Was fortunate enough to be away from the terrible Wellington weather today and flew down to Christchurch for the first Interface Xpo. Highlights of the day included the beautiful sun Christchurch put on for us, and also the opportunity to observe some of the ongoing rebuild.
Of course there was a conference to attend as well and below you will find my three best takeaways I found today after the break:
As a keen classroom flipper, it was refreshing to see a high quality PowerPoint application / add on that can add real value to my flipped content. What it allows you to do is create and add live quizzes in between slides, as well as record each slide with picture in picture functions (just like Camtasia Studio offers).
The slide recording is of a high quality and gets uploaded to your Office Mix cloud. Each video is provided with analytics such as visitors, views on each slide, average time spent on each slide, and answers to your quizzes.
I was really impressed, and I think I will be trialling it on my next flipped unit. One downside for me is the fact I have a growing viewer base on my YouTube channel. If I was to use the Office Mix software for content creation, I would probably need to upload a short video to YouTube, sending viewers to the Office Mix video – this is because the quiz plugins won’t function in YouTube.
We actually ended up purchasing a Swivl Robot so I am quite excited to explore it’s use. Quite a unique piece of hardware that allows you to place a device on top of a tripod. A user then wears a dongle, which tells the robot to track that person. This has fantastic applications within PE and other areas of the school, be it evidence gathering during a practical assessment, appraisal purposes, flipped classroom content creation or recording guest presenters. I am sure there are a number of other uses! I will pop up a review once this arrives!
One Note Class Notebook Creator:
This particular version of OneNote is only available if you are an Office 365 schools. Unfortunately we are not as we are a Google Apps school (which is awesome), but OneNote is probably the most exciting app I have seen in the last few years. I use it all the time for planning, portfolios and taking notes (great at conferences with the camera function!) and I can see the massive student and collaboration strengths the app would have in an educational setting.
The class notebook creator streamlines the process and allows you to control permissions etc on your books. Check it out if you are an Office 365 school – who am I kidding, if you are an Office 365 school, you are already all over this app!!!
Anyway, a great day – met some fantastic innovators who I hope to keep in touch with. Here was my view at lunchtime:
NZ PE Teacher 