Fliite - Group Mentioning/Messaging App for Twitter

Many educators are taking to Twitter as a method professional learning and also for communicating with students.  One of the issues is that if you wanted to mention several people in a tweet is that those mentions take up your 140 characters.  The other issue is that if you want to send a direct message to Twitter users, you can only send one at a time.  Fliite is a new option that will soon be available for the iPhone that allows users to group message/mention multiple users on Twitter.  Fliite could come on handy for those teachers that utilize Twitter in the classroom.  You can sign up to receive an email notification when it is available, but it seemed promising, so I thought I would share.  You can see the video below for more information.

Five Found In My Feedly

With Google Reader getting ready to be gone for good I have permanently switched the blogs I follow over to Feedly.  I hope to regularly bring you some of the great information shared across the web from other blogs that I follow.  Here are some from this week.

1.) 50 Digital Storytelling Websites and Apps from the Technology Tidbits Blog.  The list is available in alphabetical order which makes it easy to discover sites and apps that you might not be familiar with.

2.) Dealing with Dashboard Decisions - I don't really use them myself, but homepages that mimic a dashboard look are popular for many people.  This post provides a great list of options.  From The Never Ending Search Blog.

3.) The Bammy! Awards - An Award honoring the Education Community from A - Z.  You can find the nominees HERE.

4.) 89 Cool Sites, Apps, and Tools for Teachers from the Cool Cat Teacher Blog has a great list for teachers looking to integrate technology into the classroom.

5.) 21 Reasons to Stop Saying 21st Century Teacher from the Free Technology for Teachers Blog makes a great case for removing this terminology from describing teachers.  I wrote two eBooks called "Tools for the 21st Century Teacher" (1st Edition and 2nd Edition) and looking back, a more proper name probably would have been "Tools for Today's Teachers."  I have to agree with a lot of what Mr. Byrne is saying in this blog post.  We are teachers and this is the 21st century, so naturally we are all 21st century teachers.

Chalkfly - Order School Supplies and Support Teachers in your Community

Chalkfly is a office and school supplies online retailer looking to match wits with Amazon, Staples, and other office supply stores.  There are several categories from over 50,000 supplies that users can choose from.  Chalkfly hopes that users will like their site because it has an easy and simple user interface which will make for a more friendly shopping experience.  Chalkfly has a 365 day return policy, offers of free overnight shipping, and 24 hour customer service.

In order to further separate itself from competitors, Chalkfly will donate 5% of every sale to a school or teacher of the customer's choosing.  Teachers can sign up and include their name and school name in the online registry for parents to complete shopping on the site for their classroom (Similar to a wedding or baby registry).  Customers can also look for a teacher to donate to even if they don't have a registry but have signed up for the website.  If a teacher is not on the list, customers can add their own as well.  If a teacher or school is not selected, Chalkfly will make the donation to a school or teacher in close proximity to the customer.  Learn more about the Registry HERE.

In order to make Chalkfly successful, it would be worthwhile to share it with local businesses as a method of supporting your school while buying supplies they already need.  Teachers could also share with parents for when they are purchasing supplies for their students in the teacher's classroom.

When doing a price comparison, they were cheaper on my favorite pen (Pilot G2) by a penny.  With free shipping and supporting teachers and schools in my area, it is a logical choice in choosing to shop with Chalkfly.  

PrintFriendly - Clean Up How You Print

As a social studies teacher I would have my students complete a current events journal by using articles found on the Internet.  I also required students to include a copy of the article for each entry.  I remember getting several pages for articles because of ads and pictures that were not necessary.  It was a waste of ink and a waste of paper.  With a service like PrintFriendly, students and teachers can use the service to clean up a website to only include the important information for a page and make it more....printer friendly.

To use the service, users can copy and paste a link and get a print preview or they can get a bookmarklet for their browser that will allow them to easily print articles from sites they visit.  It might be worthwhile to have computer lab assistants put this bookmarklet on computers in the lab.  If you have your own blog or teacher website, you can also get a button that visitors can use.

To learn more about PrintFriendly, see the video below.

Reveal.js - "Cubed" Presentation Tool

Reveal.js or rvl.io is a new browser based presentation tool that makes presentations in a cubed type format.   Users can create a presentation and then go left, right, up, down and vice versa.  The editing is simple and presentation styles are applied to the slides while being edited so that users know exactly what they are getting.  Presentations can be viewed in any modern browser, including mobile devices.  Themes and transitions allow users to make sure the presentation appears just the way they want them too.  Presentations are private, but can be published and made available to everyone.   Users can also export their presentations for when internet is not available.  The presentations are HTML documents, so if users have HTML experience, they can alter the code using the HTML editor.

Users can sign in using OpenID, Google, Yahoo!, or AOL.  For more information and to see rvl.io in action, see the video below.