Education Technology

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...