Blancer.com Tutorials and projects

Students and teachers have either the most simplistic or the most complex systems at their disposal when it comes learning online. Case in point: simplistic video conference solutions and elaborate Learning Management Systems. Given that the subject matter is already hard for many, trying and spending time to understanding a new tool that helps them learn is an extra burden.

They could use a solution that is somewhere in the middle. Socrative is a smart student response system that empowers teachers to engage their classrooms through a series of educational exercises and games via smartphones, laptops, and tablets. Like always, I’m gonna take it for a test drive, would you like to join me?

Overview

Socrative is super simple to use, and all the teacher has to do is login through an Internet connected device and select an activity which controls the flow of questions and games. Students will simply have to login with their device and interact real time with the content.

Overview

Responses to questions posed at students are visually represented for multiple choice, true/false and short answer questions. At the end of every planned activity, the teacher can view reports via an emailed Excel file.

Getting Started

With so much to offer and particularly when considering how over priced anything related education these days, it is hard to believe that this web app is available for free. Getting started is very easy, but is a bit weird. The sign up page says that the app is in private beta and you will have to submit your email id to join the queue. Now, immediately after hitting Submit, I got a welcome email detailing how to get access to the app.

Registering for an Account

Apparently, you don’t have to go through the step of registering your email for an invite at all. Head over to t.socrative.com, if you are a teacher and register for an account from a simplistic form. Don’t worry if the form and the rest of the app look huge and weird in your screen.

The developers in their endeavor to make the app mobile friendly, have embraced the same interface for desktop too. This user interface brings down user experience by quite a few notches.

Accessing the Room

Teacher's Zone from Resized Desktop Browser

After a few slides giving a head’s up about the app and its features, you should land on the teacher’s zone. Again, with a lot more options the user interface looks very ugly. Try resizing your browser from the maximized view till the interface is usable enough for you. At the top, you can see the room number. This is what you should circulate among your students. You can also get the count of the number active participants so far.

Students in turn should login at m.socrative.com by entering the virtual room number provided by the teacher. They will then see “Waiting for teacher to start an activity…” status message. Once you initiate an activity by selecting it on the main screen, the same will show up in their screens (more later).

Creating Quizzes

Creating a Quiz

As mentioned earlier Socrative allows teachers to create multiple quizzes of various formats. The steps to create a quiz from the app aren’t many and is an absolute breeze to create one.

Adding a Multiple Choice Question and Answers

In the case of a multiple choice question, add the question and the choices that go with it and voila! you have a quiz in your hand. I couldn’t find a way to bring down the number of choices from five to three though.

A Quiz in Progress

Joining a Room

If you are a student, follow the above mentioned steps to get into the room and wait for the teacher to start an activity.

Choosing the Pace of the Quiz

When all the students have joined the room, you as the teacher can start the quiz. Here, you get to choose the pace at which the quiz will progress. This could either be a preset interval of your choice or the student can take his/her own sweet time to complete them.

Taking a Quiz

If you happen to be a student, start answering the questions as they start showing up on the screen. Based on how the quiz has been set, you will either see live results or will get a report directly from teacher later.

At the end of each quiz, the teacher will get a detailed report compete the name of the students and the answers submitted by them. Use this to grade them or archive it for future use.

Final Thoughts

Socrative does one thing with gusto – minimizing the pain in learning and (teaching). This is evident from their choice of technology. Without making a native app for every desktop and mobile operating system, they have embraced the universal web app format. While this makes the app fit to run on any Internet connected device, it isn’t great to look at from a desktop browser.

It is evident that the developers have painstakingly worked to ensure that the app runs on mobiles as awesome as it will on a desktop. But I guess today’s web development technologies offer the ability to deduce from which browser the user is accessing the app and serve the appropriate version of the app’s user interface. Besides that, Socrative is golden!

Share Your Thoughts!

How much fun is it to learn and/or teach online? What apps do you normally use in your campus and classrooms for learning and teaching?

When it comes to web-based task and project management apps, the Web is literally overflowing with them. You’ve got the choice between a huge range of different ones all designed to promote greater integration within businesses and generally help towards a more productive workflow. I recently looked at yaM and Podio, which both boast a wide range of features and are pretty impressive tools to help businesses collaborate.

The only problem with these kinds of project managers is that they tend to be geared towards high-end business users and tend to over-complicate themselves with features that are wasted on the average Joe such as your author here. I’m a techie, so the more complicated things are the better they will stand out with me but for most people, these advanced features can be a bit overwhelming. Think of startup companies, who don’t want to blow their IT budget on one program and who want simple collaboration tools that lets everyone in the office know exactly what they are working on.

Enter cohuman. It is, like many others in its category, a web-based task management app but there’s a spark of insight woven into the program that makes it easy to use yet still retaining some mighty features. Cohuman has recently being bought out by Mindjet, a company that develops visualisation solutions such as mind-mapping software for both Windows and Mac. You’d think that this is a marriage made in heaven, wouldn’t you?

Well, let’s take a look at cohuman to see whether this marriage is eternal, or if it is already on the rocks…

First Thoughts

cohuman is, unlike some other web-based task management apps, completely free forever for the basic version (no 30-day trial periods here, thank you very much). You can upgrade to a Pro account (which costs $19.95 a month) which gives you 2 GB of storage space and a couple of extra goodies.

The home page of cohuman

Signing up takes a few seconds and all you need to provide is your e-mail address and a password. You can also sign into cohuman using your Google account – if you do this it will integrate with your Google services such as Google Calendar and Google Docs. Once you’ve signed up and logged in, you are greeted with the dashboard, which gives you an overview of your recent activity (a bit like Facebook’s news feed) and any tasks you are working on (including ones that are overdue) .

The dashboard of cohuman

Features

Creating Tasks

Creating a task is really simple in cohuman. You simply enter the name of your task in the text box at the top of the page and click on the big green plus sign. A window pops up when you can enter some more information about the task in hand, such as who it should be assigned to, who should “follow” the task (meaning that they receive updates as well) and the due date. You can also enter comments on individual tasks and upload files.

If you have linked cohuman with your Google account then you can upload documents, spreadsheets and so on straight from Google Docs into cohuman onto a particular task, which can save a lot of time in the long run and is especially useful if your business uses Google Docs to share documents around the office.

Project Management

Projects allow members of your team to view all tasks and files related to that particular project, allowing them to keep a greater track on what is happening. cohuman has integrated a number of nifty little features into projects that make it easier to achieve this. You can add and remove members easily depending on who is working on the project, and any tasks can be organised in terms of priority and assigned to individual team members.

Managing a variety of projects in cohuman

Each project has a message board, allowing team members to post messages onto it which can be seen by all team members in that particular project (a bit like Facebook). So that you don’t forget what you have already in a project, cohuman includes a history of all activity within that particular project.

Notifications

Obviously, no task management would be complete if it didn’t notify you of any changes with your tasks. cohuman provides e-mail notifications to the default account you used when you signed up to it (although this can be changed) and allows you to keep up to date wherever you are, even when you’re not in the office.

The useful feature about these e-mail notifications is that you can alter them depending on how much information they want to convey. If you just want to get an overview of what’s happening on your tasks, then set it to low however if you want the Full Monty (say, for example, if you were the project leader) then you can set your notification level to High.

cohuman for iPhone

cohuman has another advantage over other web-based project management apps in that the developers have created a free iPhone app, meaning that you don’t have to rely on e-mail notifications and endless phone calls to the office to keep up to date. The iPhone app features pretty much the same as the web version of cohuman however the interface has been adapted for the smaller screen.

cohuman is also available in an iPhone app

Final Thoughts

cohuman definitely shines as a project management application owing to its simple interface yet powerful hidden features. It is very appealing to small businesses and startups owing to its low maintenance costs – the free account gives you 1 GB of storage, which is usually more than enough for most requirements.

At the start, I asked whether it was a marriage made in heaven between cohuman and Mindjet. The answer is: yes. When you compare the current version of cohuman to older versions, it seems that Mindjet has brought a few of its own ideas into the ring as well. The result is an easy-to-use, multi-functional project management app and one that is certainly worth having a look at.

In this Quick Look, we’re highlighting Cart2Cart. The developer describes Cart2Cart as an online shopping cart migration service, designed for moving data from your current shopping cart to a better one automatically. It provides users with:

– Quick and Clear Migration Process
– Very reasonable cost of service
– Demo Migration of 10 products/customers free of charge
– Migration tracking from your personal account
– Assisted Migration Service
– World-class support

Read on for more information and screenshots!

Screenshots

Setup your shopping cart software migration

See the live migration process

About the App

Here are the top five features you can expect to see in Cart2Cart:

1. Fully automated migration of products, product attributes, variants, images, orders, manufacturers, customers, currencies, etc.
2. Shopping Cart Migration Estimator for estimating the migration cost of a certain online store
3. Product import covers multiple (product gallery) images
4. Customer ID reservation
5. No Data Loss!

Requirements: One of the supported shopping carts on your site
Price: Starting at $49
Developer: MagneticOne