Good things will go away, and when they do, they are replaced with better things. That's a principle I am seeing play out time and time again in the world of technology. It's also a principle that we see demonstrated in many areas of life. In this series of posts, we will examine some of the tools which served me well...until they ceased to exist. The over-arching theme is that what is good gets replaces by something that is better.
In December 2007, I posted "Who Do You Want to Jott?" It was a service that let me call a phone number I had stored my phone's contacts as a speed dial, leave a voice message, and have that message show up in my email with everything I had said transcribed into text. When I handled my email, I would also handle the message.
Like the other posts you will read in this thread, I found myself without Jott. Well...not exactly. Jott was still there, but it was no longer free. I started searching the Internet to see if there was something else that did the same thing. I found the answer in this post.
reQall has been serving as an alternative ever since. This video gives you an idea of some practical applicationsl:
If you visit the reQall site today, you will see that they are now transitioning to be more of a Siri-like service. The site shows them to accepting beta testers for the new service they will unveil:
Voice input is something that began for me with Jott. When the service was no longer free for me and others, it was a disappointment. But the disappointment did not last long. Probably nothing has come further in the last several years than the concept of voice input on our mobile devices. An upcoming post on Google Now will illustrate what I mean. Check back in a couple of weeks for that one
Good things will go away, and when they do, they are replaced with better things.
Showing posts with label ReQall. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ReQall. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 03, 2013
Friday, February 01, 2013
School Leadership Briefing Follow-Up
Toodledo Toodledo is a powerful web-based to-do list. It works with PC or Mac. Apps are available allowing you to sync any of your mobile devices to Toodledo. I recently composed a 6-part series on Toodledo. You can read Part 1 here.
igHome
igHome is a personalized homepage. It is the perfect tool for those who use iGoogle and are looking for a replace when iGoogle ceases to exist on November 1. On February 11, my post will explain igHome. By that time, you may already have your igHome page established.Dropbox
Put anything in Dropbox and retrieve it on any of your computers, mobile devices, or any computer in the world with Internet access. I composed an e-book to guide you through a strategy for using Dropbox.Click on the cover to download.
 |
| Click on the cover to download the free Dropbox E-Book |
Evernote
Evernote is a great place to store and organize commonly-accessed information. The information is then available on any of your computers, mobile devices, or any computer in the world with Internet access. On February 4, my post will talk about the notebooks I suggest you create when you get started with Evernote.Voice Input
This area is becoming a major player in the world of smartphones. Everyone has seen the commercials advertising Siri. In the audio segment, we examine using voice input to get "to-dos" into your system, specifically getting them into your email so that when you handle your email, you are handling the voice notes (now transcribed to text) as well. To set up a reQall account, go to reQall.com/app.
For Vlingo, go to the site where you download apps for your smartphone and search for Vlingo. Recently, Vlingo for Android has been replaced with a program called "Dragon Mobile Assistant." Currently, Dragon will not allow you to email by voice, functionality that is necessary to get those random thoughts into your system. The app promises this functionality will be there soon.
Each of these 5 tools represents a major player in my productivity arsenal. They help me quickly access the information I need when I need it. Thanks for listening to the School Leadership Briefing segment. Feel free to leave a comment or ask a question.
Monday, January 16, 2012
Webinar Follow-Up: Your Questions Answered (Part II)
In this post, we continue with questions posed during the "Free Tech Tools for a More Productive New Year"
webinar. In the last post, we answered questions related to Dropbox. Here are questions related to iGoogle, Google Docs forms, and reQall.
1. Will Safari support an iGoogle home page?
Yes. You can use any browser to access your iGoogle page.
2. You talked about sending e-mails to people who had requested tickets to the graduation ceremony where Dr. Condoleezza Rice was the guest speaker. Did you have to hand enter all of those e-mails?
Composing the email was a matter of copy, paste, and clean-up. I highlighted the column with the e-mails from the first response all the way down to the last person that could have been seated in our auditorium. I then copied and pasted that information into a Word document. Starting with the last name, I hit the "Home" key, "Backspace," a semicolon, and a space. I kept doing that until I had all of the e-mails in one long string that went all the way across the page and wrapped from line to line. I then highlighted and copied the whole block and pasted it into the bcc line of the e-mail.
The next step was to go back to Google Docs and perform the same task with the rest of the e-mail addresses, those for the people who would watch closed-circuit TV from the high school gym.
3. Can I use Google forms to create a test?
Yes. On one level, it is very easy to create a test on Google Docs. Students would take the test by clicking the link you provide, and their answers would appear on your Google Docs spreadsheet. Instead of having a stack of papers to grade, student answers would all appear in one spreadsheet.
On a different level, it is possible to construct the Google Docs spreadsheet where it will also grade the students' work. The caveat is that the answers must have a one-to-one character match with the answer key. For example, you could do multiple choice tests. You could do spelling tests. Short answer questions would not work since each person's answer may vary slightly in wording from what you entered in the answer key.
For more information on this topic, take a look at this post.
4. I teach English and the readings are rather long for a form. Is there a limit to the length of the question?
I took a passage about half a page in length and pasted it into the spreadsheet. Realize this means pasting the entire block of text into one cell. Google Docs allowed me to do it and displayed all of the text when I created the form.
I found, however, that I could not break the text into paragraphs. If there was a paragraph break, Google Docs would paste the text from paragraph 2 into row 2, text from paragraph 3 into row 3, etc., which is no good. Since the longer passages you are talking about probably more than one paragraph in length, Google Docs would not work for a test with long reading passages.
If anyone else does some playing around with this concept and finds something significant, I would certainly like to know!
5. Does reQall only work with English language? Does it recognize accents?
I had never thought about this point before. I tried having Spanish spoken into reQall, but it became obvious reQall was trying to match what it heard with English words in its database. "¿Habla usted español?" came back as, "Home instead espanol." "Buenos días, señorita" came back, "Buenos dias senor burritto."
6. Do you manage to-dos on reQall or manually enter into your own list?
I personally use reQall for one thing: getting information that comes to me out of my brain and into my e-mail. Then, when I sit down to handle my e-mail, I will see the reQall message I created and act on it. I am a heavy Outlook user and routinely use "drag and drop" to turn e-mails into tasks.If the e-mail is not something I am going to act on right then, I "drag and drop" it to the Task list. I can do any rewording, choose a start and end date for the task, and save.
You could, however, use reQall as your to-do list. In this case, you would download the reQall app to your Smartphone and download the reQall gadget to your iGoogle page. Now, when you speak and include a a term such as "Saturday" or "August 21," reQall automatically assigns the appropriate due date.
In addition, you can manually enter tasks along with due dates on the reQall website or on the reQall Smartphone app. Personally, I like Outlook because it gives me calendar, to-do list, contacts, reference material, and e-mail all in one program. But if you do not have Outlook, using reQall as your to-do list is not a bad option.
7. If we missed the first part of this webinar, is it available online? Will this be archived so we can access it again? I would like to go back over some the of the instructions.
The webinar is now available on demand. Go to this link. If you already registered for the webinar, you will see one link to click. You will be asked for the e-mail address you gave when you registered. The webinar will stay up for around 60 days, so you can watch it as often as you like. We covered a great deal of ground, so watching a second or even third time will help with things you may have missed the first time.
I did notice when I watched the webinar myself that you do not seem to be able to pause the webinar or to skip forwards or backwards. (If I missed something, someone please correct me.) So, pick a time when you could watch straight through without interruption.
8. May I share the archive with colleagues and refer to planners for a conference I attend?
Absolutely! Have them go to the same link we talked about in the last question. Someone who did not register for the webinar original will see a link which will ask for some information, and then they will be able to proceed with the webinar.
If what you saw would fit with a conference you attend, please share this with with the conference planners. I think people are hungry for practical things they can implement immediately, and that's what I have tried to provide.
9. Where do you find these types of tools? From reading tech mags? I'm just always amazed about these things that exist, yet I've never heard of them!
What a super question and great way for me to plug using Web 2.0 as your personal learning network! I subscribe to over 100 blogs, and use Google Reader to bring all of the new content to one place (on my iGoogle home page) to make it easy.
At the same time, I am pretty ruthless about using as few tools as I get by with. When I read about the capabilities of new tools, I ask myself if I already have something that does pretty much the same thing. If the answer is "yes," and what I have is working, I stick with it. If it's something that fills a void, however, devote some time to mastering it and immediately start using it. Each of the tools you saw in this webinar fit in that second category. There was nothing like them in my arsenal, and each made a huge difference in my productivity.
What other questions do you have about the webinar? If you are just learning about it through reading these last couple of posts, this is your invitation to listen to it and then return here to ask your own questions.
1. Will Safari support an iGoogle home page?
Yes. You can use any browser to access your iGoogle page.
2. You talked about sending e-mails to people who had requested tickets to the graduation ceremony where Dr. Condoleezza Rice was the guest speaker. Did you have to hand enter all of those e-mails?
Composing the email was a matter of copy, paste, and clean-up. I highlighted the column with the e-mails from the first response all the way down to the last person that could have been seated in our auditorium. I then copied and pasted that information into a Word document. Starting with the last name, I hit the "Home" key, "Backspace," a semicolon, and a space. I kept doing that until I had all of the e-mails in one long string that went all the way across the page and wrapped from line to line. I then highlighted and copied the whole block and pasted it into the bcc line of the e-mail.
The next step was to go back to Google Docs and perform the same task with the rest of the e-mail addresses, those for the people who would watch closed-circuit TV from the high school gym.
3. Can I use Google forms to create a test?
Yes. On one level, it is very easy to create a test on Google Docs. Students would take the test by clicking the link you provide, and their answers would appear on your Google Docs spreadsheet. Instead of having a stack of papers to grade, student answers would all appear in one spreadsheet.
On a different level, it is possible to construct the Google Docs spreadsheet where it will also grade the students' work. The caveat is that the answers must have a one-to-one character match with the answer key. For example, you could do multiple choice tests. You could do spelling tests. Short answer questions would not work since each person's answer may vary slightly in wording from what you entered in the answer key.
For more information on this topic, take a look at this post.
4. I teach English and the readings are rather long for a form. Is there a limit to the length of the question?
I took a passage about half a page in length and pasted it into the spreadsheet. Realize this means pasting the entire block of text into one cell. Google Docs allowed me to do it and displayed all of the text when I created the form.
I found, however, that I could not break the text into paragraphs. If there was a paragraph break, Google Docs would paste the text from paragraph 2 into row 2, text from paragraph 3 into row 3, etc., which is no good. Since the longer passages you are talking about probably more than one paragraph in length, Google Docs would not work for a test with long reading passages.
If anyone else does some playing around with this concept and finds something significant, I would certainly like to know!
5. Does reQall only work with English language? Does it recognize accents?
I had never thought about this point before. I tried having Spanish spoken into reQall, but it became obvious reQall was trying to match what it heard with English words in its database. "¿Habla usted español?" came back as, "Home instead espanol." "Buenos días, señorita" came back, "Buenos dias senor burritto."
6. Do you manage to-dos on reQall or manually enter into your own list?
I personally use reQall for one thing: getting information that comes to me out of my brain and into my e-mail. Then, when I sit down to handle my e-mail, I will see the reQall message I created and act on it. I am a heavy Outlook user and routinely use "drag and drop" to turn e-mails into tasks.If the e-mail is not something I am going to act on right then, I "drag and drop" it to the Task list. I can do any rewording, choose a start and end date for the task, and save.
You could, however, use reQall as your to-do list. In this case, you would download the reQall app to your Smartphone and download the reQall gadget to your iGoogle page. Now, when you speak and include a a term such as "Saturday" or "August 21," reQall automatically assigns the appropriate due date.
In addition, you can manually enter tasks along with due dates on the reQall website or on the reQall Smartphone app. Personally, I like Outlook because it gives me calendar, to-do list, contacts, reference material, and e-mail all in one program. But if you do not have Outlook, using reQall as your to-do list is not a bad option.
7. If we missed the first part of this webinar, is it available online? Will this be archived so we can access it again? I would like to go back over some the of the instructions.
The webinar is now available on demand. Go to this link. If you already registered for the webinar, you will see one link to click. You will be asked for the e-mail address you gave when you registered. The webinar will stay up for around 60 days, so you can watch it as often as you like. We covered a great deal of ground, so watching a second or even third time will help with things you may have missed the first time.
I did notice when I watched the webinar myself that you do not seem to be able to pause the webinar or to skip forwards or backwards. (If I missed something, someone please correct me.) So, pick a time when you could watch straight through without interruption.
8. May I share the archive with colleagues and refer to planners for a conference I attend?
Absolutely! Have them go to the same link we talked about in the last question. Someone who did not register for the webinar original will see a link which will ask for some information, and then they will be able to proceed with the webinar.
If what you saw would fit with a conference you attend, please share this with with the conference planners. I think people are hungry for practical things they can implement immediately, and that's what I have tried to provide.
9. Where do you find these types of tools? From reading tech mags? I'm just always amazed about these things that exist, yet I've never heard of them!
What a super question and great way for me to plug using Web 2.0 as your personal learning network! I subscribe to over 100 blogs, and use Google Reader to bring all of the new content to one place (on my iGoogle home page) to make it easy.
At the same time, I am pretty ruthless about using as few tools as I get by with. When I read about the capabilities of new tools, I ask myself if I already have something that does pretty much the same thing. If the answer is "yes," and what I have is working, I stick with it. If it's something that fills a void, however, devote some time to mastering it and immediately start using it. Each of the tools you saw in this webinar fit in that second category. There was nothing like them in my arsenal, and each made a huge difference in my productivity.
What other questions do you have about the webinar? If you are just learning about it through reading these last couple of posts, this is your invitation to listen to it and then return here to ask your own questions.
Monday, January 02, 2012
Free Tech Tools for a More Productive New Year
Free Webinar
January 10
4:30 EST/3:30 CST
iGoogleDropbox
Google Docs Forms
reQall
Every year, one of the most popular New Year's resolutions is to"Get Organized!" This free, hour-long webinar shows you how to make life easier with four game-changing technology tools.
This webinar shows you how to:
- Use iGoogle to organize all of your Internet resources.
- Use Dropbox to instantly backup your documents and give you access to then from anywhere.
- Use Google Docs to forever change the way you think about paper forms.
- Use reQall to trap voice notes on the fly. Have them show up as text in your e-mail.
Already familiar with one or more? Gain some new ideas for how to use these great tools.
Space is limited, so sign up today!
Tuesday, March 01, 2011
Talladega Chamber Ambassadors
I enjoyed speaking to the Talladega Chamber Ambassadors tonight, a fine group of high school students who are doing great things to make their community a better place to live.
As promised, this post recaps what we talked about:
reQall
iGoogle is like your own personal dashboard of all of your "stuff" every time you open your browser. You can also log in to your iGoogle page from any computer that has internet access so that you now have access to your tools from anywhere.
How do I get an iGoogle page?
Google Bookmarks
Google Reader
Twitter
Facebook
Bit.ly URL Shortener
Weather
CNN.com
CNN Technology
People.com
ESPN.com
MapQuest Driving Directions
Area/Zip Code Lookup
Music
YouTube
Document to PDF
Movies
GoogleDocs
GoogleCalendar
reQall
Google Map Search
Portfolio Monitor
Calculator
Stopwatch
Flight Status
Wolfram/Alpha
If you have more than one computer, be sure to log into your iGoogle page and make it the home page on your other computer. When you are in a library or at some other computer away from home, you can go to Google and log into your iGoogle page. There's all of your stuff just like you were sitting at home!
As promised, this post recaps what we talked about:
reQall
- Set up your free account at www.reqall.com.
- After telling reQall what phone numbers you would be calling from and giving reQall your e-mail address, put reQall's number (1-888-973-7255) in your phone as a contact and make it a speed dial.
- You can get a free reQall app. Click for BlackBerry, iPhone, or Android.
iGoogle is like your own personal dashboard of all of your "stuff" every time you open your browser. You can also log in to your iGoogle page from any computer that has internet access so that you now have access to your tools from anywhere.
How do I get an iGoogle page?
- Go to www.Google.com
- In the upper right corner, look for "iGoogle" and "sign-in." Click "sign-in" to sign in to your Google account. If you don't have one, create one. It's free. You have to have a Google account in order to have an iGoogle page.
- Go back to Google and click the link that says "iGoogle."
- You are now at your iGoogle page.
- Look for a link somewhere on the page that talks about making iGoogle your homepage. You will want to click that.
- Now the fun starts. You get to choose the design for the top of the page and the "gadgets" you will have on your page. Look for "Change theme" and "Add stuff" at the top right.
- You can get rid of any of the "stuff" by clicking on the "x."
- You can re-arrange where each window is located by clicking and dragging it somewhere else on the screen.
- Many of the gadgets have a little down arrow you can click to edit the settings. That way you can get the weather for your specific zip code, driving directions with your home address already filled in as the starting point, etc.
Google Bookmarks
Google Reader
Bit.ly URL Shortener
Weather
CNN.com
CNN Technology
People.com
ESPN.com
MapQuest Driving Directions
Area/Zip Code Lookup
Music
YouTube
Document to PDF
Movies
GoogleDocs
GoogleCalendar
reQall
Google Map Search
Portfolio Monitor
Calculator
Stopwatch
Flight Status
Wolfram/Alpha
If you have more than one computer, be sure to log into your iGoogle page and make it the home page on your other computer. When you are in a library or at some other computer away from home, you can go to Google and log into your iGoogle page. There's all of your stuff just like you were sitting at home!
Monday, February 15, 2010
reQall Part 2: Final CLAS Follow-Up
In the last post, we examined reQall. I think you will not only enjoy this video, but will also sympathize with the leading character. We all forget. The good news is that there are tools available that can help. Remember, when we are doing the best we can with the tools we have, our improvement opportunity is to get better tools!This blog was created over 5 years ago for the purpose of providing the follow-up needed to make professional development work. We covered a great deal of ground in a hour. Hopefully, these last several posts have made the tools we talked about clearer. Thanks again for coming to the session and for your support of CLAS!
Thursday, February 11, 2010
reQall: CLAS Conference Follow-Up
The final tool we examined was reQall. I have no doubt that many of you have already established an account. Here are a couple of posts that cover the service in more depth:- Oh No...Jott's Not Free (But reQall is) This post provides an explanation based on my initial experiences. Actually, I was mistaken about one point in that post. For you to "share" a message with someone else (have what you say sent in am e-mail to them), they do not have to have a reQall account. All who you have to do is add them to your contacts in reQall.
- Demonstration of reQall This video provides an explanation of the service
- reQall Videos Here are two more videos which demonstrate the capabilities of reQall.
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Saturday, August 23, 2008
Oh No...Jott's Not Free! (But reQall is)
Just a week ago, I was writing about Jott. I have been using it since December to leave quick voice messages for myself and close friends which would be automatically transcribed to e-mails. I wrote about my experiences here.
Well, here is the bad news...as of September 8, Jott is no longer a free service. While one plan is still listed as free, it removes the service's best feature--being able to send messages straight to someone's e-mail.
A quick internet search of "alternatives to Jott" put me onto this Lifehacker post. In a few minutes, I was up and running with reQall.
The direction are pretty straightforward. You will be asked to set up a free account by supplying your name, choosing a user name and password, providing the phone number (or numbers) from which you are going to be calling, and supplying an e-mail address.
In the "Notifications" section, I put check marks beside "e-mail." Finally, I added the reQall phone number (1-888-973-7255) to my BlackBerry contacts and set it as a speed dial key.
I composed several sample messages. Within 10-15 minutes, the messages I left were showing up in my e-mail.
The major way I had used Jott was to send reminders to myself, so reQall is a good substitute. What about sending messages to someone else? Add them as a contact at the reQall site and you can "share" a message.
What you have read here are my perceptions after just a few minutes with reQall. Does anyone else had more experience with this or similar services?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)