Engaging Learners In The 21st Century: Useful Apps For Higher Education

Alexandra Salas ran the session on Useful Apps For Higher Education. Here are some of the apps she went over during the session. For some of these apps, my notes focus on the extremely frustrating limitations of them. 

  • Flowboard has memory issues and does not export, which annoyingly means it has to live in the cloud. I seemed to puzzle some attendees with my concerns about this, which terrified me.
  •  Prezi doesn't support audio? I am so glad I never bought into it.
  • Socrative is polling software for phones, tablet, web that could be useful.
  • I agree that an important part of Google Drive is permissions and how you implement them in grading or collaborative projects.
  • Doodle is a scheduling app. I think it over complicates things. I send a Google Doc with times to sign up to advisees/classes.

ThatCamp Jersey Shore: Online Collaboration

In this panel, we went around the room discussing different collaborative tools we use in our classrooms.

  • Spicebird runs email, calendar, and chat all in one program. Spicebird reminds me of Google Wave.
  • Prezi creates very pretty presentations. I am going to experiment with this in the fall.
  • …along with Dipity, which creates timelines. I like timelines.
  • Transcribe Bentham crowd sources transcriptions of digitized Bentham documents.
  • At some point, I brought up my experiences using PBWorks in the classroom to create wikis for my classes.
  • GroupTable organizes group projects and allows document management.
  • Some discussion of the lack of ease of exporting files from Google Docs. I discuss the symposiums I put together using Google Docs in graduate school.
  • Zotero.
  • Academia.edu could become a Linked In for academics, but not a lot of work seems to be happening with it. I barely used my page until recently.
  • DHAnswers can be helpful for finding out tools.
  • Comment Press incorporates review into writing. Could be a replacement for gate kept peer review.