Save Meeting - Audio Recordings and Transcriptions of Meetings

Save Meeting is a meeting recording app for iOS and Android devices. The app allows you to record the audio of your meetings, transcribe the audio, and share the recordings and transcriptions with others. The transcription options that I tried were somewhat limited (30 seconds of automatic transcription and 5 minutes of manual transcription) but should be sufficient for recording quick notes during a meeting. Save Meeting uses a freemium pricing model. At the free level you can save up to 1,000 minutes of audio.

The video below contains a short overview of Save Meeting.

SaveMeeting presentation from SaveMeeting on Vimeo.

Applications for Education
Save Meeting could be a good app for students to use to make quick reminder notes for themselves. The app could also be used by students who are conducting interviews that they are going write about at a later time.

Project 365 App Helps You Organize Your Photos Throughout the Year

On Sunday I shared that thanks to Ken Shelton, I finally "get" the purpose of participating in Project 365. In short, committing to a 365 project is a good way to build up a private media library that you and your students can access when you media for your presentations.

Last night I was somewhat aimlessly browsing the App Store when I discovered the Project 365 app for iPhone and iPad. The app provides a place to organize your images in a calendar format and share you images via Facebook, Twitter, and email. The "pro" version of the app ($0.99) removes advertising, includes image cropping tools, and offers immediate upload to your Flickr account.

Applications for Education
If your school is using iPads, the Project 365 apps could be handy for creating image galleries that your students can use whenever they need images for slideshows, videos, or other digital stories. By using their own images, all concerns about Copyright are removed from their projects.

Listen to Customized Bite-sized News

Snackr is a free iPhone and iPad app that allows you to listen to a set of customized news channels. Snackr's goal is to provide you with headlines and summaries of news that is most important to you. You can used the app to hear tech news, world news, sports news, weather, and more. Watch and overview of Snack in action in the video below.

Snackr Demo v1.0 from Snackr App on Vimeo.

Applications for Education
When I taught Contemporary Global Studies my students were responsible for reading and watching the news. If you teach a similar course, Snackr could be good app for your students to use to get an overview of headlines and hear a bit of the stories. After listening to their Snackr news channel, they can select a story or two to investigate in further detail.

H/T to Joyce Valenza. 

iNaturalist - Record and Share Observations of Nature

iNaturalist is a community website for sharing pictures and observations of plants and animals. To enable easy sharing of observations, iNaturalist offers a free Android app and a free iOS app. Using the apps you can take a picture, geo-locate it, write your observations, and upload to the iNaturalist community. If your observation is incomplete, for example if you're not sure of a scientific name, you can ask the community to add comments to improve the recording of your observation.

If you don't want to join the iNaturalist community, you can simply explore members' observations through the iNaturalist Google Map.

Applications for Education
I learned about iNaturalist through an excellent post on the Google Lat Long Blog that outlined the efforts of a group to compile a large collection of observations about the Pepperwood Preserve in California. Pick a woodlot or nature preserve in your area and have your school build a record of observations about that area.

Collaborize Classroom Offers an iOS App

Collaborize Classroom is a free service that host websites for teachers that I wrote about last spring. I recently revisited Collaborize Classroom and learned that they now offer an iPad and iPhone app for teachers and students. The app provides access to the discussion features, assignment posts, other elements that teachers add to their Collaborize Classroom websites.

Applications for Education
The Collaborize Classroom iOS app could be a handy app for students to use to access important course information and activities. If a student has multiple teachers that use Collaborize Classroom he or she can access all of those teachers' sites through one app.

Try Yahoo to Find Your Next iPad or Android App

For a lot of us Yahoo is kind of the forgotten search engine. I honestly can't tell you when the last time I used it was until today when I learned through Android Central that Yahoo has an app search setting.

At Apps.Search.Yahoo.com you can search for Android and iOS apps. You can filter results according to OS, price, and category. I gave it a try and I have to say that the search results page is quite a bit nicer than that of the search results page in the Android Market. The look doesn't affect the effectiveness of the search tool, but it is a nice aspect of Yahoo App Search. Give Yahoo App Search a try the next time you're looking for a new app for your Android or iOS device.

Cross posted on Android4Schools.com

Hot Apps for Higher Order Thinking

Hot Apps 4 HOTS (link opens to iTunes) is a free ebook about iOS apps that can be used to help students practice and develop higher order thinking skills. The book takes readers through a series of apps that are aligned to the various parts of Bloom's Revised Taxonomy. Examples and suggestions for app use are included in the book. As Hot Apps 4 HOTS is an ibook, it can only be viewed on an iOS device.

Applications for Education
If your school is one that is rolling-out iPads for student use, check out Hot Apps 4 HOTS to find some good apps and ideas that you can bring into your classroom.

A couple of other good places to find iOS apps for your classroom use are Kinder Town and IEAR.

Alien Buddies - An iPad App for Learning Shapes, Numbers, Letters

Alien Buddies is an iPad and iPhone app designed for pre-k students to practice recognizing shapes, letters, and numbers. The app provides leveled games in which students practice recognizing patterns and sequences. The activities for recognizing letters and numbers have audio and visual prompting modes. Alien Buddies normally costs $1.99 but I received an email from the app's publisher informing me that it is available for free today, January 27th.