophy, teaching strategies, common core, etc. Add videos and create channels that teachers can access for on-demand professional development.

Keep your school or classroom websites up-to-date with the latest video content without contacting your web provider or logging in to add new video. Create a category called “Home Page” and create a channel based on the category. Any time you tag any video with the “Home Page” category, the channel will be updated to include the new video automatically. If you’ve embedded that channel on the homepage of your website, all of the video is automatically included, no need to edit the website.

Tagible is a great way to foster a home-school connection. Record student work and share via a unique channel with families. This would be an incredible look inside your classroom for families who don’t get the opportunity to volunteer at school often.

At Anastasis, I’ve created categories for Field Trips, Special Events, Teams (classrooms), Inquiry Blocks, Explore (videos we like), Crave classes, School year, and Student Created. The great thing about the categories is that you can use them to quickly narrow down videos for a channel. For example, we could create a channel just for “Inquiry Blocks” in “2013-2014” school year. Students and families can find exactly the videos that they are looking for all the time!

Are you an educational speaker? Create a channel of your presentations to share with others, and create a channel of videos that you used during your presentation. These can easily be shared at the end of a conference.

If you “flip” your classroom using video, Tagible is ideal. Make it easy for students to access video based on your own customized categories. Your flipped channel can be embedded directly on your blog/website and update automatically every time that you add a video. Create “review” channels that automatically collect videos from a unit or topic so that students can go through the channel to review and study. Invite your students to come up with categories that they would like to be able to search by.

Tips: Tagible is a brand new startup company. They are still working some bugs out of the system, and are regularly adding new features. In the bottom, right corner of the site you have the option to “Send Feedback” click on the portion of the site that you want to send feedback about and let them know about any bugs you find or features you would like to see. You can try Tagible for free, they do have advanced features with monthly subscriptions. Be sure to mention Kelly Tenkely, they may be able to help you out with premium features. Tagible was started by one of Anastasis Academy’s board members and founding families. It has been incredible to watch this thing take shape! Just like the school, it started around this family’s kitchen table.

Want to see what a customized Tagible site looks like? Check out Team Anastasis here.

ClassConnect: all-in-one digital organization for the classroom

March 14, 2012March 14, 2012Kelly TenkelyLeave a Comment2691 views

What it is: ClassConnect is a website I have written about in the past (here) that has made some great changes that make it worth taking another look! ClassConnect is a fantastic one-stop-shop for collaborating, storing, and organizing your life as an educator. The real powerhouse of ClassConnect is the ability to build, organize and share lessons and resources easy. You won’t be pressed to remember where you stored everything (dropbox, diigo, pinterest, twitter favorites) because with ClassConnect you can store it all in one place. Even better, you can search and use lessons and resources that other teachers have built. The collaborative nature of ClassConnect makes it easy to work together on planning out and sharing learning. ClassConnect even started a great movement called “United We Teach” encouraging educators to share more. ClassConnect is super easy to use, just find lesson plans and snap them into your lessons…there is no need for downloads!

You can set up ClassConnect to automatically notify your colleagues, students and parents when you make updates. What’s even handier is that everything is viewable on computers, iPads (woohoo) and smartphones. This makes it easy to plan and use from everywhere! The lessons in ClassConnect aren’t only files, they are also interactive websites, games and videos. Everything in one place. Gotta love that! When a lesson gets updated, everyone who is shared on the lesson gets updated.

Did I mention it is free? It is 😉

How to integrate ClassConnect into the classroom: ClassConnect is a no-brainer for introducing to your classroom routine. Who could argue with an all-in-one organizational tool? ClassConnect makes it SO simple to share resources with colleagues, parents and students. Think about how this could transform differentiation in your classroom. Instead of just using the “one-size-fits-all” differentiation that curriculum offers (I hesitate to even call that differentiation…what a joke!), you can create folders of lessons; resources; and learning that perfectly fit the needs of your students. Because they are so easily shared, you can bring everyone who needs to be on board, on board. Students can go right to ClassConnect to view what you have stored for them there. Parents can go to ClassConnect for additional support and ideas for furthering learning at home.

The colleague sharing shouldn’t be overlooked. Imagine how much richer learning could be if we were sharing our best finds with each other freely and in an easy to access location. Changing the world here.

***By the way, ClassConnect has a truly AWESOME start up story. This isn’t just some company. ClassConnect was/is created by a student who wanted school to look different. Be sure to read Eric’s story on the About page.

Tips: For every colleague you invite that signs up, ClassConnect will give you BOTH 500mb more of free storage (you start out with 1GB)! That is a pretty sweet deal!

Please leave a comment and share how you are using ClassConnect in your classroom!

1-to-1 iPad ePortfolio solution

October 11, 2011October 11, 2011Kelly Tenkely12 Comments4140 views

Today @j_allen asked how we handled eportfolio’s at Anastasis Academy. The 140 characters of Twitter felt a little too limiting to explain the hows and whys of what we do…bring on the blog post!

Anastasis has a one-to-one iPad program. Our students own their iPads in a modified BYOD (bring your own device) setup. I say modified because we requested what device they brought. The iPad was the ONLY supply on our supply list. Anastasis supplies all other materials (pencils, papers, crayons, markers, paint, glue, etc.). This has been a fantastic setup for us. Families are in charge of keeping the iPads in working order, synced with the student iTunes account and charged for class. We made the decision not to own the iPads as a school to keep costs low for technical support, replacement of broken or out-dated devices and so that our students could take ownership over their own devices. Students can add any apps to the iPad at home using their own iTunes account. As a school, we purchase curricular and productivity apps for students. Students download these apps using redeem codes so that they can stay signed into their own iTunes account.

Anastasis has 60 students in 1st through 8th grade. At the beginning of the school year, we sent home a list of recommended restrictions for parents to set up on student iPads. We taught families how to enable parent restrictions on the Internet, movie/app/song ratings, and how to block in app purchases. We asked all parents to restrict student access to Safari. At school, we downloaded the MobiCip app to every iPad so that we could filter the Internet. MobiCip allows us to set up broad category filters based on age. A premium MobiCip account lets us filter exactly what we want to and allow those sites we want to. (For those who are wondering our students do have access to YouTube.) 🙂

I digress…the question was about ePortfolios.

We use a combination of Evernote, Edu 2.0 and Edublogs to keep and share our work. Evernote has been a fantastic app for our students. Students can record text, images, and audio directly in Evernote. Each note can be emailed to teachers and parents. A link can also be generated for each note making them easy to share on blogs. Better yet? There are SO many apps that have the ability to share with Evernote. Very handy. Students do quite a bit of writing directly in Evernote. This is a good place for all of student writing (even those pieces they don’t want to, or aren’t ready to, share). Evernote makes it easy to organize all of their notes into notebooks (the learning curve here is teaching students to use some organization). The ability to record audio and take pictures of their work in Evernote is great. This means that students can capture learning that isn’t natively digital-digitally. All of those awesome inquiry projects that they construct and build can be captured and reflected on in Evernote. Another HUGE benefit to the Evernote/iPad combo: it goes with them everywhere. Recording learning on a field trip? Check. Recording learning at home? Check. Recording learning on the fly? Check. Teachers often send students a PDF instructions for an assignment or a picture to the student’s Evernote account. Parents can login to their child’s Evernote account from any computer or iDevice to see what they are working on.

Edu 2.0 is our education portal. In Edu 2.0 we can share things as a school community. Edu 2.0 has a built in e-portfolio (we don’t often use this), a blog, a post feed, calendar, and message system. Edu 2.0 makes it easy for us to stay connected as a school community. Because we teach young students, this “walled” community is a safe place for students to share any, and all, of their work and thoughts. Students often write blog posts in Edu 2.0 about their learning. Other students, parents and teachers can comment on the Edu 2.0 blog posts. Teachers use Edu 2.0 to send students assignments, make class announcements and communicate quickly with parents in their classroom. Students can link any content from their Evernote account to their blog in Edu 2.0 to share it with other students, parents or teachers. The school calendar is updated with all birthdays, learning excursions and school events so that students, parents and teachers are always up-to-date. The live post feed makes it easy for teachers and administration to make school-wide announcements. This feed shows up on the home page of every student, parent and teacher.

Each of our teachers has a class Edublog. This is where the teachers write blog posts about the happenings in their classrooms. Students can also contribute to the class blogs to get input and comments from a global audience. The Edublog is the place for interaction and collaboration with the world.

We have a school YouTube account where students can upload videos and stop motion animations. The school account has become a nice central place for students to share their work with the world. I act as administrator on the YouTube channel so that I can moderate comments and videos. Students can easily link to, or embed, videos they have created in Evernote, on their Edu 2.0 blog or on Edublogs.

This combination of tools has worked well as an ePortfolio for student work. I love that at the end of the school year students have ALL of their work with them. Because they own their iPads, the Evernote content goes with them. Even without the iPad, students can access their Evernote account from anywhere and continue using it.

Do you have a one to one program? I would love to hear your solutions for an ePortfolio!

FlipSnack: Turn a PDF into an embeddable Flash Flip Book

May 27, 2011Kelly Tenkely8 Comments3855 views

What it is: FlipSnack lets students turn PDF documents into embeddable Flipbooks quickly and easily. Students upload a PDF (or multiple PDFs) to be included in the book and FlipSnack instantly transforms it into an interactive flippable book. In order to login to FlipSnack, students will need an email address (this can be a temporary email such as Tempinbox or Mailinator). Students can also login using a Twitter account, Facebook connect, Google connect or MySpace connect. FlipSnack has some neat options available that other pdf to embeddable book services like Issuu do not have. Students can choose a template for their Flip including classic, hardcover, coil bound and interactive. Student also have the ability to customize the background, size and buttons included in their embed. Students can share their FlipSnack with a unique url, on social media sites and email, or embed it in another website. The free version lets students embed the finished FlipSnack on a website or blog with a FlipSnack watermark.

How to integrate FlipSnack into the classroom: FlipSnack is a neat way for students (and teachers) to share pdf documents online. Students can save their work as a PDF and upload into an interactive book that can be embedded on a blog, wiki or website.

Use your classroom computers as a student created library. Students can upload original stories to a class FlipSnack account to create a library of student work. During silent reading time, give students the opportunity to enjoy their peers as authors. This is perfect for an elementary classroom that may not have the email addresses for each student to sign up for a separate account.

Create custom books for your students by combining PDF documents into one customized text-book. These can be embedded on a class blog, website, or wiki for students to access from anywhere they have internet access.

Upload school handbooks, resources etc. to the classroom and school website for easy access by students and parents.

One of the features I enjoy about FlipSnack is the ability to view statistics for the flip books. Find out how many views a Flip has had by day, month or all time.

Tips: I often use Issuu to share and embed PDFs. It has been my go-to favorite for personal use. I hesitated to use Issuu with students because of the collection of ALL user publications on the home page of the website. Sometimes these were inappropriate for elementary students. I like that FlipSnack doesn’t share user-created publications with little eyes.

Take a look at the FlipSnack I created for my new school, Anastasis Academy, embedded below:

Please leave a comment and let us know how you are using FlipSnack in your classroom!

Vista Zoo

February 6, 2009Kelly TenkelyLeave a Comment3100 views

What it is: Vista Zoo is a website where students can create incredible virtual tours of the world by combining pictures, video, audio, and objects in 3-D. The tours are uploaded and placed on a map. Tours can then be embeded into any website. Students can also sign up for their own Vista Zoo portal that they can customize and save their projects. Vista Zoo is also available on the iPhone and iPod touch (if you are so lucky to have a lab of them!)

How to integrate Vista Zoo into the classroom: Vista Zoo would be a neat way for students to display geography learning. Students could collect images in history or current images to embed in their maps to learn about a subject. Teachers can also create virtual tours for students to take individually or as a class with a projector or interactive whiteboard. This is a great way to teach geography and history, your visual students will love it! The ability to add audio and video makes these virtual field trips around the world pretty amazing. If your class has a pen pal class in another country, it would be fun for each group of students to create a virtual tour of their town for the pen pals to view.

Tips: Use Creative Commons images from Flickr or open stock images from a site like stock.xchng for images to embed.

Leave a comment and tell us how you are using Vista Zoo in your classroom.