Bit.ly
The website www.bit.ly allows you to take lengthy website addresses and shorten them into something that you could share with someone in conversation. We've all seen how long websites can be and trying to share something like that verbally would be near impossible. A URL shortening resource like bit.ly allows us to take those long web addresses and generate something much shorter. With these shorter links, we can communicate these verbally, in print or in an electronic document much easier.
I have taken my Wilkes blog and used bit.ly to shorten up the website. It's much easier to type or write out and if I'm sharing my blog with someone verbally, it's much easier to say "bit.ly/curtsIMblog" than the much longer web address associated with my blog.
During this process I also utilized a bookmarlet (see more about these below) that Bit.ly offers called Bitmark. The image to right shows the pop up screen you get when creating a shortened URL using Bitmark, so there wasn't even a need to go into the bit.ly website to create this.These URL shortening resources can be used in the classroom very easily, especially with commonly used sites. It is also a much easier way to share important areas on the web with parents, etc. Many of these same advantages in our educational lives could be applied to our personal lives as well. It would be much easier to share verbally the link to my family's blog through a bit.ly than to say the entire blog address.
Here is my Bit.ly link to my Wilkes Instructional Media blog:
http://bit.ly/curtsIMblog
QR Code Generators
QR codes are easy to generate and have a lot of application in the classroom. While these are an exciting technology resource, there are some drawbacks to them as well. Teachers can now link any online content to a QR code in a just a few easy steps. I used a free resource called Delivr.com and I generated the QR code to the left in just a matter of a couple minutes from the time I registered to the time I had the code saved to my computer. The code I generated will take you my Wilkes Instructional Media Blog. One of the downsides to QR codes is that the teacher or student must have a smart phone or tablet with a QR code reader app ready to go. While exciting to teachers, this technology needs to be in the classroom to take advantage of QR codes.
For those classrooms that have the technology or are implementing a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) program, there are a number of ways to engage students with QR codes.
QR codes could be embedded into a set of directions so students do not need to type in web addresses. This could be especially helpful with younger students who don't have high level of typing skills. QR codes can also be posted around a classroom, school, museum, etc. as a digital scavenger hunt. Teachers can also use QR codes to set up a "lab practical" type of assessment where students rotate from QR code station to QR code station to answer a question about the content embedded with in the QR code. These might also be a great "back to school" tool or on "meet the teacher night" where parents can walk up and scan a QR code with a video made by the teacher embedded within.
Bookmarklets
Bookmarklets might be one of the most unknown tools within the educational community. These tools are amazingly easy to use, require no skills except the ability to drag / drop to add them to your favorite internet browser and offer some really cool resources that teachers could use throughout the year. I reviewed two bookmarklets that I thought I would use quite often. The first is called QuietTube. One of the concerns that teachers have when it comes to YouTube is the comments section and additional suggested video's all of which appear "around" the video. QuietTube will remove all of this extra content that students don't need to see and teachers don't want them to see. It's as easy as opening a YouTube video and clicking on the QuietTube bookmarklet. The other is Printliminator. We've all been to a website that has some great content, but it also has tons of graphics, pictures, ads, etc. so when we go to print, it ends up using a lot more ink than we need or it prints more pages than we need. Printliminator allows you to click on different sections of the page to "delete" them from what will be printed. This gives you a much cleaner view and a nicer print out than you might have had otherwise. I think teachers would use both of these resources in their personal and professional lives and bookmarklets make them so easy to access and use even those digital immigrants will be willing to use them.
These are three more categories of digital tools that teachers can learn and implement into their classrooms in a very short amount of time. Like with all technologies, it's important to start with what you can handle, master that and then continue to add to your digital teaching toolbox.
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