TodaysMeet

Have you ever wanted to grab feedback from your audience while a video was running or you were giving a presentation? How about questions that students have while reading a book or doing a lesson?

Check out www.TodaysMeet.com.  TodaysMeet is a back channel tool. Back channel means: everything that's going on in a room that that isn't coming from the main presentation. By using this back channel tool, students can go to a link provided and enter responses or questions in the form of a 140 character text.

You, as the leader of the room, create a room and give it a name. You then decide how long the room will be active. (You have the choice of 2 hours, 8, hours, 12 hours, 1 day, 1 week, 1 month or 1 year).  Next you want to copy your room link and share it with your users. (You may want to bookmark your url for future use.) Users will then follow the link, enter their name and start typing messages.

Try my room here to see an example: http://todaysmeet.com/AmandaBurns I've left my room open for 1 year so anytime users visit this link they will see all the responses from the past year.

This site is very simple, so you don't have to worry about configuring much more then listed above, although one cool thing you can do is when you are in the room you can turn on speaker colors to show each user in a different color. You can also download a transcript of the rooms messages.

Things to remember: 

• Anyone with the link can access the site
• User name can be anything, so look out for fake user names
• You cannot remove a message once its been entered
• You are only limited to 140 characters
• Try using the @ symbol to reach out to specific members
• Once your room is expired, you can no longer access it. 

<a href="http://www.bloglovin.com/blog/10717245/?claim=wuhqs9x5vun">Follow my blog with Bloglovin</a>

Apple: 5 Years of the App Store

Congratulations Apple!!

In 2008, the launch of the Apple App store, we had just 500 apps. Today, we are over 900,000(375,000 native to iPad) . That is amazing, right? To celebrate their success Apple is giving everyone 5 games and 5 apps that have shown great success over the past 5 years. 

The apps you will be able to download are:

Barefoot World Atlas:an interactive guide to the world

Day One: a personal journalism app

How to Cook Everything: a guide to cooking over 2000 recipes

Over: add awesome text and doodles to your photos

Traktor Dj for iPhone: Famous DJ mixing apps

The games you will be able to download are:

Badland and Infinity Blade II : both action packed games with stunning graphics

Superbrothers:Sword & Sworcery EP- Story based puzzle game

Tiny Wings and Where's my Water: puzzle game based with creative characters

How to get your free apps:

Go to the app store

Click on Featured at the bottom of the page

You should see an Add that looks like this: 

*** remember, these may only be free for a limited time so be sure to check it out before its over!

Also, While there, check out the Milestone section to really see how far the App store has come, some fun facts include what countries got access to the app store and most popular apps to hit the store!