Today’s article was written by guest blogger Jason Schmidt. Jason is an instructional technologist for Bennington Public Schools in Bennington, Nebraska, as well as a Mimio Quick Learn moderator.

For years, PowerPoint has been the de facto standard across the country for creating presentations. While PowerPoint can be an excellent tool for enhancing your speaking skills, it lacks much of the collaboration and annotation abilities that are the strengths of MimioStudio™ classroom software. For as long as I can remember, PowerPoint presentations could be imported into MimioStudio Notebook. This has been a great way to reuse content that you have already created by adding shapes, reveals, and annotations, but any ability to interact with the objects and animations in those files was lost in the process. With the next update to MimioStudio software (available in September), you will gain the ability to import not only the entire static slideshow, but also the objects, graphics, animations, links, and media.

Big news: we have some upgrades coming to our MimioMobile™ application and MimioStudio™ classroom software.  These upgrades are focused on collaboration and assessment, key components of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Here are the new features, in a nutshell:

• Support for iPhone 4 and up, iPod touch, and (drumroll, please) Android devices!
• Create assessments with short-answer, short-essay, and numeric student responses, which will help prepare students for upcoming Common Core assessments that will use open-response test items.
• Automatically record multiple-choice, numeric, and short-answer responses in MimioStudio Gradebook, eliminating the need for teachers to hand-grade tests.
• Enhanced PowerPoint importing and object-level editing; audio and video remain active in INK files.

The new upgrades will be available in September. If you purchase before then, don’t worry – upgrades are free while your license is active.

To see MimioMobile in action, watch our Mimio Goes Mobile webinar.

“Learning should be centered on the student, not the teacher. And isn’t that really what flipped learning is all about? It’s about compelling teachers like me to reflect on our practice and rethink how we reach our students. It’s about encouraging students to set the pace so that truly individualized instruction takes place. It’s about stirring teachers and students alike to change the way they’ve always done things.”

Make practicing phonics engaging with these easy grab and go phonics lessons activities.  Have fun with letter sounds in the lower grades, beginning and ending blends in the middle grades and jump right into prefixes and suffixes for the upper elementary grades. Can’t find exactly what you need? Then take images from the phonics gallery and one of the many templates in this pack and create just exactly what you need quick and easy! 

Last week I had the pleasure of sitting down with Chris Cacioppo, our fearless leader of R&D, to talk about the MimioMobile™ iPad app. We’ve already told you about the app’s features and benefits on our product page and in our marketing activities, but I was interested in hearing about the process of creating the MimioMobile app, why we decided it was the right thing to do, and how this app will help the educators we serve. If you have questions about the MimioMobile app, go ahead and leave them in the comments section below, and I will get Chris to answer them for you.

Join us on Friday May 3^rd at 4:30 EST for our next free webinar. Paul Gigliotti will talk about creating engaging, blended learning environments using collaborative, project-based learning tools and content from Mimio. With over 14 years in the classroom, Paul lives and breathes social studies and educational technology. His enthusiasm is contagious so this is sure to be a fun hour! 

In recent months we have had a great deal of news to share with you, our friends and customers, about Mimio’s proven educational tools.

Recently a customer asked us the following question: “I have been asked many times how Mimio got its name. Since the name can refer to the older mimeo duplicating machine, people ask why?” We are fortunate because one of the founders of our company happens to be our General Manager, Manny Perez, so we were able to quickly get our answer. Here’s what Manny had to say: