Education Technology

One of the true keys to learning and developing any ability is the willingness and capacity to reflect on what we have learned. So how can we encourage our students to reflect on what they have learned? Generally we want them to reflect from a slightly more distant perspective of time rather than more immediately within the classroom and this is where Recap can really help. Recap is a cross platform app that allows teachers to create classes and manage students and set them reflection questions that they can respond to using video on their laptop webcam or smart phone from their own home. How does Recap work? To create a class and add your students just register on the site as a teacher. Once you have registered you click on Add Class and complete the class details form. You can also decide at this point whether you want your students to register with a PIN or an email. Email is a better option for older learners, whereas a PIN is better for younger ones as this doesn’t require them to...

This is just a quick post to share 5 very short ebooks that have been taken from my award winning ebook - Digital Video - A Manual for Language Teachers . Winner of the 2016 British Council Award for Innovation in Teacher Resources The ebooks come from chapter 9 of the manual which contains 12 more entries like these. As well as the explainer text, which shows you how to use the tools and gives suggestions for tasks you can do in your classroom, each ebook also has a video tutorial. Each ebook is available either as PDF from Payhip or from the iBooks Store . I hope you enjoy these free ebooks and find them useful. Digital Classrooms - TedEd TED Ed is a great tool for creating online lessons around videos. It enables you to structure a sequence of interactive activities around the video clip that guides the viewer towards a deeper understanding of the content. It’s an ideal tool for building blended learning. Digital Classrooms - MoveNote MoveNote is a great tool for getting your pre...

One of the biggest requests in Google Docs has been adding columns in the layout of the document.  Well, Google has just released this  and it is already making a lot of people happy :)  Here's where you can find the new Columns feature in Google Docs: under the "format" menu, choose "columns". You can have up to 3 columns.  You can also specify if you want spacing between them and if you want lines in between them. Ok, now go and try it! A new feature of Google Classroom is allowing parents to see a summary of student's activity in Google Classroom.  Once a teacher adds a guardian email to a student account, that email will stay with the student in all other classes the student may have in Classroom. It is important that teachers are aware of this so that there is no confusion.  For more information visit Google's Classroom help center here .

Summer is coming to an end and a new school year starts! Here are new features that you will enjoy from Google for Education. Posted by Dina Kachintseva, Classroom Software Engineer and Felix Wang, User Experience Designer As any teacher would tell you, the classroom isn’t the only place where learning happens — it’s just the tip of the iceberg. From parents who help students with homework, to extracurriculars, field trips and more, there are so many ways students can learn beyond the walls of the classroom. This is why today we’re announcing new features to help teachers inspire learning for students, regardless of place or time.  Parents and guardians stay informed with Google Classroom email summaries Parent participation has a major impact on student learning. Today, we’re launching a new feature in  Google Classroom  that will automatically share  summaries of student work with parents . Once invited by a teacher, parents and guardians can receive automated dai...

It's never too late to turn your old lessons into new engaging ones.  Us teachers know that summer time is for relaxing but, honestly...in the back of our minds we are always thinking about the new school year and how to improve or bring new things to our students. Are you dreading the use of your old PowerPoints once again with your new students? why not give them a twist and make them real time interactive and engaging with PearDeck ? You may not see yourself as a very tech savvy teacher but I can assure you that using PearDeck is super easy! PearDeck is: Want to get started with PearDeck?  We have it available for you here at Guilderland.  To use it, simple log in with your school account and use these resources to get you started!  As always you can "book" time with me to help you! click on the "book now" icon on the top right of this page.  Interactive Walkthrough Videos and Tutorials Live FREE Webinar Training

*From Google:  Accelerate the feedback loop: Quizzes in Google Forms  Getting feedback early helps students learn and teachers teach. Starting now,  Quizzes in Google Forms  will allow teachers to auto-grade multiple choice and checkbox questions — so teachers can spend less time grading and more time teaching.  Teachers can also add review materials in the form of explanations, supplemental websites or review videos — so students can get quick, actionable feedback. Plus, teachers can get instant feedback on student progress, so they know which lessons need more explanation and what to teach next. We’ve also added a common request from educators to disallow students from sending themselves a copy of their responses.  If you haven't used Google Forms with your class,  it's time you re consider.  Especially now that there is a built in Quiz function for auto grading.  Check it out in my video below and read all about it from Google's Education ...

Exciting news!  I just heard from Alice Keeler that Fluency Tutor will be free for a limited time.  If you don't know what Fluency tutor is, check this video  here .   From Alice's Blogpost :   Free for the Summer For those that aren’t familiar,  Fluency Tutor® for Google™  is a Google Chrome app that helps make reading aloud less stressful and more fun for students who need some extra support. It’s a big time saver for teachers, and great for struggling readers and English Language Learners. Designed for schools using Google Apps for Education (GAFE), the app allows students to record themselves reading and share it with their teacher – away from the pressures of reading aloud in the classroom. To use, teachers simply share content they would like students to practice reading (or allow students to choose content independently), then provide feedback at a time that’s convenient for them. Texthelp, makers of Fluency Tutor for Google, are giving away Pre...

Google has released a   new featur e in  Google Slides : Slides Q&A. This update—rolling out globally today—helps speakers connect with their audience and collect real-time feedback. With a simple link displayed on a Slides presentation, audience members can submit questions from their phones, laptops, and tablets—and vote on those they want answered the most.  Read their original post here

Google has just released its newest feature for Google Classroom; and it is big news! You can now schedule announcements, assignments and questions to post at a later date or a specific time.  I can't wait  for he fall when the new parent/guardian feature will be released!   Here's an excerpt of the original post from Google: Schedule ahead, post later  Starting today, teachers can plan ahead by scheduling announcements, assignments and questions to post at a later date or a specific time (great for the early birds who want to get a head start on school planning during the summer ;). Just look for the scheduling option when posting new  assignments , questions and announcements. You can find scheduled and draft posts in the “Saved posts” section of your class stream, and you’ll get email and mobile notifications when your scheduled posts go live. We’re also adding new updates to  Classroom  over the next week—all designed to help teachers save time and...

Recently, we moved away from a managed media source for our district.  For some, this move left us with no places to look for quality educational videos.  Luckily, YouTube has become a great resource for educational videos.  I am sharing some sites that have excellent YouTube channels suggestions.  I encourage you to click on the resources below to learn more about the channels and subscribe to them.  Once subscribed, you can handpick the videos you would like to keep for classroom use and add them to your own playlist.  In this post, you will also see a quick tutorial on how to subscribe to channels, create your own playlists and share them with others. Some of you may already have some channels you use and would like to recommend to fellow teachers.  If so, feel free to add to the following live list of teacher recommended YouTube EDU channels by clicking here . 30+ YouTube Channels for teachers 197 Educational YouTube channels you should know about ...

It's the phrase I hear very frequently.  Being a Google educator will benefit your teacher practice and most importantly your students.  Being a Google Educator doesn't just mean that you know how to use the Google Suite of Apps for EDU; it means that you see the connections between what you teach and the way it could be enhanced by using google Apps. I encourage you to become one! to help you get prepared for it, I found this great resource.  Feel free to re share!

  Have you ever wanted to use polls with your students? how about a quick exit ticket or a quick check for understanding? Now you can with Google Classroom. Today Classroom is making the learning process even easier with a new polling feature that helps teachers quickly check for understanding, gather feedback or gauge interest. Here are four creative ways teachers are using polling in their classrooms. Exit tickets, help students self monitor, guide students discussion, get feedback on your lesson from students and find out how they are feeling towards a project/lesson are some examples of using the polling feature in google Classroom. How would you use this feature? Read more about this here .

One of the things I  like about Google Docs is how often they are updated and improved.  The latest improvements are Document outline and Document expiration dates. Document Outlines will help you navigate lengthy documents by showing you the different headers and sub titles of the document on a navigation side bar.  You need to go to "tools" and then "document outline"  If you do not normally use headers or forgot to add headers to your document, Google will do that automatically for you...#winwin The next feature is Expiration Dates on Drive, Docs, Slides and Sheets.  You can now set expiration dates on these types of files.  Many times we work with projects that involve other people.  We share the document/folder with others; this gives them perpetual access to those documents unless we manually go into the document and remove their access (you have to remember to do this...so setting a timer or calendar alert?) With the newest release, you can now ...

One of the most common complains I hear when training staff on Google Apps is: " I can't use Google Docs because it is nearly impossible to share them with all my parents.  Not everyone has a Google account" This is a very common misconception.  Google Docs, Slides and any Google app allows you to share your final products with anybody.  The way by which we share these items is different. We are used to creating a document, a newsletter or even a presentation and attaching to a parent group email.  We are using email as the vehicle to deliver our product.  This method requires the other users to have compatible software or accounts to open the attachment sent in the email. With Google, you don't have to worry about programs, versions of programs ( read: I did my newsletter on Word 98 but they have either a newer version of Word or an older version of Word) or user accounts.  Simply grab a shareable link and you are good to go! Below I will explain how to d...

Learning how to maximize your browsing experience is important these days. Specially since we get information form online sources most of the time.  We are having our students browse online for research and we are using digital tools for our students to create their work, turn in assignments and much more.  Wouldn't it be nice to have an Internet Browser that will make your browsing experience much more efficient, personalized and smarter?  Well, Google Chrome is all that and more. With Google Chrome, you can get all of your browsing history, your bookmarks with you any time from any device.  you can also add apps and extensions that will enhance the use of the browser and make it much more functional for you for example, an app that lets you do screencasts (SnagIt) right on your browser for free.  Or an extension that lets you zap all the clutter from web articles so that they are less distracting for students (Readability) Below you will find a slide deck that...

It's time to Power Up your Google Forms. You probably have used Google forms to create quizzes for your students - if you have not thought about using Google Forms for that, then you might want to still watch this 3 min tutorial ;) Using Google Forms for quiz creation is an excellent tool, especially if you are a Google Apps for EDU district.  With Google Forms, you can create quizzes that will collect all answers in one spreadsheet, making it easier for you to grade and to sort the data collected. Google Forms has recently been improved.  For example, you can now shuffle the questions order for every student, allow only one submission per student and what's more- and my favorite- you can now use "Add-Ons" which enhance the already awesome features of Google Forms and make them even better! If you create a new Form now, you will see an "Add-Ons" menu item along side file, edit and tools. Click on it and then click on "get "Add-Ons"  You will s...

It's very easy to drag to files and folders around in Google Drive, too easy in fact, and dragging items in a shared folder moves them from everyone who is part of the folder...so ... Let's look at the steps that will prevent this from happening.  But before, let's understand the difference between "Add to" and "Move" One of the best things that Google Drive offers is the ability to have a folder structure in which subfolders are housed in top level folders. Let's say you have a folder structure with 4 sub folders and you move one of those sub folders to your "My Drive" for easy access.  Great! but be careful you do not move the folder for everyone else.  A simple way to make sure you keep the folder structure in place is always press CTRL and then drag. Alternatively, use the "move to" menu item.  Both of these actions will actually "Add" a folder rather than "Move" the folder- this is how Windows handles it t...

If you have gone digital and your students are sharing their work with you, you are likely to be overwhelmed with "Shared with you" items in your inbox. Here's a way that may help you create a better workflow for you and your students.  This presentation shows two solutions for workflows one includes Google Classroom.

Most of you have joined Google Classroom and have experienced it for a couple of weeks.  During its use, you may have noticed a couple of hiccups that Google has not provided a fix for.  I have found some workarounds to some of the common problems you may have encountered. Google Classroom Hacks Problem 1 : There is no way to add a Co-Teacher to my class.   Solution :  Share the "Classroom" folder housed in your Google Drive with your Co-Teacher and give her/him editing rights.  This will allow the other teacher to see all assignments and comment on them too. While this is not the perfect solution because the co-teacher cannot grade assignments, this workaround is better than adding the co-teacher as a student to your class.  Doing the latter will not allow her to see all student's assignments. Problem 2:  I can't share an entire folder of resources with my students through Classroom Solution :  Select the folder that you want to share with stude...

Google has recently launched the new Google Drive- yes, right when I was pretty much comfortable with it ;) And as you know, your current google Drive will eventually transition into the new Google Drive. We might as well learn how to use it now. To enable the new Google Drive: Go to your Drive, click on the gear-shaped icon to access your settings and then click on "Experience the New Drive" While it looks very different from the old Google Drive, it has the same functionalities and some more. Click on this Guide to learn more about it.