Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you this fine day?
Me?
I’m excited because the kids are heading back to school.
It’s back-to-school time, a great time for us all.
I thought we would spend a little bit of time today looking at three very cool apps that
I found for back-to-school.
Two of them work for high school and university level students and one of them is just for
the teachers out there.
Actually, it’s for the teachers and students but teachers are going to like it more than
anybody else, I think.
Curious?
It’s back-to-school today on DottoTech.
There are a variety of great apps out that are available to help kids out at school and
since more kids are taking smartphones to school and certainly at the university level
I would be surprised to find any student in a class without a smartphone, there are a
few tools that I thought we would take a look at to help in that space.
Let’s begin by taking a look at a tool that I found on Android—now this is my Samsung
Galaxy phone here—a tool which is called Studious.
Studious is a free app available on both Android and iOS that is a calendaring app that does
a variety of different things on the smartphone that really help out.
First of all, you put in your entire schedule.
All of your classes, you put in.
When you put a new class into the schedule, they do ask the class name, the start and
finish time, etc., allow you to give it an icon but here is something that’s a little
bit of magic.
Do you know how every time you go into class, you’ve got to remember to put your phone
on airplane mode or silent mode so that you’re not going to ring in the middle of the class,
disturb the class and gain the ire of the instructor of the class?
This automatically sets your ring and your access preferences in your phone for that
schedule.
It will put it to vibrate, it will put it into airplane mode, it will turn off the speaker.
It will do all those sorts of things every time you take that course.
So you set the course in and you set your phone up.
That’s kind of brilliant, isn’t it?
On a more practical basis—I mean that is fairly practical—but as far as helping you
out with school, this helps you not get in trouble at school, which is a good thing,
but to actually help you get the work done, when you’re actually in any one of the courses
and you bring it up—that’s a good thing; watch the Princess Bride—it has modules
for following your homework and tests but here you can add different assignments that
you can do, that you can set due dates on and create reminders for.
So as your instructor is giving you assignments to complete, you can be putting them in and
creating a task list out of this all within Studious.
It’s free, available in both Mac and iOS, let’s just take a look here.
There’s the iOS version.
The iOS version is $0.99.
Let’s take a look at the Android version.
Do I have it on the Android as well?
Studious Android, there it is.
The Android version is—where is the price?
It’s already installed.
I think the Android version might be free.
At any rate, have a look.
Studious is an awesome tool.
The next app is more university level and that is an app called EasyBib.
Now I’ve got it installed on my iPhone here.
What it does is it helps you do all of your different citations as you’re doing research.
If you’re in the library and you’re doing some reading on a book and you have to write
down all of the different citations for anything that you’re reading, what this allows you
to do is to use the camera app on your smartphone in order to capture the citation.
All you do is go to the barcode.
When I go Add Citation on this book here—let’s take a look.
I’ll show you the book.
The book is The Digital Dollar by my buddy Joe Wozny.
It’s a good learning book.
There we go.
I didn’t do anything.
I just focused it on the barcode and there it is.
It comes up with the citation in MLA, APA format or Chicago.
Then you can save the bookmarks here onto your phone or you can email them to yourselves
as well.
Now these folks actually have a full-on website called EasyBib.
There’s a premium version of it available but basically you can save all of your different
notes and that sort of stuff right within the website which integrates as well.
The phone app though is completely free and I would say pretty darn useful.
The next app I want to talk about Remind.
It used to be called Remind101 and it is a privacy-enabling app that allows communication
between teachers and students, especially at the high school and elementary school,
and protecting the privacy of both parties.
Here is the basis of it: texting would be a great way to remind students of assignments,
to remind the kids in the band program to bring their instruments on a certain day and
teachers would be happy to text that information to the parents or to the students, those reminders.
But that exposes them to giving out their cellphone number basically, their mobile number,
to all of the students in the class or all of the parents which give those people probably
inappropriate access to the educator.
So we want to protect the teachers’ privacy.
Remind sets up a buffer.
Let me just sign in and I’ll show you.
It allows teachers to send from a semi-anonymous account.
Kids and parents sign up for the service.
They text in a sign up.
Here is the account here.
It walks you through the whole process but basically you can add students and parents
to your class.
They can text to this number which this message in it which will automatically enrol them
into the class list or they can use this QR code.
Then the teacher can compose any text that they want to send.
They send them and it comes from an anonymous account.
It doesn’t come from the teacher’s account.
Parents and students can reply to that account and the teachers will see it in the web interface.
It’s simple.
It’s elegant.
Again, it’s free and it really serves a dual purpose – protecting teacher’s privacy
while allowing them to use the best communication technology to be able to communicate with
their students and enriching their lives, a win-win situation.
All of these apps today are win-win situations and you spending time with me today, I hope
you found it to be a win-win situation.
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Until next time, have fun storming the castle!