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. 

Audio Memos - A Voice Recorder for iPad & iPhone

Audio Memos is an iOS app for creating and sharing audio messages. The app is available in three versions. The free version is limited to 3MB recordings, the $0.99 version is limited to 15MB recordings, and the "pro" $9.99 version has a nice selection of audio editing tools built-in. Some of the features that are available in all three versions of the app are automatic pause if a call comes in while you're recording, recording volume controls, and recording even when your iPhone or iPad goes to sleep.

Here is a video tutorial on Audio Memos.


Applications for Education
I learned about Audio Memos from Silvia Tolisano's recent post about using voice recordings and QR codes in a lesson that integrates Art and Language Arts. I encourage you to read Silvia's post.

In addition to the ways in which Silvia described using Audio Memos, the app could be great for journalism students to record interviews and then play back the recordings while creating the written version of the their interviews.

Pinnion - Targeted Audience Polling Through Mobile Devices and Your Website

One of last week's most popular posts was this list of 11 web-based polling services. Pinnion is another good service to add to that list. Pinnion is a tool that you can use to survey your audience through your website, blog, or through mobile devices.

Using Pinnion you can create multiple surveys using multiple question formats. Your survey can be distributed to a specific audience through Pinnion's channel service (you create the channels) or you can cast a wide net and gather responses from anyone who visits your website or blog. Pinnion offers Android and iPhone apps for gathering feeback. A sample Pinnion poll is embedded below.

Applications for Education
Our students carry a variety of mobile devices that we can use to gather feedback from them. Pinnion makes it easy to gather that feedback from students using Android and iOS devices. And if they have neither OS on their mobile devices, the web version of Pinnion surveys is quite mobile friendly.