January 2021 – iLearn Technology

BombBomb is hands down the best way to upgrade your email game

January 11, 2021January 11, 2021Kelly Tenkely1 Comment167280 views

What it is: BombBomb is an email service that lets you record and embed video directly in your email. That is a totally oversimplified explanation because BombBomb does SO much more. This is one of those pieces of technology that has been life-saving for me during the pandemic and one that I will continue using forevermore! In addition to easily adding video to your email, you can add images, button-type navigation, build and send forms right in BombBomb, and even create automations. BombBomb shows you who opened your email and what they clicked/engaged/watched while they were there.

How to integrate BombBomb into the classroom: During the pandemic, BombBomb has been an incredible way for us to communicate and keep connected to our students and their families. Each day we were in remote learning, I sent a daily email with a video message for the community, links to all of our teacher’s daily plans, links to tech-support, and a daily check-in survey so parents could share how remote learning was going in their house. At Anastasis, we start every day with a whole-community meeting. Obviously, 2020 wreaked havoc on that daily tradition. Since we couldn’t be together each morning, I recorded a video as if we were together. I invited the kids/families to send me content that would show up in future videos (Mindstamp helped with this as well!). In one email, families had access to all teacher’s plans for the day as well as a way to share feedback about what was going well or what they were struggling with. As the admin team received feedback about what families were struggling with, we could offer real-time immediate support. Any time a family shared something that was hard, we either adjusted or contacted them to support them. BombBomb made this process seamless for us! Because we could see who was opening and interacting with each portion of the email, we knew we had a high level of engagement and could see what was and wasn’t working well even for families who didn’t fill out our survey each day.

BombBomb is a great way to provide video feedback for your students while you are remote. You can use the screencast tool to walk them through the work they submitted with your comments and suggestions.

We are currently back to in-person learning, but I’m still using BombBomb to send my weekly newsletter. I’ve never been one who loves recording video (I wouldn’t say I love it now…but it has gotten SO much easier), I prefer writing, but I have to say families seem to love the video content. Parents who are not inclined to read the weekly newsletter seem more inclined to watch a 2-minute video update. That makes all our lives easier! I’ve also noticed that parents seem more connected and likely to interact when they see me on video than a written message alone.

As a teacher in the classroom, BombBomb would be a great way to flip your classroom and send students videos tailored to what they are learning. Because you have a built-in video library, email library, form library, and the ability to automate, you could set this up one year and continue using it year after year! You don’t have to record all of your video content, you can also import videos from a link expanding the content available about a million fold. BombBomb also allows you to screencast directly from email making it a great way to send support to students.

If you teach young students or students who don’t have their own email, you can still use BombBomb to create video content and related links (seriously, it’s almost like having the ability to create mini-websites). BombBomb gives you a share link for every email you create so you can share it with students as a link or even create QR codes that link to the email you created. At Anastasis, we individualize for every student every day. A lot of our independent learning is set up as center rotations with one of the centers always being one-on-one with the teacher. With BombBomb you could record yourself explaining the center, and include any other links or information that students may need. You could also create a form that acts as an exit ticket for that center rotation. If you have a mobile device or Chromebook at the center, it’s almost like having you right there with them. Again, with the email/video/form library you could create this one year and keep using it over and over. The analytics help you see how students are interacting (how many times they viewed the video, what links they clicked on, etc.).

We’re an inquiry-based school. This means that the kids are constantly doing research and digging deeper. The research process can be too much for our littles. Using BombBomb, teachers can break down that research process in video and provide guided research links.

BombBomb is also a major upgrade to email you are sending to parents. Imagine sending a quick video of something brilliant that their child did in class. Or, you could record a conferring session between you and their child so they can gain insight into your assessment process and student growth. You’ll be able to see which families are opening and interacting with your emails, and those who may need a different approach.

Tips: To help teachers through the pandemic, BombBomb is FREE for educators. You should sign up today, I truly cannot say enough good things about this platform!

Here’s an example of an email I sent out in prep for Giving Tuesday…see you really don’t have to be fancy with your videos, just record and share!

Mindstamp: Easily create dynamic interactive videos

January 8, 2021January 11, 2021Kelly Tenkely2 Comments192721 views

It’s been a minute (or thousands) since I’ve blogged new technology finds. This year has us utilizing technology in new ways and in need of tools that support learning in new ways. I thought I’d drop back into the tech-tool blogging world with some of the technology that has kept us sane this year, but are also SO good that we’ll continue to use them even in non-COVID years.

Mindstamp- Create interactive videos for your classroom

What it is: Mindstamp is one of my favorite finds this year. This interactive video creation platform is a major upgrade to remote learning, but we’ve come up with about a hundred ways that it is equally valuable as a learning tool regardless of whether we are in-person or remote. Mindstamp makes it easy to quickly create interactive video experiences that include buttons, questions, hotspots, branching. You can ask questions directly in the video that are free-response, multiple-choice, audio response, video response, or drawn response. The editor is intuitive and easy to use…this is not one of those tools that you will have to spend a significant amount of time learning. When your videos are played, you get a full report showing exactly what the viewer did. You can see how long the video was viewed, how it was interacted with, and see responses to any questions.

How to integrate Mindstamp into the classroom: Mindstamp is an obvious choice for creating learning experiences that can be viewed and interacted with asynchronously. During our remote learning, we used Mindstamp for daily community messages that encouraged students to be part of the conversation. Our goal was to keep our community connected even though our school-wide morning meetings looked very different. We loved the ability for students to respond to question prompts in a variety of ways and for everyone else in the community to see their contribution. We also used Mindstamp to debut our recorded performance of our theater production. We set up the performance as if it were a live telethon and invited our viewers to interact with the video in a variety of ways (text-to-give, leave a message for our performers, etc.). Though we couldn’t be in an auditorium enjoying the performance live, the interactive video gave us the feel of something that our whole community to be involved in.

Mindstamp is a fantastic platform any time you want to “flip” your classroom. Give students the opportunity to ask questions about the content that you can address live during class, or just check for understanding throughout the video. You’ll be able to see exactly what pieces of new learning may be hindering your learners. Mindstamp lets you record your own video or import video from other platforms like YouTube or Vimeo. We have greatly appreciated the ability to import learning content from YouTube and then pausing the video and inserting additional links, photos, videos, or audio that supports the learning just like we would do if we were in a classroom watching it together.

At Anastasis, we individualize learning for each learner based on who they are and where they are in the standards. As a result, we set up our independent learning time as center rotations with one of those rotations being the teacher. Mindstamp could be used to make the teacher available at every rotation with a video message that explains the center and opportunities for students to record their process and leave it as a question response.

Mindstamp isn’t just for teacher-created content. Students can create their own interactive video content. Students could record themselves completing a science experiment and adding supporting research they used in the form of links throughout the video, drawings or photos that support their findings, and ask for feedback from other students or teachers in the form of questions throughout their video.

Mindstamp would be a FANTASTIC platform to create choose-your-own-adventure type videos. It could be interesting for students to explore a historical or current event through video and then explore different outcomes based on the response. It could also be a great way for students to explore different points of view on the same topic. The main video could introduce the topic, and they could use branching, links, photos, and videos to explore the topic through multiple perspectives.

Truly, once you get into Mindstamp, you are going to think of hundreds of ways it could be used to enhance remote and in-person learning. We keep coming up with new ways to support our students through videos. We’ve loved the data dashboard for accountability and support purposes.

Tips: One of the things we learned is that students cannot respond to a question as a video response from an iPad or iPhone. They will need to use a computer for video responses so keep that in mind as you are building interactive content.

Mindstamp is offering iLearn technology readers a 50% discount of any tier. Use the code ILEARN between now and March 15, 2021, for 50% off!