Digitial Learning and Teaching Tools

Google Meet

Google Meet is a video conferencing tool that allows teams of people to "Hangout" together online with audio and video.

Google Meet is accessed on pc's and Chromebooks via the web at

meet.google.com

Google Meet mobile app for Android devices is available in the Google Play app store.

Google Meet mobile app for Apple devices is available in the Apple Apps Store.

Digital Whiteboards

These make it possible to create a whiteboard that can be shared between teachers and students via online tools.

  • Google Jamboard - probably the best thing about Google Jamboard is that it is built right into our Google Suite of apps on the waffle menu. Check it out, it's very easy to learn, pretty cool, and behaves just like all the other Google apps for sharing, saving in the cloud, etc. Also, your whiteboard scrawls can be saved to PDF - a great way to do handwritten classwork to turn into Google Classroom digitally, if you have a touch screen and stylus.

  • Doceri - an iPad and Windows app that can be used on touchscreen devices to create whiteboard video and PDF lessons. It can record both your whiteboard marking, and your voice as you teach the lesson. This is my favorite digital whiteboarding app, although it has a lot of features and complexity. Highly recommended for teachers for doing virtual direct instruction just as they might do in the classroom on a real whiteboard.

  • Educreations - a more simplified approach to digital whiteboarding that is easy to use and learn. Educreations works online within a web browser, or through a mobile app. A very generous basic level of service is available for free, and during the COVID-19 campus closures, Premium level service is being offered as a free upgrade through May 1st, 2020. A downside to Educreations is that it requires the Adobe Flash plugin for web browsers; most web browsers are mercilessly phasing Flash out of support, though, with some effort, it is still possible to use.

Whiteboard Recording from Khan Academy

Video and Screen Recording

Video recorders record digital audio and video through a camera. Screen recorders, or desktop recorders, make it possible to create audio and video recordings of the activities on your computer also. They are a great tool for demonstrating to others how to use an app, or software program, or how to accomplish a specific task step-by-step on a computer.

  • Windows Camera - this app is built in to Windows 10 and will record digital films through your computer's video camera.

  • OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) - OBS is a completely free of charge, open source, and very powerful program for creating pc based recordings. It is widely used by professionals in the social media industry. OBS can record computer audio and desktop video, as well as webcam audio and video, and multimedia from many other input sources as well. The tech support videos I've shared with you in the past, for example about how to use Paint.Net for graphics projects, or the teacher video about using TADS gradebook, were done with OBS. OBS works on windows, mac, and linux pcs.

  • Screencastify - this is a much lighter and simpler Chrome web browser extension based app that enables you to do screen, webcam video, and audio recordings through the web browser. Because it is Chrome based, Screencastify not only works on Chromebooks, but it is probably also the best screen recording tool available for them. Although there is a premium pay level service for Screencastify that enables long recordings, the free version is limited to 5 minutes of recording per video.

  • Digital Camera, Smartphone, iPad/Android Tablet - you can also use any of these to record a video through the device's camera. Save the video to your Google Drive cloud storage, and it will be accessible on other devices too!

Windows Camera

OBS Screen Recording Studio

Screencastify

ScreenShots

Screenshot tools allow you to take a digital "photograph" of your entire screen, an entire window on the screen, or even just a partial selection of the screen. Some also have integrated annotation tools for marking up your screenshots with text, boxes, highlights, and arrows.

Awesome Screenshot - this is hands down my favorite overall, because it works right within the Chrome web browser as an extension, and therefore works on pcs, macs, and on Chromebooks too, and also because it has some awesome cloud features for saving screenshots directly to Google Drive and creating shareable web links.

Windows Snipping Tool and Snip and Sketch - these are the screenshots tools Microsoft has built into Windows 10.

MacOs Keyboard Shortcuts - MacOs uses combinations of keys on the keyboard to activate screen shots. Click the link for more information.

Annotated Screenshot taken with Awesome Screenshot

Document Scanner Apps

Document Scanner apps assist you to take a high quality photograph of your paper documents so that they can be saved digitally and sent to others over the Internet.

ScanPro, aka ScanBot - I've been using this one for years and love it.

Evernote Scannable - Scannable is another one I have used and really like. It's especially nice if you are an Evernote user, since it snaps into your Evernote cloud.

Adobe Scan - Adobe is the king of digital documents.

CamScanner - this was one of the first mobile scanning apps, and is very good. Another nice thing about CamScanner is that it is one of the few that is free.

For more good scanner app choices, see this article for Apple devices, and this one for Android devices.