Tuesday Tech Tidbit

While geeking out on Twitter, I stumbled upon an amazing Apple Distinguished Educator who publishes slick videos on YouTube that quickly and easily demonstrate how to more effectively use the iPad in the classroom.   Jacob Woolcock is a computing and digital learning teacher in the U.K.  His iPad QuickTips YouTube channel provides viewers with easy-to-follow videos (often less than 2 minutes) that demonstrate an educational concept on the iPad.  His videos include tutorials on: iMovie Freeform Keynote Clips I appreciate how easy it is to follow these videos and then directly apply them to classroom usage.  If you are interested in brushing up your iPad skills or designing creative projects for your students, you should visit: https://www.youtube.com/@iPadQuickTips Have a wonderful summer! 🌞

Recently I stumbled upon a very handy website that contains step-by-step guides on how to use some of the most creative features of the iPad. Dr. Tolu Noah is an Apple Educator who creates iPad tutorials .  These help guides provide visual assistance on how to use some of the impressive multimedia features on the iPads.  Some of the guides include: Creating digital whiteboards using FreeForm Animating text and shapes in Keynote Using the Clips app to create engaging videos Using the Notes app for planning and preparation Personalizing lectures with Live Video in Keynote Screen recording Creating QR codes Although these iPad guides were created for higher education, they are definitely relevant for K-12 as well.  I hope you find some good pointers in here.  Please reach out to me if you get a burst of inspiration and wish to implement these features into a lesson or project.  Follow the link to view the iPad Guides: https://www.tolunoah.com/ipad-guides

Many teachers share slideshows with their students that demonstrate learning concepts.  These are particularly helpful when students want to access information from a past lecture or a tutorial.  Apple's amazing slideshow production app, Keynote, offers a simple way for you to add live video to a presentation. With Keynote's Live Video feature, teachers can insert themselves into a presentation so students can see and hear what they have to say about a presentation.  Instead of just reading text on a screen, students get to see and hear their teacher.  You can also use the rear camera on your iPad to record live footage of a concept you wish to demonstrate in your presentation.  This is a great way to bring students up to speed if they missed an important lab.   When used in conjunction with screen recording on your iPad, you can create movie presentations for your students or professional learning communities.  Quickly make tutorials that contai...

Using the Keynote iPad app, students can create amazing multimedia presentations that put Google Slides to shame. But once these presentations are completed, teachers want to be able to easily open them on their Windows computer and assess them in Google Classroom.  Impossible, you say?  Not at all! The secret to submitting full-featured, multimedia presentations into Google Classroom is for students to submit an iCloud link rather than a physical file.  The video below demonstrates how a student uses an iPad to submit a Keynote presentation (with a video!) to his teacher in Google Classroom.  The teacher then opens the presentation on a Windows PC and plays the full-featured presentation in the Chrome browser, all without leaving Google Classroom.  If you thought this was impossible ... watch on! By demonstrating how easily Keynote can play nicely with Google Classroom and Windows computers, I hope more teachers and students take the plunge and discover the am...

Keynote is an incredibly capable program that can create multimedia presentations that run circles around Google Slides.  I highly recommend taking advantage of Keynote when assigning students projects that include multimedia presentations. When working with another teacher, I discovered that Keynote does not appear to allow streaming videos to be embedded directly into a presentation.  Keynote prefers to access videos directly from the iPad.  No worries mate!  It's fairly easy to download a streaming video and then embed it into a Keynote.  I recommend using the website btclod.com to download streaming videos (such as YouTube videos).  The video below demonstrates how to accomplish this. UPDATE!  The btclod website is blocked at Hudson.  You can instead try  https://www.youtubedownloader-online.com .   Let me know if you have any questions or need follow-up support.  🙂