This afternoon I went for a drive through western Maine to take some pictures of the mountains and rivers near Sunday River, the site of the Practical Ed Tech Summer Camp (one ticket is left). The video below begins with my truck in the yard and ends with a shot of the Sunday River road sign. I put the images into order by simply pressing on them and dragging them into position. After selecting and sequencing the pictures I added a soundtrack from the Animoto library of free music then selected a theme. When the video was complete I simply tapped it to open the sharing options. From my Android phone I shared the video to Evernote, Twitter, What’s App, and YouTube.

Make your own slideshow with music at Animoto.

Like a lot of services in the language learning market Memrise offers flashcards for studying words. What makes Memrise more than a flashcard service is that they also offer audio pronunciations of the words and in many cases videos that feature people using the words and or acting the words. For example, in the set of French cards “un baiser” features a video of someone blowing a kiss to the camera. Eight languages come pre-installed on the Memrise Android app.

The Memrise website has courses in topics other than world languages. You can also study math, science, geography, and history. You can select and start courses on the Memrise website then continue them on your Android device.

To learn on Duolingo you read, listen to, and translate words and phrases. For example if I want to learn Spanish I’ll be shown Spanish words with translations. I can can hear the words pronounced too. Then to practice I type and or speak translations. The activities start out with simple words and phrases. As I become more proficient, Duolingo gives me more challenging phrases. To help me track my progress Duolingo awards poinst and virtual badges to me when I reach a new level of comprehension.

Download the Duolingo Android app here.

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. 

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.

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 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.