Techie Tuesday - Taking Screen Shots and Featured App: Baby ESP

Well, I feel kind of silly admitting this but I had no idea how to take a screen shot (a picture of whatever is on your screen) prior to creating this post. I knew it was possible because I have seen so many screen shots of text message conversations on the iPhone posted online. I knew I wanted to post a couple of screen shots of this app I will be talking about, so I simply Googled "How to Take a Screen Shot on the iPhone 4" and got this wonderful and simple video.  And I can just tell you right here, if you don't want to watch the video, that all you have to do is hold down the power key and hit the home button twice in a row.  So simple!  Now I just wish I knew how to enlarge them so they don't look like junk.  I have realized that you can barely make out the images on this blog.  Anyway, I am sure most of you already knew how to take screen shots, but I figured I would include it just in case someone didn't!

My newest app obsession is for Mommies (and Daddies) who are interested in tracking their newborn's daily habits is called BABY ESP. My friend, Holly, recommended it to me. She originally used it on her Droid, which wouldn't help either of us anymore bc we both switched to the iPhone. Fortunately, the week before Landon was born BABY ESP debuted their app for the iPhone! Perfect timing!

So, what is so great about the app? Well, there is a place to track virtually everything you might want to track (pee/poop diapers, sleep times and lengths, nursing/bottle times, journal entries, medicine, growth in height/weight/head circumference, etc.) and then the option to create any other category you may want to track. So far I have created an immunization tracker for both boys and a potty training tracker for Will.

One Week of Statistics for Landon - Covers the first full week we were at home.

Now some of you might be thinking that this is a bit obsessive, and perhaps you are right, but I did the same thing with William.... Only I hand wrote it all out. He had a few issues after birth so the Peds would constantly question the number of feelings and wet and poopy diapers he had, which there was NO WAY I could remember on my own, so instead I wrote it all down. Now I'm in the habit of doing so, so it's really no big deal and I don't have to worry about how long it has been since Landon ate, slept, peed or pooped. Plus this allows me to see patterns over time, which is something my hand-written book did NOT do for me!

William's Growth Chart over 2.5 Years... He is SO TALL!  He has always been above the 95th percentile!

This app has a fee. I believe I paid 5 bucks for it, which I feel was very well worth it. However, the day after I downloaded it I got an email about another FREE app from Similac which does the same thing PLUS some (yes you can choose the color of poop on an image of a diaper... I just HAD to share this with our Ped. He thought it was awesomely hilarious!) So perhaps you would want to download that few one before purchasing BABY ESP, but that's up to all of you new mommies!

Let me know what you think if you use any of this!

The Similac Poop Selector - I LOVE this! LOL

Techie Tuesdays: My Top 10 Most Used iPad/iPhone Apps

This week, I decided to knock out a quick "Top 10" list of apps that I use the most on my iPhone and iPad.  I am throwing them all into one blog post, because many of these are used universally and therefore I am probably not going to introduce you to much (or anything) that is new, exciting, and unique.  However, I wanted to pay homage to these apps because I truly use almost all of them every single day.  Please note that all of these (and so far all of the apps I've covered) are FREE!  Free is always good! :-)
OK, here we go.  I will alphabetize them so they are all considered equal!

1. Blogger (Social Networking)

Of course I had to give a shout-out to Blogger on my Blog! I still prefer to type on my laptop (I haven't used my laptop all year as much as I've used it since I started blogging. I just can't type fast on my iPad or iPhone and I have yet to invest in a keyboard for my iPad!)  Although you can't do nearly as much on the Blogger app as you can do on the actual website, it's still good for starting a draft, uploading pics, and editing posts.




2. Email (Business/Social Networking)

One of the best aspects of the Email system on iPads and iPhones is that you can get all of your messages sent to the same location, so you don't have to worry about checking your work/personal/family accounts.  I've been able to stay on top of my emails a lot more since getting an iPhone, because now I check them and delete them as they come in.  Before I was checking my email rarely and would just be bogged down and overwhelmed with all of the messages waiting for me to look through them.





3. Facebook (Social Networking)
Since SmartPhones came out, I have felt as though using Facebook is as easy as text-messaging.  I get updates on notifications, and I check them as often as I check my texts.  I know a lot of people think I am on Facebook all of the time, but I am not sure how many of them understand how little time I actually spend on it.  I can accomplish so much in such a short amount of time with the Facebook app.





4. Groupon  (Shopping/Dining/Entertainment)

If you aren't getting your "Group" on, then you need to start.  Groupon is a website and app that allows you to either use your Facebook account or create a new account and receive great-deal discounts on gift cards from local, national, and international businesses.  These deals vary daily, but they are usually about 50% off of the regular price.  I will use a popular local Groupon as an example.  Nagoya Japanese Steakhouse is one of the most popular Groupons around our area.  When it is available, they offer a 50 dollar gift card for $25.  What a great deal!  The only catch is that so many people need to buy the Groupon for the deal to be on.  I have only seen a deal get canceled a couple of times, and that was toward the earlier days of Groupon.  There are many pluses for using Groupon.  For starters, it's a great way to try new places for the first time.

BTW - If you do NOT currently have a Groupon account, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE tell me and I will "refer" you! If I refer you and you create an account, I will get ten dollars to use on their site!

Now I should clarify that I don't use the app to PURCHASE my actual Groupons.  One of the best things about Groupon for me, as a Discover Card user, is that if I log into "ShopDiscover" and buy a Groupon I get 15% cash back on that purchase.  I will go back to my Nagoya example for this.  Since I spent $25 in order to get a $50 gift card to Nagoya, but I bought it through ShopDiscover I actually got $3.75 off of that purchase, making it really $21.75 for a $50 gift card.  However, then I take my Discover Rewards dollars (that $3.75) and increase them through their cashback bonus program, so that $3.75 becomes even more... up to twice as much (or $7.50!) This may seem complex, but really it isn't.  I love saving money!

NOTE:  I do not want to encourage anyone to open a credit card for these types of perks.  I only have one credit card (this Discover one) and I even consider letting that one go after going through Financial Peace with Dave Ramsay a couple of years ago.

Please purchase items responsibly!

4. Mint (Financial Planning and Organization)

I love Mint! I highly recommend it! This is an app (and website) that allows users to combine all of their banks, credit cards, and investment accounts into one place.  Once all of your accounts are linked, every check you write, debit card purchase you make, direct deposit or withdrawal, credit card swipe, etc. all gets filed chronologically through this site and placed into your personalized budgets.  I love how intuitive the program is.  It knows how to categorize almost everything except checks (those come up as they do on a bank statement as "Check 1234".)  This is definitely a great app for people who truly need to visualize their budgets.


6. Pandora (Music)

Pandora has taken over my musical life.  I used to buy hundreds of CDs and albums.  I have them all organized in files.  Now I rarely ever buy music.  Instead, I listen to it on Pandora or other similar music apps.  I use Pandora at home, school, and on the road.  I really like how if you pick an artist it plays music from other similar artists.  It also lets you give individual songs either thumbs UP or DOWN, and then it remembers what you like and don't like for future plays.



7. Pinterest (Crafting/Cooking/Hobbies)

Besides keeping family recipe cookbooks, I think cookbooks are quickly becoming a thing of the past.  Pinterest is my new cookbook.  I know from my job as a teacher that most learners are "visual learners", hence the success of Pinterest.  Pinterest takes pics of anything from baked goods to bedroom designs and allows users to "Pin" them onto various boards.  Each picture is linked to a URL which will take the user to the website that will instruct him or her how to make the pictured item.  What a concept!  It's a great way to keep all of your future craft/party/cooking/decorating ideas in one location.  You need an invitation to join, but anyone can invite you or you can request an invite through the website.  Let me know if you need an invitation and I will send you one!


8. Viggle (Televison)

This may be a new app for some of you.  I hadn't heard about it until last spring, when my former choir director told me about it on Facebook.  Viggle is an app that actually REWARDS people for watching television.  Basically, whenever you watch tv you can turn on Viggle and it will listen to your tv and give you points for checking in on that station.  Either it will be able to identify the show you are watching or it will try a couple of times and then let you search for it on your own.  Every morning I watch 13ABC news while I dry my hair.  I turn Viggle on and get rewarded points for simply watching the show I watch every single day!  Since 13ABC news is a local program it is not one that Viggle recognizes, so it doesn't matter that the hairdryer is going b/c it won't pick up the show anyway. I always have to type it in.  So far, I have earned a few thousand points but I have never redeemed them.  My former choir director has redeemed hers for gift cards, so it is legit.  A bonus to Viggle is that there are trivia games you can play during highly watched shows.  I like to play the Modern Family trivia game because it gets me more points!  A downfall to Viggle is that it really sucks the juice out of your battery, so don't use it if you won't be able to charge your phone during the day.  Honestly, I am not a big TV viewer but it's nice to earn something for watching the shows that I do watch!  If you are a person who watches HOURS of TV I would definitely recommend that you get this app!




9. Words with Friends

Words with Friends is a fun Scrabble-like game app where you and a friend can play either online, on Facebook, or on your phones.  Since I am an English teacher, I like fun word games.  This one in particular has me hooked because there isn't a time limit and you don't have to play every day.  Plus users can play up to ten games at once.  One thing I don't love about WWF is that there are words that are in our dictionary that are NOT accepted on WWF and then there are accepted words that don't even make sense!  Yet for the most part, this is a good mind-numbing app to play with a friend, family member, or complete stranger if that is your style.  Oddly enough, as I was typing this I just got a notification that it's my turn to make a move on one of my games.

Side Note: Although so far every app I have mentioned has been a free one, I actually just paid for the ad-free version of Words with Friends after using the ad-version for years.  I received an email two days ago letting me know that they were only charging 99cents for the ad-free version of WWF, so I bought it because the ads are slightly annoying.  Granted, I wouldn't have paid more than 99cents for the ad-free version, but I am happy with it because I use this app so much.

10. YouVersion Bible (Christian/Religious)

I like the YouVersion Bible app because once you create an account, you can flag your favorite verses and highlight passages plus make notes.  I also like the fact that you can choose which version of the Bible you want to read.  At both home group and church I have noticed an increase in people on their phones using this app.  I think it's fascinating because some people assume that anyone on their phone is texting.  HAH!  There is so much more to phones than texting.  If I am on my phone at home group or church it's either because I am using YouVersion or because I am taking notes on the NotePad app.  God is everywhere, right?  Even in our technology!


Well this concludes Lavender's list of app-obsessions.  I would love to know which apps you use on a daily basis.  If you were to select your 10 most-used apps, what would they be?  Once baby comes and BABY ESP for the iPhone comes out, I am sure that will replace one of these as one of my top ten apps.  More about that app though in a week or two.

Have a tech-fabulous week, friends!!! Learn something new and then come back and teach me about it!

Techie Tuesday: Featured App - Aurasma

Since it seemed like last week's Techie Tuesday post received some good feedback, I decided to stick with featuring an app for the iPad/iPhone/iPod again this week.  In fact, I might just do this every Tuesday until I can't think of anything else to feature!  Today I will feature the app for Augmented Reality called "Aurasma".  If you haven't heard of it, you better hold on... b/c it's pretty CRAZY!!!

The Aurasma App for Augmented Reality

I wanted to start with Aurasma, because Augmented Reality is all the rave right now in technology.  I first heard about AR at eTech last February, and the idea just blew my mind.  If you don't know what it is, I will do my best to paint a picture, but I would encourage you to watch this video to see Aurasma in action. 

Aurasma is an app that allows you to focus in on a picture of something and see far behind that image.  What do I mean by that?  Once you get the app downloaded, take out a twenty dollar bill, and focus your iPad/iPhone over it with the app open.  You will see that the bill turns from a piece of green paper to a multidimensional video/music/moving image.  It's unreal and terribly hard to explain on a blog.  Trust me - it's something you have to see to believe. There are TONS of images you can focus in on in order to "see beyond" its flatness.  In fact, the coolest thing about Aurasma is that you can actually make your OWN versions of augmented reality.  I have done this twice... the first with a guitar and the second with a Wizard of Oz book.  On the guitar I was able to link a video and a picture of a guy playing the guitar and the Wizard of Oz book turned into Dorothy stepping into Munchkinland after landing on the Wicked Witch of the East.  Don't get too excited; neither of these were that cool and neither provided anything worth using in the future other than simply figuring out a LITTLE about how to make my own augmented reality.  Why would this be good to know?  Well, I wouldn't mind setting up a system in my English/Theatre/Speech classroom where the students could take pics of posters in my room that would lead them to instructional videos/music/etc about that topic.  Currently that isn't really possible because my kids don't have iPads and are not allowed to use iPods in the room.  Yet maybe in a few years this will all change.  Regardless, I want to stay on top of technology so it doesn't run me over!  Seriously, before February if I would have been told about this app I would have thought the person speaking about it was from the future.  Actually, it's kind of like that.  There is so much "from the future" that is available today, it's virtually unreal! PUN INTENDED!

When I was first introduced to Augmented Reality, I was informed that people are using it everywhere for tons of different purposes.  The most interesting thing I heard about was that there were specific t-shirts being made for augmented reality.  I heard that some people are wearing them at college sporting events and you can walk up to the t-shirt wearer and zoom in on their shirt and their school mascot will come alive and their fight song will play.  To me that seems a bit intrusive.  I mean, think of it... complete strangers are walking up to you and zooming in on an image that is plastered across your chest.  Yet I guess if you bought the shirt, you want people to do that... so it's your choice!  Anyway, I haven't been able to find anything like that to show you but I did find this video on marketing with Aurasma. Pretty crazy stuff, eh?

This Techie Teacher Recommends Aurasma for:

• Teachers! Play around with creating your own augmented reality for a more inner-active classroom.
• People who are interested in new marketing techniques.  This is like the next "QR Code" phase.
• People who are creative and want to tell stories within stories within stories.
• People who want to stay on top of what's next in technology.

This Techie Teacher does NOT Recommend Aurasma for:

• No one really!

Main Downfall of the App (if any):

• Augmented Reality is new and expanding every day.  I wouldn't say that there is a DOWNFALL to this app, it's just that you might not use it all of the time unless you create your own.
  

If you think that Augmented Reality is just a fad that will be leaving soon, think again.  In my opinion, this is just the tip of the iceberg of the future.  Here is one final video on the possibilities for Augmented Reality within the new few years.  In fact, I bet that this video becomes truth in less than a year's time.

What are your thoughts?

Techie Tuesdays: iPad Training Session and Featured App Review: TourWrist

As many of you know, Dom and I invested in an iPad last Black Friday.  (We didn't open it until Christmas though... isn't THAT impressive?)  Since getting an iPad, I have been working on improving my understanding of its countless functions and capabilities.  I was fortunate enough to represent my school district for a second time at the eTech conference in Columbus back in February.  It was there that I learned a little more than I knew before.  Yet understandably, technology is an ongoing and ever-chaning process.  I have made it my goal to try to keep up with its changes, because if I don't I (like many other frustrated people) will get run over.  Therefore, I knew I wanted to schedule and attend regular trainings for my new gadget.

In the spring, I arranged for our staff to go through two voluntary after-school iPad trainings given by our NWOET representative. Both of these were big successes.  The teachers who attended one (or both) sessions walked away with a handful of new apps they could use in their lives and classrooms right away. In addition to learning a ton about the iPad, I loved the fact that the training was done by a person who is open to learning from his students as much as teaching them.  Technology allows students to become the teachers at times, and I believe that is a big step to engaging learners in today's classrooms, so I felt that our instructor modeling this was an excellent move on his part.

Below is the link to the presentation for the iPad training I hosted at school.  I promised a lot of people on Facebook that I would post it, so here it is. WARNING:  This is an "INTERMEDIATE" training.  If you are looking for the basics of iPads, then this is not where to look.  It is also not advanced, so don't expect that either!  Before you click on the link, here are some directions you will need once you get to that site:

- Click on the link to the training

- Look for the QR code on the right side of the screen

- Below that code there is a link that says, "iPad Intermediate Presentation" 

- Click on that to open the training session
- There you have it!  Read through at your own pace, some of this will be new and some will probably be review for you! 

- NOTE: You might even want to save it to your iBooks account so you will have it indefinitely!

- ok, NOW you can may begin here: Intermediate iPad Training 

I will be identifying some of my favorite apps in later "Tech Tuesday" blog posts, but I will leave you with one today.  I am really digging TourWrist right now because it takes your iPad or iPhone and turns it into a viewfinder.  You can search anything from the London Bridge to a cafe in San Fransisco where you would like to eat brunch.  Once you find what you are looking for (say a hotel in New York) you simply check the "tour" out by moving your iPad or iPhone up, down, and around like a pair of glasses and you can see a 360 degree image of the place!  Try looking off a cliff!!! It's so trippy!

This Techie Teacher Recommends TourWrist for:

• Teachers!  You can take kids ANYWHERE with technology. Our district cut field trips out of its budget YEARS ago, but even then we could never take a kid to the Great Wall of China!
• People who are about to go on a vacation and want to check out hot spots, resorts, clubs, diners, hotels, etc.
• People who are interested in geography and landmarks.
• People who want to look silly moving their iPads or iPhones up, down, and around while waiting in the doctor's office.

This Techie Teacher does NOT Recommend TourWrist for:

• People who get motion sickness.

Main Downfall of the App (if any):

• Like most apps, it is still fairly new, so there aren't as many "tours" as I would like to see.  Yet keep TourWrist on your radar;  I am fairly certain it is going to do some amazing things very soon.
  

Please feel free to share your favorite apps with me as well.  Like I said before, technology is amazing in that the students can actually become the teachers and then learning can become the circular activity that I believe it was always designed to be.  I love learning, so PLEASE ... teach me! :)