Android 4 Schools

Google Play for Education Promises What We’ve Been Waiting For

admin — Thu, 16 May 2013 00:57:36 +0000

While I was busy leading a day of learning about iPad apps at Bridgton Academy Google announced a new service that could make Android tablets a stronger challenger to iPads in education. Google Play for Education (not live yet) promises the features that many of us have wanted for a long time.

Google Play for Education will be an app store designed specifically for teachers and students. Developers will be able to submit their apps this summer. Some selected developers announced at I/O include NASA and PBS. The best part of Google Play for Education will be the ability for teachers (or administrators) to purchase apps and push them out to all of the devices in their schools. If the entire school is too big of a group, the option to create smaller groups of devices will be available too. Teachers will also be able to use Google Play for Education to push video and documents out to all of the devices in a group.

One thing to keep in mind about pushing apps and videos to Android devices through Google Play for Education is that all of the devices will have to be part of a Google Group created through Google Apps.

H/Ts to The Next Web, Venture Beat, and Android Central.

Create Your Own Digital Magazines on Flipboard for Android

admin — Fri, 10 May 2013 01:01:17 +0000

Last month the popular digital magazine app Flipboard added an option for iPad users to create their own digital magazines to share through the app. Today, Flipboard brought that same option to Android.

To create your own Flipboard magazine you have to first create a free Flipboard account. Then install the Flipboard bookmarklet in your browser (Firefox, Chrome). After you have the bookmarklet installed you can click it whenever you find something you want to add to one of your Flipboard magazines. You can also send items to your magazines from withing the Flipboard app as you read through your feeds. To do that just click the “+” icon while reading an article in Flipboard. You can create public and private magazines for as many topics as you like. For example, you could create a magazine about teaching mathematics and a magazine about school administration.

Joe O’Brien wrote a great post about how he’s using Flipboard magazines with his students. I recommend reading his post here.

Use Weebly? Use Android? Try Weebly for Android

admin — Fri, 03 May 2013 00:58:37 +0000

Last week Weebly released a new Android app. The app doesn’t allow you to create new sites or edit the look of your site, but you can use it to create new blog posts. The free app also allows you to start a new blog (provided you have already created a Weebly site). Through the app you can moderate and respond to blog posts. And if you’re interested in seeing the traffic statistics for your site, the Weebly Android app will let you do that too.

Add Drawings to Your Videos With Magisto

admin — Wed, 01 May 2013 15:53:15 +0000

Magisto is a free video creation and editing application for Android and iOS. Using Magisto you can mix together raw video clips, pictures, and sounds on your phone or tablet to create a video. A new Magisto feature only available for Android users allows you to draw on frames in your video clips and add borders to your frames. Learn more about this new feature in the video below.

Magisto can be integrated with your Google Drive account allowing you to add video clips stored in your Google Drive account to your Magisto projects. All of the processing and editing of Magisto videos happens in the cloud so you will need an internet connection to use the app.

Astrid – Group Task Management on Android, Web, and iOS

admin — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 01:53:31 +0000

Astrid is a to-do list management service that functions on the web, on Android devices, and on iOS devices. Astrid is a collaborative tool that allows you to share tasks and assign tasks to people in the groups that you create. The Astrid Android app recently received some nice updates including the option to add tasks through voice input and set reminders through voice input. The video below provides a short overview of Astrid’s features.

Astrid could be a good to-do list management tool for students. Students working on group projects can assign and manage task due dates with each other.

GoClass – Remotely Deliver Quizzes and Lessons to Students’ Android Tablets

admin — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 22:18:54 +0000

GoClass is a free application for creating short lessons and delivering them to your students. The lessons can include annotated images, free hand sketches, text, and video. GoClass gives teachers tools for creating class rosters that they can use to keep track of which students are using the lessons when. Teachers also have the option to ask questions and poll their students. After the students’ response have been gathered teachers can project those responses without showing the names of individual students. The image below, from GoClass, illustrates how a teacher might use the app with students.

Discover Poets and Poems on The Poetry App

admin — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 11:01:07 +0000

The Josephine Hart Poetry App is a free Android app that students can use to discover and read works of sixteen famous poets including Yeats, Byron, and Frost. Students can browse through the app to find a poet. When they find a poet students can click on that poet’s portrait to open a small biography and a selection of poems written by that poet. Students can read the poems and listen to narrations of the poems. Many of the poems are narrated by famous actors. Students can download the poems and audio recordings to use offline. Students can also organize poems into a collection of favorites in the Poetry App.

Chrome for Android is Updated Enabling Easier Form Completion

admin — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 00:08:09 +0000

This afternoon Google released a new stable version of Chrome for Android. The latest version supports accessing the usernames and passwords that you have saved in Chrome on your desktop. This means that all of the auto-fill features in Chrome on your desktop work in Chrome on your Android device too.

I know that I will appreciate not having to complete username and password forms on my Android phone’s small screen as often as before. Teachers and students who use Chrome on a regular basis will probably appreciate it too.

For Better or Worse Google Translate Now Works Offline

admin — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 14:07:57 +0000

Google Translate is known for occasionally producing some unintentionally hilarious translations (I’ve experienced this many times when translating Icelandic into English). Last week Google announced that those translations can now be made offline on your Android device. The Google Translate Android app supports fifty languages. To use the app offline you do have to download the language packs for your native language and the language that you want to translate. In other words, if you want to use all fifty languages you will have to download fifty language packs.

Google Translate offline doesn’t support as many words as the online version but it could be handy in a pinch when you don’t have a data connection for your device.

Cool Reader – Find and Read Free eBooks on Your Android Device

admin — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 13:12:41 +0000

Cool Reader is a free Android app that anyone can use to read a variety of ebook formats including ePub, .mobi, and html. Through the Cool Reader app you can browse for books in public collections like Project Gutenberg or import your own books. The Cool Reader app has some handy features including bookmarking pages, clipping text, searching for text, and skipping to chapters.

Cool Reader is an open source project. The app has an average rating of 4.7 from more than 56,000 reviews.