Here’s a secret: Teenagers like to read. They really do.

It’s just not cool enough, especially in public.

I mean, how uncool is it to be 14 years old riding the bus with a paperback in your hands? All your friends have iPhones and iPods and various other high-status accessories.

That’s part of the reason teenagers prefer Kindles over physical books. High-tech devices bring status.

The problem is, the Kindle isn’t high-tech enough. The iPad and Kindle Fire win out there. But the Kindle is superior for reading.

Therefore, the Kindle needs a little bit extra. That’s where Octovo sleeves come in.

Available for the Kindle Keyboard, these polyurethane sleeves ($9.75) come in six sharp colors: orange, blue, yellow, pink, gray, and black. They tell the world, loud and clear, “Yeah, I’m a reader. Do you have a problem with that?”

You might think this is silly, but it really isn’t. Until a revolution occurs in our country that propels reading to be more significant in teenagers’ lives than music, it’s crucial to make reading as tantalizing and high-status as possible. 

GroupMe, a group text messaging service, recently won SXSW’s Digital Breakout Award. I can see why. My students love GroupMe.

GroupMe gives you a phone number that you can share with a group. Text that number, and everyone gets it. You can also conference call.

Since my post in September, my students have used GroupMe to get help on their homework and to coordinate class projects. There’s plenty of room for jokes and banter, too.

Even students with computers prefer GroupMe. It’s faster than Facebook. I love Edmodo, but it’s just not as universal as GroupMe. GroupMe is just a text away, and you get the whole group at the same time.

The only problem comes if the group becomes too large. One of my groups is 17 students big, and there was conflict a couple months ago when someone thought GroupMe was Twitter. For students without unlimited text plans, it doesn’t work. Even though you can mute incoming texts, it’s best when everyone in the group gets the messages.

Next year, I think I’m going to require students to sign up either for GroupMe or another service that will encourage peer support. The best classes are ones where students know they can get help from the teacher but also realize the importance of supporting each other. 

How often does this happen to you?

It’s late at night. You have a hard copy of a handout, but you need to modify it for your students. You don’t have the Word file of the document, so you end up wasting your time retyping it.

Up until I found Zamzar, that happened to me a lot.

Zamzar is my favorite file conversion application. It’s free, and it handles nearly every image, document, music, and video format out there.

You don’t even need to register. Just select a file to convert, choose the format you want, and type in your email address. In just a few minutes, your converted file gets emailed to you.

Students love Zamzar, too. Before Google Docs, when essays were due, students would stampede me, desperate to convert their WordPerfect or Works files to Word. Once the word about Zamzar got around campus, the stress declined. Now there are fewer complaints about how our technology is “so old.”

PDF to Word: Better than Zamzar for PDFs
Most popular for teachers, of course, is converting a PDF to doc format. At my school, the administration is notorious for sending out forms for us to use without providing a soft copy. We’re expected to fill them out by hand. I suppose there is a concern we’d modify the form too much.

In this case, I recommend PDF to Word. It’s also free, and it’s better than Zamzar with PDFs. It returns your document with excellent accuracy. I’ve been especially impressed by how well it does with graphics.

Of course, remember the ultimate goal: uploading your converted document to Google Docs. Although it’s another step (scanned hard copy to PDF to Word document to Google Doc), now you can share your file with others.

Before Google Docs, the No. 1 thing excuse my students gave me on due dates was, “My printer didn’t work.” Or: “My printer ran out of ink.” Or: “I don’t have a printer and didn’t have time to go to my friend’s house.”

As teachers, we know that some of those excuses are just that: excuses. But for some students, it’s a legitimate concern.

No matter how much I replied, “If you don’t have a printer at home, it’s your responsibility to print it here before class begins,” I found that the same (underperforming) students would inevitably come in the next due date (late or right on time) with the same excuse.

Instead of repeating that teacher-y refrain, I looked for a solution to this mess. And I think I found it: PrinterShare. Although Google Docs is still the best answer, if you’re not on Google yet or still prefer a hard copy of students’ final drafts, PrinterShare is a strong alternative.

PrinterShare lets you share the printer in your room so that students can print to it from anywhere with an Internet connection. This means they can print from their house, their friend’s house, the library, or even from their iPhone!

PrinterShare requires a quick download (Windows, Apple, and Linux are supported). Once you do that, the PrinterShare console comes up on your desktop. From there, you can name your printer and share it with your students.

The only hard part is that your students have to download the program at home. (This seems easy, but I’ve found that unless it’s LimeWire, some of my students struggle with this part.) Then, when they go to print their document on Microsoft Word, PrinterShare comes up as one of the available printers! All they have to do is search for your printer and press OK.

PrinterShare comes with some great options. For example, you can require that you approve requests before printing, which will decrease wasted paper from students who like to print their documents 100 times. On the other hand, the free version prints a cover page (like a fax) before the actual document, which is annoying.

One more annoying feature: In order for you to share your printer, your computer needs to be on all the time with PrinterShare running. (This might bother environmental folks.) You can choose to have it always running in the background, but then you run into possibly slowing down your computer.

Despite those problems, PrinterShare is still a great choice to offer your students. Instead of racing to school early to print their essay right at the last second, students can get some extra sleep knowing that their document will get to you safely.

Every once in a while, a trendy application comes out that makes me wonder, “Do we really need that?”

First it was Twitter. Now it’s Evernote.

Evernote, hardly a newcomer to online notetaking, lets you save and organize web clippings, photos, and handwritten notes, among other things. It wants to become “your second brain” or “your external brain.”

I don’t want any of my brains to be that disorganized.

Maybe it’s just that I’m a teacher and I can’t see myself walking around the supermarket taking pictures of sake labels, as CEO Phil Libin from Evernote seems to do, given this promo video. (He also likes ninja shirts.) (He also uses Evernote to remember where he put his car.)

Let me be fair: I’m all for organization, and Evernote claims to organize your life. Whatever notes you create — whether by typing them, clipping them from a website, or taking a picture of them — are accessible online from any device, including your mobile phone.

The problem is, the service encourages you not to organize your stuff. Sure, it lets you tag notes and create notebooks. But all their advertising suggests don’t! Instead, save everything all in one place and then search for it later! Evernote is “a tool for lazy slobs,” Phil says. Well, perhaps there are many people out there who can get away with loose organization systems, but teachers in general cannot.

Evernote’s photo + OCR capability makes things even worse, particularly if you have an iPhone. Because it can scan pretty much anything you throw at it, there’s no reason not to start taking pictures of all your student work. Yes, you can do this with Evernote, but that doesn’t mean you should. It becomes anti-organization overkill.

I’ve spent several hours over the last couple months trying to make Evernote work for me. After all, Lifehacker called it “the most popular note-taking application.”  But I just don’t get it. It’s clunky, it’s complicated, it just doesn’t work for me.

Of course, some people would say the same thing about Google Apps and Live Mesh, so I would be happy to hear from teachers who find Evernote helpful. Please let me know how you use it!