DawsonITE for the Week of December 15

Google is big news in DawsonITE this week. It is marketing special versions of products to 12 year olds, integrating with platforms like Doctopus, allowing you to edit Microsoft Office files in Gmail as well as to edit and sign your PDFs online. Google isn’t the only corporate giant to capture DawsonITE’s attention. Read about a great iPad app to turn physical notes into digital ones.

Don’t know what Doctopus and Goobric are? Here’s your chance to find out.

• Google to revamp its products with 12-and-younger focus
  ‎Beginning next year the tech giant plans to create specific versions of its most popular products for those 12 and younger. The most likely candidates are those that are already popular with a broad age group, such as search, YouTube and Chrome.
• A Great iPad App to Turn Physical Notes into Digital Notes
  Post-it Plus is a great iPad app that you can use to digitize your physical sticky notes. The way it works is pretty simple: install the app in your iPad and then use it to snap an image of the physical notes you have. Post-it Plus will then digitize these notes in a format that will allow you to edit, arrange, refine and organize them into different boards.
• Microsoft’s presentation app Sway gets Bing Image Search to help find content and offer suggestions ‎
  Microsoft has integrated Bing Image Search into its Office presentation app Sway. The addition not only lets you search for images and add them to your Sways without leaving the app, but it also improves the app’s Suggested Source feature.
• HSTRY – Create Multimedia Timelines in an Online Classroom
  ‎HSTRY is a multimedia timeline creation tool that will work on your laptop, Chromebook, iPad, or tablet.
• Gmail now lets you edit Microsoft Office documents from your inbox
  ‎Google has added a new feature to Gmail inboxes that allows users to edit Microsoft Office documents sent as email attachments.
• Moving Beyond the Textbook
  ‎There are a lot of misconceptions around the transition from textbooks into the world of digital content delivery. The biggest mistake schools can make is simply changing out one medium of delivery for another without ever assessing or changing the content or method of delivery.
• What Students Do (And Don’t Do) In Khan Academy
  ‎This brief analysis has revealed that Khan Academy students are doing two primary kinds of work (analysis and calculating) and they’re expressing that work in two primary ways (as multiple-choice responses and as numbers).
• 16 new provost-funded courses to ‘flip’ classrooms with technology
  ‎“We can assess, for instance, in some of the courses, the right length of video that will have maximum impact for a specific course or discipline.”
• Evernote gets lots of upgrades and new features
  ‎Evernote has gotten some great new updates recently. It is especially powerful for teachers, students and administrators – lesson plans, lesson resources, lesson materials, class notes, notes on students, class work, schedules, teacher evaluations, etc. All in one place, accessible anywhere, anytime, on any device.
• A Good Visual On Bloom’s Taxonomy Vs Depth of Knowledge
  ‎Bloom’s taxonomy and Depth of Knowledge are two popular conceptual learning frameworks. They both approach the learning process from relatively different stands: Bloom’s taxonomy seems to emphasize the categorization of tasks in a way that corresponds with students thinking levels. Depth of Knowledge (DOK), on the other hand, shifts the focus from the product or end result to focusing on the cognitive and thinking process. It extends beyond the ‘what’ and digs deeper into the ‘how’.
• A Handy Google Drive App to Edit, Annotate and SignPDFs ‎
  PDFzen is a great free web tool that allows you to edit and sign your PDFs online. This app is integrated with Google Drive which means that you can easily edit the PDFs you have in your Drive. When you are done, you can save your edits back to Drive or download the document as a PDF or generate a link to share via email or social media websites.