Creating collaborative flashcards for mobile devices with Google Slides

Creating flashcards collaboratively with Google Slides is very simple. In Google Drive you need to create a new presentation for the flashcards and share it with your collaborators. Choose a template that suits you (I find “label” quite handy for flashcards). Create the title slide (e.g. “animal flashcards”) and a first slide, which serves as template for all others.

All other content slides are then created by duplicating the latter slide. The students can easily add content by using the search tool for images and typing the text underneath them. Alternatively photos uploaded to Picasa by the students themselves can also be used. Adding the “flip” transition to all slides even provides the feel of flashcards.

The final step would be to download the flashcards to mobile devices which can be done in different ways:

• Using the Google Drive app
• Downloading the slides as a file (pdf or pptx)
• Using a browser and the shared URL

In order to permanently store the content on the phone the first two options are best. Google Drives allows for offline viewing when using the pin tool in the file menu. 

Listening to podcasts on Android using Google Reader

Update: Google had decided not to support Google Listen anymore. You can still follow these instructions and use an alternative podcatcher (e.g. BeyondPod) instead.
Ingredients:

• Google Search
• Google Reader
• Google Listen

If you have an iOS device like an iPod you probably know where to go to when you want to listen to a podcast: iTunes. There is nothing like iTunes for Android and there are many ways to get podcasts on your device. The most confortable one is probably using Google Reader and Google Listen.  When you subscribe to a podcast on the internet Google Reader puts the feeds in a separate folder “Listen subscriptions”. It is possible to listen or download the podcasts via Google Reader as it has got an integrated audio player. Chances are, however, that you would like to listen to the podcast on your mobile device.