On February 17, the COLRS Staff offered a presentation titled “Emerging Technologies for Education” through the UIS Faculty Development Office. The following is a list of technologies presented along with others that are among the new favorites for online educators.
ACCESSIBILITY
Even if you haven’t added captions to your video, YouTube may use speech recognition technology to automatically make captions available.
Since these are automatically generated, the quality of the captions may vary from video to video. As the video owner, you can always edit the captions to improve accuracy, or remove them from your video if you do not want them to be available for your viewers.
If your video does not have automatic captions, it could be due to one or more of the following reasons:
• The language in the video is not yet supported by automatic captions
• The video is too long
• The video has poor sound quality or contains speech that YouTube doesn’t recognize
• There is a long period of silence at the beginning of the video
• There are multiple speakers whose speech overlap
Fangs renders a text version of a web page similar to how a screen reader would read it. The ambition is to help developers understand how an assistive device would present a website and thereby increase chances of finding accessibility issues early.
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jd3qfZGGM88
VIDEO/PRESENTATION TECHNOLOGY
Present.me is the fastest and easiest way to add video or audio to your document or presentation, so that who ever is viewing gets the whole story – as if you were in the room with them!
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6HAw1VsvMs
Vialogues (which derives from “video dialogues”) is an award-winning discussion platform that proves that videos are both powerful teaching resources and the ultimate conversation starters. Vialogues provides a space for users to hold meaningful and dynamic time-stamped discussions about videos.
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAKRcmZFcW0
The ShowMe iPad app lets you create lessons using a whiteboard. The app is free and there is no limit what you can teach! Our community has created millions of ShowMes, from chemistry to history to football strategy – and more knowledge is being shared everyday.
Watch: https://vimeo.com/38003641
Swivl was founded in 2010 by Brian Lamb and Vladimir Tetelbaum, with the idea of making video a more useful tool with robotics. They launched the first concept to market through crowdfunding on IndieGoGo, and have been engaging with users and improving solutions ever since. This culminated with the launch of the second generation Swivl and Swivl Cloud in April 2014.
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfQFNfnGWU0
TOUCH TECHNOLOGY
The Leap Motion Controller senses how you naturally move your hands and lets you use your computer in a whole new way. Point, wave, reach, grab. Pick something up and move it. Do things you never dreamed possible.
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gby6hGZb3ww
PRODUCTIVITY
Expand your classroom: Students can join from home or even from other schools to make the classroom community even bigger.
Embrace the backchannel: The backchannel improves meetings, presentations, Socratic seminars and fishbowls, movies and silent activities, reviews and snow days, and more.
Empower learners: TodaysMeet gives everyone the floor and lets even the quietest students express themselves.
A simple, easy-to-use, cross-platform tool that helps you organize your life.
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSmbnaPZVHE
BibMe is an automatic citation creator that supports MLA, APA, Chicago, and Turabian formatting. BibMe leverages external databases to quickly fill citation information for you. BibMe will then format the citation information and compile a bibliography according to the guidelines of the style manuals.
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LikOn0xgb0
MOBILE
Flipboard is a social-network aggregation, magazine-format mobile app localized in more than 20 languages. The software collects content from social media and other websites, presents it in magazine format, and allows users to “flip” through their social-networking feeds and feeds from websites that have partnered with the company.
Flipboard is produced by Flipboard, Inc., a United-States-based software company founded in 2010 by Mike McCue and Evan Doll and headquartered in Palo Alto, California.
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgdU8UvwfB4
WhatsApp Messenger is an instant messaging app for smartphones that operates under a subscription business model. The proprietary, cross-platform app enables users of select feature phones to use the Internet to communicate. In addition to text messaging, WhatsApp can be used to send images, video, and audio media messages. WhatsApp has also started rolling out the much awaited voice calling feature. Locations can also be shared through the use of integrated mapping features.
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhnFh1MGx4w
s a suite of integrated mobile productivity apps. The company’s first product, the Any.do task management app, was launched on Android in November 2011 and later for iPhone and Chrome on June 3, 2012.
Any.do’s namesake to-do list app was released on November 10, 2011 on the Android platform and TechCrunch reported it to have 500,000 downloads in its first 30 days after launch. It was later released on iOS in June 2012 and reached another milestone with 100,000 iPhone downloads in its first day on the platform. Any.do includes numerous planning and task management functions:
- Unlimited, customizable task folders
- Task sharing and delegation
- Built-in microphone can be used for voice entry of tasks
- Auto-suggest feature with predictive text
- Time- and location-based reminders
- Cloud sync across all of a user’s devices
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPpHp4Yfs_M
Remind (formerly Remind101) is a private mobile messaging platform that enables teachers to send Reminders to students and parents via text and email.The platform has over 10 million users and sends over 65 million messages per month. As of February 2014, 15% of the K-12 teacher population in the U.S used Remind101.