Education Technology

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 ...