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In July 2011 I wrote about Socrative, a web-based student response system. (See the blog post here.) The brief version: The instructor logs into the Socrative website and gets a room number (change to whatever you’d like). Students visit the website on whatever web-enabled device they have (smartphone, iPod, tablet, laptop), and enter the room number. The instructor can ask multiple choice, true/false, or short answer questions. Ask them on the fly or create quizzes in advance. These quizzes can be teacher-paced or student-paced. Responses are collated into a spreadsheet and emailed to the instructor. Socrative has added several very useful features to begin 2012.Read More →

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12/15/2011 11:46am The presentation has moved into the Q&A session, so I’m going to wrap up here. Be sure to check out the report and the 2011 study infographic. As we slide into the winter break, I hope to have time to read the report myself and write about some of their findings in this blog. ___________ 11:41am PT Where do students say they learn the most? Source: EDUCAUSE Live Presentation, 12/15/2011 ___________ 11:34am PT Basically, students don’t think instructors are using technology effectively. How can we make better use of the technology we have? Source: EDUCAUSE Live Presentation, 12/15/2011 ___________ 11:29am PT What doRead More →

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The ECAR survey folks always have interesting information to present. Free and online. Hope to see you there! For those who can’t attend, but are interested, I’ll be tweeting live during the event. Follow me on Twitter by clicking the ‘t’ icon on the far right side of your browser’s window. From the EDUCAUSE website: Speaker: Eden Dahlstrom, Senior Research Analyst, Data, Research, and Analytics, EDUCAUSE Susan Grajek, Vice President, Data, Research, and Analytics, EDUCAUSE (Moderator) Date: December 15, 2011 Time: 2:00 p.m. ET (UTC-5); convert to your time zone Topic: In this free hour-long session, “ECAR National Study of Undergraduates and Information Technology, 2011,” SusanRead More →

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On the “Tech Handout” page I now have two documents. One is my general tech handout; the other focuses on collaboration tools. At some point I’ll probably merge them into one big document, but until then I have two. Both have a QR code at the top. I noticed that they were different codes. I wondered where they went. At this point I had a number of options. Leave them as is and continue to wonder. Go find my phone and scan them. Or search the internet for a QR code decoder. I opted for the latter and used Esponce as my decoder. I savedRead More →

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A colleague (thanks Craig C.!) recently sent me a link to a Forbes article (10/18/2011) about Drew Houston, founder of Dropbox. (Disclaimer: Craig swears he doesn’t usually read Forbes; he was in the waiting room of his dentist’s office.) At a recent presentation before 100-or-so psychologists (educators, researchers, and practitioners), I asked how many used Dropbox. About 90% of the hands went up. I confess I was surprised at the number. But in case anyone had any doubts about the widespread use of Dropbox, read this excerpt from the Forbes article: The opportunity in front of Drew Houston revealed itself again a few months agoRead More →

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I’ve left Firefox. It was using up a massive amount of RAM (Firefox 6) and had slowed to a crawl. I started looking at my add-ons to see what might be slowing it down as I did with previous iterations of Firefox. And then I stopped. I thought, “Using a web browser shouldn’t be this hard.” I had tried Chrome before, but I had Firefox set up exactly as I wanted with the add-ons that I wanted. Then the scales tipped. I didn’t have many add-ons left that worked, and Chrome had many more add-ons available. I’ve been happily, and speedily, cruising the web withRead More →

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[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 justRead More →

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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 paidRead More →

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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 forRead More →

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A number of my colleagues have recently acquired smartphones that run on Android. I promised them that I’d share my favorite apps. Some of them are even relevant to education. Andricious (free). As you may know, I’m a fan of Delicious, the social bookmarking service. Andricious gives me easy access to all of my Delicious bookmarks. When I use my phone’s web browser, I can also use Andricious to save pages to Delicious. (You may have heard a rumor that Delicious is shutting down. That’s not the case. A few years ago Yahoo bought Delicious and then did nothing with it. It looks like YahooRead More →