Of all the tech tools I’ve written about, there’s one that garners the most praise from my readers: YouCanBook.Me. There are three faculty members on my campus that, whenever I see them, mention how much they love it. Last month I was at the American Psychological Association Convention, and one of the attendees was a reader of this blog. She told me how great she though this tool was, and that several faculty on her campus concurred. What makes it so great? It automates a task that otherwise requires several emails and a lot of time.

Without YouCanBook.Me:

Student: I’d like to make an appointment with you. When are you free?

Instructor: <looks at calendar> I’m free at these times. What time would you like?

Student: <looks at calendar> I’m not available at any of those times. How about one of these times?

Instructor: <looks at calendar> I can do X time. See you then.

Student: Great!

X time arrives, student doesn’t show.

With YouCanBook.Me

Instructor posts URL for making appointments. Student visits URL and selects a time. Appointment is added to instructor’s calendar. Student gets a reminder email a few hours before the appointment. Student gets a cancellation link to use in case of the need to cancel.

It was almost a year ago that I first wrote about the free service YouCanBook.Me, and I did a quick follow-up a month later. Since then YouCanBook.Me has been redesigned with a lot of new features. It’s time for an update.

Recap: YouCanBook.Me allows others to schedule an appointment in my calendar. It accesses my Google Calendar, and then shows my free times to those who need to make an appointment. The visitor clicks on a time, fills out the form, and that appointment is automatically added to my Google Calendar. I get an email letting me know of the appointment and the appointment-maker gets an email. The appointment-maker also gets a reminder email a few hours before the appointment. Both of those emails contain a cancellation link. To cancel, the appointment-maker clicks the URL to go to a website where they then just click the cancel button. When canceled, the appointment is automatically removed from my Google Calendar.

To see what it’s like, you’re welcome to schedule an appointment with me using my fall quarter calendar. When you get the confirmation email, follow the cancellation link to cancel it.

YouCanBook.Me is fully customizable with an easy-to-use user interface. As you read through this post, it may feel like a lot to do. It really isn’t. YouCanBook.Me uses a lot of default settings that will work just fine. Make any changes you’d like to customize your YouCanBook.Me calendar. Below I show you the settings I use and explain why.

Before you get started, you’ll need a Google calendar account. I sync my Google calendar with Outlook; any changes I make to one are changed in the other.

After creating a YouCanBook.Me account, you’ll be prompted to create a new calendar. You can create as many calendars as you’d like. I have five: fall quarter, winter quarter, spring quarter, meet-and-greet, and a general calendar with no fixed start or end dates. My main calendars are my quarter calendars, so I’ll show you what the dashboard to my fall quarter calendar looks like.

Basic Tab

Once you create your new calendar, you’ll be taken to the basic tab on the dashboard. This tab lets you customize the look of the main calendar page, what’s picture in the image above.

[Note: Below each dashboard area YouCanBook.Me will display what this area will look like to the users of your calendar. I didn’t include them in this post to reduce clutter.]

[Another note: Any time you’re unsure what a particular area does, in YouCanBook.Me click the little red question mark next to it. A new window will pop up with more information.]

Next to calendar you can see that my Google Calendar named “Sue Frantz” is being used. My free and busy times will be pulled from that calendar, and any appointments YouCanBook.Me makes on my behalf will be added to that calendar.

For subdomain, you can change that to anything you’d like. It will default to the first half of the email address that you used when you created your YouCanBook.Me account. Here I’ve changed mine to sfrantz-fall since it’s my fall quarter calendar. That is the URL I give my students: http://sfrantz-fall.youcanbook.me.

Enter the title you’d like to give your calendar. This will appear at the top of your calendar page.

Enter the text you’d like to appear above your calendar times.

Any changes you make are automatically saved. No need to worry about losing your settings.

Times Tab

Select your start and end times for each day. While my personal calendar shows that I’m free at 6am, my YouCanBook.Me calendar doesn’t start looking at my Google calendar until 9:30am.

Times are available every 15 minutes (9:30, 9:45, 10:00, 10:15, etc.). The minimum amount of time available for making an appointment is 15 minutes and the maximum is 60 minutes. This means that a student could select a 9:45am appointment time and then reserve 15, 30, 45, or 60 minutes.

My calendar is set to display one week per page starting today (today plus the next 6 days). You can choose to display as many weeks or as many days as you’d like. And you can choose to start the calendar on any day of the week. For example, if you chose Sunday, then Sunday through this Saturday would be displayed, even if today were Wednesday.

If you have a set lunch time, you can block that time out here. Or you can leave these times blank, as I have done, and block out time in your Google calendar.

Advanced Tab

Minimum notice is how soon from now an appointment can be made. Mine is set at 12 hours. If a student is looking at my YouCanBook.Me calendar at 11pm, the earliest appointment the student can make is at 11am the next day. The 9:30am – 10:45am slots will be unavailable.

While I have the time zone set to my own time zone, YouCanBook.Me will use the time zone set on the appointment-maker’s computer. YouCanBook.Me knows that my calendar starts at 9:30am PT. If someone who is on central time accesses the calendar, the times will change so that the earliest time would be 11:30 CT. I also let users change the time zone from their default. Let’s say that I have a student visiting family in Chicago. When the student calls up the calendar, the times will all show as central time. The student can change the time zone to pacific as he or she considers an appointment time upon returning to the pacific time zone.

The ‘jump to date’ button allows users to jump to a future date instead of using the arrow to click through weeks.

Since this is my fall quarter calendar, I have set the fixed start and end dates to correspond to the quarter.

Minutes clear before new and minutes clear after new are useful if you need time to get from one place to another. Since most appointments will be in my office, I don’t need time before or after an appointment. If I were a clinical psychologist seeing clients, for example, I would give myself 10 minutes ‘after new’ to write up my client notes.

‘Units per slot’ allows you to let more than one person schedule in a time slot. Let’s say that you had a computer lab with 5 computers and students could reserve time at those computers in advance. Set ‘units per slot’ to 5. Any given time will show as being free until 5 appointments have been made for that time.

Add a password if you’d like. Only those who have the password can make an appointment on your calendar.

Earlier I mentioned that I have a meet-and-greet calendar. This calendar has a fixed start date at the beginning of the quarter and a fixed end date three weeks later. The appointment slots are 5 minutes each. I haven’t done this yet, but I plan to invite students to visit me in my office for a quick chat. I’m thinking of offering 2 points extra credit (out of 400+ points available in the course) to those who accept the invitation. If a student uses this calendar to schedule an appointment from 9:30 to 9:35, slots 9:35 and 9:40 will remain open. On my fall quarter calendar where the minimum appointment time is 15 minutes, the 9:30 to 9:45 time slot will show as unavailable.

Booking Form

After students have selected an appointment time, say 9:30am on September 26th, they get this page.

The fields on this page are customizable using the booking form tab.

The appointment time will be set to the ‘start time’, that’s the time the student clicked to get to the booking form. In this case, 9:30am on September 26.

‘Your Name’, ‘Your Email’, and ‘Reason for Meeting’ are all required fields as denoted by the asterisk.

As you can see in the image above, this is the ‘Your Name’ field. It’s a ‘simple question’ where the text is just ‘Your Name’, and I’ve checked the box next to ‘this is a required field.’

For the ‘Your Email’ field, the question type is ’email address’. By using ’email address’ as the question type, YouCanBook.Me will use what the student enters here to email the confirmation and reminder emails.

For ‘Reason for Meeting’, the question type is ‘multi-line question’. That just gives the student a bigger box in which to write.

For ‘How long would you like to meet’, the question type is ‘booking duration.’ This question type refers back to the times tab where you entered information about the minimum booking (I said 15 minutes) and maximum booking (I said 60 minutes). When the question type is ‘booking duration’, the student will see a dropdown menu that gives four options: 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 45 minutes, and 60 minutes.

To add a new question, click ‘add a question’, choose the question type, and add the text you’d like the student to see.

Afterwards Tab

This is what the student sees after making the appointment.

The screen that appears simply says “Your meeting has been scheduled.” As you can see below, the messages tab is where that text goes.

The Google tab controls what is entered in your Google calendar.

I created an appointment using YouCanBook.Me for a half hour appointment on September 26^th.

These settings…

… generated this entry in my Google calendar:

{CREATED} enters the time the appointment was made. {REF} is the unique reference number YouCanBook.Me assigned to this particular appointment. {IP} is the IP address of the computer that made the appointment. {FORMFIELDS} are the fields you asked the appointment-maker to complete when they made the appointment. In this case, I asked the student to enter their name, their email address, and the reason for meeting. Those get entered in the order in which they are listed on the booking form.

‘Add to Google’ is what gets entered in the main calendar line. When I look at my Google calendar, this is what I see.

YouCanBook.Me defaults to entering the email address here: ‘booked: {EMAIL}’. Having the person’s name here is more valuable to me than their email address. I replaced {EMAIL} with {2}. Why {2}? Let’s look at the booking form again.

The first field is the appointment time. The second field is name. I’m telling YouCanBook.Me to enter that second field next to ‘booked:’ for my Google calendar entry.

On the ’email to you’ tab, I checked the box to say that I want an email when a new appointment is made, and I include the email address I want the message sent to. If you want it sent to multiple email addresses, add as many as you’d like, separated by commas.

Use the ‘sms to you’ tab if you want a text message sent to your phone when a new appointment is made. I don’t use this since my minimum advanced notice is 12 hours and I’m getting messages via email.

The ’email to user’ tab is for sending a confirmation email to the appointment-maker.

Enter the subject line for the email, your name, the ‘from’ address (if the appointment-maker hits ‘reply’ in their email program, the email will go to this address), a logo URL (totally optional — I use my college’s logo), and then whatever text you’d like. {WHEN}, {FORMFIELDS} (what the student entered on the booking form when the appointment was made), and {CANCEL} option are all automatically entered here. I would advise not changing them. Feel free to add any text you’d like though. For example, I included ‘Where’ so students know where they are going.

The ‘sms to user’ tab allows YouCanBook.Me to send a confirmation text to the appointment-maker. To use this feature you need to ask students for their cell phone number on the booking form. You also need to have sms credits in your account. Each credit is 16 cents. Email is fine for me.

Cancellation Tab

In the confirmation and reminder emails appointment-makers get a URL to follow if they need to cancel. The URL takes them to a page that displays the following.

The content of this page is controlled by the cancellation tab. Add your own text to the box if you’d like. {START} enters the date and time of the appointment that’s to be canceled.

Reminders Tab

Before the appointment, the appointment-maker will receive a reminder email if you activate this option.

Check the box next to ’email reminder (for others)’. Set the time you want the email sent. Enter the subject line, your name, your email address, a logo URL if you’d like, and the text. {WHEN} and {CANCEL} are automatically included just like in the confirmation email.

Appearance Tab

Use this tab to customize the look of your YouCanBook.Me calendar.

Choose from one of the standard designs. Choose ‘format as’ ‘a stand-alone page’ if you intend to just point students to your YouCanBook.Me calendar. If you want to embed it in an existing page, say, inside your course management system, select ‘a component to embed on a bigger page’. Select the colours and fonts tabs to change the colors and fonts. Use the css tab if you want to create your own css template.

Conclusion

The YouCanBook.Me developers frequently add features. For example, at this writing, the teams and services tabs are new.

Let’s say that your department has four tutors for one of your courses. Each tutor could create a Google calendar for tutoring, each one sharing that calendar with you. Each tutor blocks off the times they are unavailable in their tutoring calendar. In YouCanBook.Me, under the team tab, enter the information for each tutor. You will have one YouCanBook.Me URL to give to students who are looking for a tutor. Each tutor’s name will appear. The student looking for tutoring can click on the name of the person they want, and then make an appointment on their calendar.

For services, if you had specific services that required specific times, this tab is a nice addition. Let’s say I added ‘advising’ and ‘test review’. I could designate advising as a 30 minute appointment and test review as a 15 minute appointment. The YouCanBook.Me URL would take students to a page where they’d choose from the services offered, in this case advising or test review. Instead of choosing the length of the appointment themselves, YouCanBook.Me would automatically do it.

If you try out YouCanBook.Me, let me know how it works for you!

Do you play Jeopardy in class as a test review? Jeopardy Labs makes it easy to create a web-based Jeopardy game.

Here is one created for the “Biological Bases of Behavior” chapter in an Advanced Placement Psych class.

In the opening screen, decide how many teams will be playing. You can choose up to 12.

Click “Start” to bring up the board.

Clicking “100” under “The Neuron” produces this question.

Students buzz in by whatever method you’d like. After the team responds, click “Correct Response” to show the correct answer.

At the bottom of the screen, click +/- to add/subtract points to the responding team’s score. If it’s a 200 point question, click + once, and 200 points will be added to the team’s score. If you do not click + or -, the question will remain available on the board. Clicking multiple times will add multiples of the question’s value.

Click “Continue” to return to the board where the chosen question has been removed. You can, however, still click on the box to reveal the question. The score can be seen at the bottom of the board.

No fancy Double Jeopardy or Final Jeopardy, though.

Building a Jeopardy board is easy. Click in the appropriate boxes to change the title and category names. Click on a numbered box to enter the answers and questions.

Click save at the bottom of the board when you’re done. You’ll be redirected to a page that will provide you for the URL for your board. Bookmark it. That’s the only way you’ll be able to get to it to run the game or edit it, unless you create an account and donate money to the site creator – a worthwhile expense if you intend to make heavy use of the site.

Quick Tech Tip: In the Firefox search box, click the icon on the left side of the box to select other search locations. Click “Manage Search Engines” to find others to include.

New blog feature: Quick Tech Tips (QTT). These will be short and sweet. Think of them as a technological amuse bouche.

Windows users: To minimize all of your windows, press the windows key on your keyboard and simultaneously press M.

Windows key

[Update: See a more recent post on new features.]

This is the tool I’ve been waiting for. Socrative turns your students’ smartphones into a powerful student response system. It’s like PollEverywhere (see this earlier post), but with greater flexibility and ease-of-use, the ability to attach student names to electronic quizzes, and free – even when you have more than 30 students. This promises to be a real challenge to the makers of student response systems.

You and your students have options for accessing Socrative. Access it via the website using a computer or any web-enabled mobile device. For the mobile devices, you can either just access the website, or you can download the free app (Android or iPhone). I tested it out by visiting the Socrative teacher site on my computer and using the student app on my Xoom.

Socrative includes a simulation on their website, so I took the liberty of taking screenshots. You can try it out yourself by going to the Socrative website, and clicking on “Hands-On Demo” in the lower right corner.

To experience it yourself, on your ‘teacher’ device, go to http://t.socrative.com. On your ‘student’ device, go to http://m.socrative.com. Yes, it’s just that easy. In class, you go to the ‘t’ website and send your students to the ‘m’ website. If you or your students have the app, just run the app.

Connecting student devices to the teacher’s device

On the lecturer’s device, you see “my room number”. When students run the app or visit http://m.socrative.com, they’ll be asked to enter a room number. They just enter the number you have on your device. You can change that number if you’d like. Just select “Change room number” (it’s on the bottom half of the menu, not visible in the screenshot). The number doesn’t have to be a number. It can be text, say, your name or the name of your course. Whatever you choose will be remembered both on your device and your students’ devices. The student’s device will show “Waiting for teacher to start an activity” until you, well, start an activity.

Multiple Choice Questions

Pose a multiple choice question orally, or by writing it on the board, or in your presentation slides. Tap “Multiple Choice”, and the students will be given A through E options.

Once the student chooses, the instructor gets a bar graph, and the student’s device goes back into waiting mode. Unfortunately, at this time, there is no way to display this bar graph to students other than displaying your device using an opaque projector, or if you’re using your computer’s web browser, displaying the web page.

Short Answer Questions

Pose a short answer question to your students. On your device, tap “Short Answer”. That generates a response box on the student’s device.

Here the student entered “I have no idea what the answer is.” That appears on your device, and the student’s device goes back into waiting mode.

Now, if you’d like, you can have students’ vote on the best responses by tapping “Vote on responses.” Each student device now shows all of the short answer responses that were submitted. In this case, just one.

Quick Quiz (Self-Paced)

In a quick quiz, you give students a set of pre-planned questions. After a student submits one question, they move onto the next one, and the next until they’re finished. The first question should be their name.

Here you can see that there is one active user in the room. We know that because that’s how many devices have entered the Socrative room number. At this point, no one has completed the quiz.

The student has answered all 4 questions in the quiz. On the lecturer’s device, click “Live Results” to see who has responded and how they did. Once everyone has completed the quiz, click “End Activity & Send Report.” An Excel spreadsheet will be soon emailed to you with all of the data from the quiz.

This is what the spreadsheet looks like. The green-filled boxes are correct answers; the red-filled are incorrect.

Tip: On the quizzes, change the first question about name into two questions. Question 1: Enter your last name. Question 2: Enter your first name. When you get the spreadsheet, you can sort by last name for easy entry into your gradesheet.

Exit Ticket

The Exit Ticket works in much the same way as quizzes. With 5 to 10 minutes left in class, click “Exit Ticket” and students respond with their name and quick responses to a question, such as “define independent variable.” Research has shown that responding to open-ended questions related to the course content at the end of class improves performance on exams. [See for example: Lyle, K.B. & Crawford, N.A. (2011). Retrieving essential material at the end of lectures improves performance on statistics exams. Teaching of Psychology, 38, pp. 94-97.]

The Exit Ticket should be editable, but as of this writing it doesn’t appear to be. Instead, you can accomplish the same thing by giving a Quick Quiz since the Quick Quizzes are editable.

Space Race

Students compete in small groups (maximum: 10) to answer your pre-loaded questions as quickly as they can. The team that gets the most right in the shortest amount of time wins. Again, when you’re done, click the “end activity & send report” button at the bottom of your screen (not shown). You’ll be emailed an Excel spreadsheet with the results.

CONSIDERATIONS

Not all students have smartphones, laptops, netbooks, or other portable web-enabled technology. On the quizzes and the exit ticket, once a student is done responding, they’re given the option to finish or let another student take the quiz. For activities that could potentially have points attached, there’s at least this option. If many of your students don’t have internet access in your classroom, consider pairing students so that the two of them provide one response.

I anticipate trying this out in the fall. If anyone tries it before I do, I’d love to hear what you and your students think of it!

Thanks to Free Technology for Teachers for posting on this technology!

TitanPad allows you to quickly collaborate. Create a public pad, copy the URL, and email it to your collaborators. They follow the link, then just start typing in the pad. In the top right corner, new visitors are assigned a color and are named “unnamed”. Clicking in the “unnamed” box will allow them to enter their name. Attached a name to a color allows you and your collaborators to see who added what. If others are logged in at the same time as you, you’ll see their changes as they type. Changes are automatically saved. With the chat window, text will stay there even when you leave. It’s a handy space for leaving messages for your collaborators.

When I last wrote about TitanPad two years ago, that was pretty much all there was to say. They’ve since added a lot of functionality.

Import/export. Import text from, say, a Word document. Or Export your TitanPad to, say, Word document.

Saved revisions. While TitanPad automatically saves, you can also create save points. Use this after a major revision so you can quickly restore to that revision at a later point if you’d like. With this pad, I clicked “save now” at two different points. Now, under “saved revisions” I have two restore points.

Time slider. Below is the time slider view. I can click on the circled bar to move it back in time, then I can click the play button to watch how the document changed over time. The stars designate when I hit “save now” to create a saved revision. But notice that with the time slider, you can move the slider anywhere I’d like, then click “link to” or “download as” to get that specific version.

The newest functionality, though, is the creation of a private space. In effect, the public pads are private. After all, you can only get to an existing pad if someone has given you the URL. But that also meant that you needed to bookmark the URL because that was the only way there was to get to a pad you created.

Now you can create a space where you and your collaborators can see the multiple pads you’re working on. Go to TitanPad and click on “Get your own private space” in the bottom right corner. Name your team site. For example, I might want a team site for my department – hccpsych. The URL I would give to my colleagues would be hccpsych.titanpad.com. Fill out the rest of the form, and click the “create team site now” button. [Note: Notice how it’s called EtherPad here? EtherPad was the original software. When it was no longer being supported, it kind of fell into the public domain. TitanPad was one group that adopted it.]

TitanPad will send you an email with a URL. Following it will take you to TitanPad where you’ll be asked to create a password. When you’re done, you’ll be taken to your main page. To add collaborators, click “Admin”, then “create new account.” To create a new pad, click “create new pad”. You can see all of the pads you’ve created with the “Pads” link.

The pads themselves operate the same way with the addition of two functions. You can name your pad. And there’s now a link at the top of that pad that lets you return to the list of pads you have for your team site.

I’m sometimes asked why use this instead of Dropbox. I use both. I use Dropbox for most storage and sharing of files. I like to use TitanPad for brainstorming, especially when others are editing at the same time. For example, we might be on a conference call, and we call up a TitanPad to take notes so we know we’re all on the same page. . A few times I’ve created a public pad, and sent the URL out on the teaching of psych listservs when I’ve been looking for new examples to use in class. With a public pad, people follow the URL, then just start typing. No login. No need to save. Just type and go.

Can you envision using TitanPad with your students? Maybe for small group work? It’s easy to learn how to use, and it’s easy to see who contributed what and when with the color coding and the time slider.

[Update 12/15/2012 : Effective January 2013, appointment slots will no longer be an option.  Try YouCanBook.Me instead.]

Google Calendar now lets you let others schedule appointments in your calendar. With YouCanBook.Me, any open time can be scheduled. With Google Calendar’s new feature, you decide which times are open to scheduling.

In Google Calendar, click on an open time slot like you normally do to add a new event. Click on “Appointment slots”.

Call it what you’d like, say, “Office Hours”, then I selected “Offer as slots of 30 minutes.” Change the time to another amount if you’d like, such as 15 minutes. That’s it. Edit the details if you’d like. Add a location, say. This is where you get the URL to the appointment page that you will give to your students. Expand the amount of time you want to make open for appointments. After adding three time slots, this is what my calendar looks like.

Here’s the URL to my appointment calendar where you can only see the times when I’ve blocked off.

https://www.google.com/calendar/selfsched?sstoken=UUpoRTdRcUdUMlNqfGRlZmF1bHR8Y2NmZDA4ZjBlOTYxZTEzZDlhOWRhZjg3OGYyNmVhOTE

Note that those who wish to make an appointment this way will need to have a Google Calendar account.

Once the appointment is made, it’s added to both my calendar and the appointment-maker’s calendar. If they delete it from their calendar, it will also be deleted from my calendar, and the time slot will once again be available to future visitors.

There’s a lot to be said for a good old-fashioned email list. One address emails a bunch of people. Fiesta.cc makes it easy to create an email list and makes it easy to manage it.

I use an email list for each of my classes. I live inside of my email, so it’s easy for me to send an email to all the students in a class, and easy for them to respond. While most course management systems have the same functionality, you have to log into it to send an email.

The email list software I have been using is hosted by my college, and it comes with the ability to customize every which way you could possible want. Most of it I don’t need.

Enter fiesta.cc. I’ll be using this with my classes come fall quarter.

I just spent 2 minutes creating an email list.

To create a list, you can visit fiesta.cc. Or you can just send an email to everyone you’d like to include in your list, and cc listname@fiesta.cc where listname is what you want to call your list. Done. Seriously, that’s it. Here’s what creating an email list called tech@fiesta.cc might look like.

Don’t worry about whether or not someone else is using the listname you’ve chosen. It’s fine if they do. That’s one of the nifty things about this (free) service. Each list is private and tied to your email address. For example, I created a list called tech@fiesta.cc. When I email that list using the email address I used when I created it, fiesta.cc knows it’s me, and so knows who else the email needs to be sent to. If your email is associated with this list, when you email the list using that address, fiesta.cc knows who to send your email to.

Each person you add gets this email message. (For the purpose of this blog, I just added another of my email addresses to this list. That’s why there’s only one person, me, listed as being a member.)

By logging in at fiesta.cc, participants can change the name of the list, but it will only change for that person. For example, let’s say that I added you to my tech@fiesta.cc list, but you wanted to call it something else, like BestTechToolsEver@fiesta.cc. Great! Log in to your account at fiesta.cc and change the name. I email tech@fiesta.cc and you email BestTechToolsEver@fiesta.cc; our emails will go to the same people.

With fiesta.cc, there is no list owner. Everyone who’s a member of the list can add more participants or remove participants. If they do, everyone else receives an email to that effect.

Fiesta.cc email lists come with plus tag functionality. This allows you all kinds of control just using your email. For example, if I wanted to add someone new to my tech@fiesta.cc list, instead of logging in at fiesta.cc, I can send an email to tech+add@fiesta.cc and add the person’s email address in the cc box. Alternatively, I can send an email to tech@fiesta.cc, put the person’s email address in the cc box, and put +add at the end of the subject line. Either way. Whichever you prefer works.

One quick tip. If I’m on the NY Times website, and I want to share an article with my tech@fiesta.cc list, it won’t work to type tech@fiesta.cc into the box on the website. Fiesta.cc wouldn’t know which tech@fiesta.cc list to send it to. To email a list, the message has to come from an email address associated with the list. Instead, I need to compose a new email message where I paste the NY Times URL into the body of my message.

Visit https://fiesta.cc/learn to read more about fiesta.cc’s functionality, including additional tips for use, and more plus tags.

I’ve been discussing QR codes in this blog for some time. In the blog for Discover magazine, they report on another use of QR codes. While this isn’t related to teaching, it does illustrate how pervasive those pesky QR codes are becoming.

“In a bid to boost online sales, grocery retailer Tesco covered the walls of a Korean subway station with photos of its merchandise arranged on store shelves. Each item was endowed with a QR code, those black-and-white squares recognized by smartphones, and commuters on their way in to work could snap pictures of the codes with phones to fill a virtual shopping cart. They paid for their items via an app, and the food was delivered to their homes after they got home from work.”

I’m frequently asked, “Android or iPhone?” The good folks at Lifehacker provide the “Top 10 Awesome Android Features that the iPhone Doesn’t Have” and the “Top 10 Ways iOS Outdoes Android“. Truthfully, if Apple had originally opted to open the iPhone to all carriers and not just AT&T, I’d probably be an iPhone user today. But I was very happy with Verizon, and I have a long-standing grudge against AT&T. So Android it was. And now that I’m here, I have no desire to change camps. Nor am I alone in that regard.

In December 2010, I shared my favorite Droid apps. It’s time for an update.

What’s new:

CamCard (free for the lite version). CamCard uses your phone’s camera to take a photo of a business card, then it pulls the relevant information into a usable contacts entry; tap to call, email, visit the website, or see the location on a map. Additionally, organize the business card photos into categories for easy access. Create a QR code for the business card so others can bring the information into their phones.

Swiftkey X (free, currently in Beta). Like the original Swiftkey keyboard, it offers terrific text prediction. It learns from what you’ve typed before and offers suggestions based on what it thinks you’ll type next. Give it a couple letters, and its guesses are very good.

SpringPad (free). SpringPad is an EverNote alternative. With the new ability to drop notes into notebooks, and the old ability to access SpringPad via a computer’s web browser, SpringPad is a solid place to store your ideas.

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A quick recap of the December 2010 list:

Andricious (free). Still a good way to access Delicious bookmarks. Now that AVOS, founded by the creators of YouTube, have purchased Delicious from Yahoo, look for increased functionality from Delicious. One of the first things they did was make Delicious work with Firefox 4.0, of which I am very grateful.

Ask-WA (free). Ask-a-librarian for those of us in the great state of Washington.

Barcode scanner (free). Essential for scanning QR codes.

Business calendar ($5.68, try the free version first). I love this calendar. I can see all of my Google calendars. Swipe to the left to move the calendar into the future. Swipe the bottom bar to increase or decrease the number of days shown. Pinch to zoom.

Documents to Go (free, $14.99 for premium features). I admit that I haven’t had much need to edit documents on my phone, but it sure has been handy when I’ve needed to.

Dropbox (free). Essential for Dropbox users. The files aren’t stored on your phone, but you can quickly download whatever you need.

Epistle (free). Great for quick notetaking. It syncs via Dropbox.

Google Voice (free). While I have a Google phone number, I don’t generally use it. I do use Google voice for voicemail however. I like the transcription feature, although sometimes the transcriptions leave something to be desired. Recently a friend called to see if I was planning on attending their crab boil, which Google Voice rendered as crap boy. In addition to the transcription, you also get the audio file. For obvious reasons.

ICE: In Case of Emergency (free). Haven’t had to use this, but I like knowing it’s there.

Movies (free). Excellent for finding out what’s playing when and where – and whether it’s worth the money.

OurGroceries (free). I’d use this if I lived alone, but it’s essential if you live with one or more people.

PdaNet (free to try, $15.95). This turns your phone into a modem by tethering it to your laptop via USB cable. I use it when I stay in hotels that charge an arm and a leg for internet access. Some carriers aren’t thrilled about you doing this, so they’re blocking it. Android market, acknowledging the carriers’ wishes, has removed PdaNet. You can still download it from the PdaNet website… and the newest version hides the tethering from your carrier. Newer Android phones, such as the Samsung Droid Charge, include the ability to turn into a Wi-Fi hotspot, so PdaNet may only be a temporary fix.

Power Control Plus ($1.99). Very handy widget. It’s customizable to include just about anything you need. I have mine set to allow me to silence/unsilence my phone, change the brightness, use the camera’s flash as a flashlight, turn on/off Wi-Fi, turn on/off the GPS.

Reader (free). Easy access to my Google Reader feeds. I’m not entirely crazy about the interface, but it’s fine for now.

Swiftkey (free to try, $2.02). One of the advantages of Android over iPhone is the ability to install different keyboards. I’m partial to this one.

Tick! (free). Easy to use timer.

Where’s My Droid (free). I haven’t had much need for this one, but, like ICE, I feel better knowing I have it.