Wevideo, An Alternative Video Editor

We have been playing around with a web based alternative to Windows Movie Maker and iMovie. The application is called Wevideo. It is powerful, versatile and free.  This program will not do chroma key work yet and doesn't allow you to split clips, but apart from that it is a very complete toolset for video production work.

We just have begun using it with our students for video work that can't be done in our Mac Lab, due to booking issues. It will be presented to 7th grade Humanities students as one of several options for tools they can use  when producing their slave diary projects this fall.

  If you haven't tried Wevideo yet, you should. Here is a brief tutorial on how to use this free, online application for movie making.

Wevideo is available in the Google Chrome App Store,

Blogger for iPad and Flipboard

Blogger App

This is my first post from my iPad. It is hard even for me to believe considering how much I adore my iPad. The problem is that I only just discovered the free,blogger app. This is quite remiss on my part considering it was released in November 2012.  To be fair, I had looked for it last summer, only to find there wasn't one. It was disappointing, but life went on and I kept blogging on my Mac. A few weeks back I searched for it again, and there it was. I was skeptical at first, as my experiences with Google Drive have been less than ideal. I doubted that it would be a game changer. I was wrong!

I love it. While it is not perfect in my opinion, this simple app is very friendly. I really like that allows users to switch between blogs with a tap. That is something we have come to expect from Google accounts.

When Looking ahead at the new school year, I can see how we are going to use this. Our 5th grade students are coming up to secondary with their own blogs in August. They are bloggers and we want to encourage them to keep it up and extend their blogging to include other areas of focus.  This app is going to facilitate the to work we will do with them involving sharing, reflection and digital portfolios.

Jen's Wishlist for the Blogger App:

Link and embed options would be fab!

 Lessons learned:

-Google Apps for iPad are evolving in a good way.

-Don't give up! Always check back for Apps you want that don't exist. If you are patient, someone will invent them. If you know your stuff, it could even be you.

Flipboard

My other new love is Flipboard. It isn't new really. It has been around since December of 2010. I downloaded it sometime last year after reading about and then proceeded to get busy and forget to play with it. A few weeks back I was getting frustrated in trying to keep track of all my feeds.There were too many. It was unmanageable. I was missing out on so much!

I solved the problem. The school had just lent me a Samsung Galaxy S3 and I added the Flipboard widget. It is fantastic! I brings everything together in one place as a digital magazine. it is oranised by the feeds of your choice, flips beautifully through them and is easy to share from to your different social networks. 

As I was sat at the breakfast table this morning, during the traditional wait for my kids to get ready, I didn't go to Twitter or Facebook, instead I opened Flipboard on my iPad. Yes the app was still there! (I am an App hoarder!) It is hard to describe how much I enjoyed the experience of flipping through articles from my chosen feeds. I was reading a magazine, for which I had chosen the content, based on my interests.

It struck me how lovely and effortless it was to bring so much of what I am interested in into one place. Not since I discovered Google Reader so many years ago have I had this experience and trust me, this is so much better. If you miss Google Reader, get over it and get Flipboard

Scratch Work and Side by Side for iPad

I have mentioned my zeal for Diigo many times over and have developed a fondness of  Evernote over the last year. They are the perfect tools for so many jobs. There is however a new app in town, a new discovery of sorts (New for me that is.), that I think will place right up there with the other two. I don't think it will steal the limelight, but rather emerge as  the perfect tool for note taking of a different kind.

There is no perfect note taking app for all jobs.  It is a matter of the  right tool for the right job really. If you or your students are frustrated with taking notes on the iPad by switching between apps, then this is the app for you.  Enter  Scratch work for online note taking. What a great idea! The browser window sits side by side on the iPad screen along with the notepad, allowing you to take notes without switching back and forth between apps. What a great tool!

It also allows you to  open a browser window or the notepad in full screen, link notes to the web pages they came from, Insert images, graphs and drawings, input math characters as well as email your notes as plain text or pdf files.



The fun doesn't stop there. There is yet another app out there which works in a similar way, but with even more windows!

The Side by Side app allows you to open  up to four windows and arrange them in different ways, up to a quarter of the screen each when four are open. With this app,  you to web browse in up to four windows, open a note window and take text notes by typing them in or copying them into the notepad with one click. Using Side by Side you can search search items you have starred by keyword and even save files for viewing offline using the filing cabinet and bookmark items if you haven't quite finished.

Again if you haven't already tried it out, you should. Here is a short video which demonstrates all of its functions.