Demo Slam at the Colorado Summit

This was my second time taking part in one of the EdTech Team’s dynamic Demo Slams. I learned my lesson last time about trying to win against these ballers and went in with the new attitude that “To play IS to win.” This made it easy to walk away with my dignity intact and feeling like a winner:)

Spoiler: the first slam listed, Molly Schroeder’s Bitmoji share, was the winner.

Here is my quick review of the tips and tricks that were shared. Please note that these demos go super fast and there were a couple that were both so speedy and so advanced and over my head that my review will be sparse:

Bitmoji slam

It was my first time seeing Molly Schroeder present and she is every bit as awesome as everyone says she is. Her Demo Slam winning share was around Bitmojis. One thing Molly said that really resonated with me was that, “Bitmojis communicate beyond just words.” It’s a whole new medium and can really bring someone a smile. Specific to her slam, the oohs and ahhs came when Molly shared that there is now a Bitmoji chrome extension and that, once installed, it automatically plays nice with gmail. Woot!

Unroll Me to minimize junk mail

Nannette McMurtry shared how Unroll.Me can help us better manage email clutter. One of the coolest features she shared was that when we go and log into our dashboards on the Unroll.me site, we can with a single click unsubscribe from emails (so we don’t have to go through the unsubscribe option within the actual emails).

Make Your Own Interactive PokemonGo

Micah Shippee shared how to create a custom google map with your own plotted pins and then export the file into Wikitude. It’s a fun hack and for anyone who hasn’t played with the Wikitude app, that might be the biggest takeaway as it is (for me anyway) the coolest onramp I’ve seen to getting started with Augmented Reality in authentic ways. If you want to start wrapping your mind around AR, I suggest installing the app and loading up the Twitter layer. This will allow you to move your phone through the air and, in a sense, see through walls and visualize both the text of tweets AND the exact places from which they were tweeted.

PearDeck

Alyssa Davidson had participants join her PearDeck presentation. She started off with a fancy either/or poll and showed how PearDeck graphically presents responses with a scatterplot. She then showed the live responses to a multiple choice question (super engaging) followed by a question to rank on a spectrum. Whether your latest experience with EdTech student response systems is clickers or Kahoot, you will wowed by the features Alyssa shared with PearDeck. As she put it: “I got 110 of you to share your thoughts with me in under 3 minutes. Slam!”

TextHelp

Kay Tepera shared some new features in Read&Write, an awesome extension that is free for teachers. Beyond all of the cool stuff you already knew about, Kay shared that the R&W now works on google slides, allows you to convert inaccessible text (such as text in a picture or PDF). She also announced that they acquired g(Math), a tool that is as popular as it is awesome for Math teachers. This was a great transition to =>

g(Math)

John McGowan, the founder of g(Math) shared how his tool making Math and Science “delightful” inside of googledocs while also focusing on accessibility for all learners, something not enough EdTech products are focusing on. Props to John and TextHelp for making accessibility a priority.

Daily Agendas

Becky Shorey shared a solution for empowering students (and parents) to cut teachers out as the middle man for those who miss class/classwork or forgot what the assignment was. This was one of the slams that was over my head so please feel free to post a response that offers better detail! What I think I understood is that Becky hacked together Autocrat and GoogleClassroom in order to quickly and easily create class agendas (in my mind, these are Smart Agendas) and push them to students and parents.

Google Tips

Beth Mossholder shared her demo here. Hers was a fire hydrant explosion of coolness. My two favorites were that she shared that you can Bookmark all tabs to quickly (in a sense) save the tabs so you can close out your window without losing the open tabs. As a person who keeps a google doc titled Open Tabs in order to manage this process, Beth’s tip here will be helpful. My other fave was that you can do location-based reminders in GoogleKeep. I currently use other tools (such as IFTTT) that are inconsistent so I was super excited to learn that I can do this within GoogleKeep, a tool that has become one of my most-used since I learned about it from Matt Miller in our Google Hangout earlier this semester.

Making Sense of Gibberish

Sandra Chow shared that Google Translate will now speak the translated words and phrases we have it look up. For those frustrated with the tool’s lack of accuracy, Sandra shared that there is a community (of humans!) to help improve Google Translate. The Translate extension will also allow you to highlight text and get a translation. Sandra shared a few other tricks that I couldn’t keep up with as I was distracted by such an amazing presenter she is…even better than the hype that precedes her.

Hypothes.is

My Demo Slam share was Hypothes.is, a Chrome extension that fits into a genre of what some academics are calling Social Reading. If you think of Social Writing as a way of collaborative authoring on a google doc, Social Reading is a way of using tools like Hypothes.is to collaboratively read, annotate and uptext a reading, and do so native to the original web page. Rather than having students read photocopied PDFs and use ink highlighters to take notes, Social Reading tools allow them to do so paperlessly and, importantly, socially: their annotations are visible to other users who can in turn post replies to their peers…all right there in the margins. I really think this is the future and will be commonplace in a few years. One of the coolest use cases I have seen so far is teachers planning with colleagues at other schools to have their disparate classes converge on a text for an Annotation Jam. Check out the Marginal Syllabus blog to get your finger on the pulse of the cutting edge of this movement.

Amazing YouTube extensions

Daniel Sharpe shared some super cool YouTube extensions. Check them all out in his slide show here. The GIF It! extension was a crowd pleaser. While there are simple tools that we can use to make a GIF from any youtube video, this tool is way quicker and easier than anything else I have seen. There were several other cool tricks that I recommend you check out in his presentation, including one fun one that might bring a smile to those of you who are sick and tired of the Presidential election.

A quick note about Demo Slams

These are exciting, high energy lightening presentations (usually 2–3 minutes each) that tend to offer something for everyone while boring nobody. The model shows up at these GAFE Summits and EdCamps and, hopefully soon, in your school as this is easily scaled to any environment. Share the Demo Slam idea with your admin team and see if they are willing to give it a go at an upcoming staff meeting!

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