Do More with Google Classroom
Matt Miller is a rockstar educator who freely shares so much every week. This compilation of Google Classroom resources, all in one place is amazing. Check it out here. Pretty soon he will have another book out. But, do sign up for his mailing list and get ready to use great tips and strategies delivered to your inbox and get free ebooks
PearDeck vs NearPod
OK, I get a lot of questions about these 2 applications. Which is better/ What are the similarities and differences? Which one should I use? Is it worth it to get the premium version? So... I found a spreadsheet from TCEA that compares the two. Here you go.
Honestly, you do not have to choose. Our district went with the premium version of PearDeck. That does not mean that you cannot use NearPod. There are some really cool features of NearPod. Check them out- compare for yourself... but don't feel like it has to be one or the other. Google Slides Trick
I saw this tweet the other day and saved it, but then realized that I didn't really get it. Lucky for me, a whole bunch of other teachers needed clarification as well. Check outcomments on the tweet and watch the video explanation as well.
Stuck on Fractions?
I have no idea why, but all of a sudden, I have a ton of teaching fractions resources saved. So here you go...
MathCurious made a slide with Fractions favorites from PhET
Looking for more Jamboard Ideas?
Julia Dweck has amazing ideas that she freely shares on her Twitter account.
Or even more from Candace Buchanan candyTechIdeas
Handy Bookmarklet
"This bookmarklet installs a javascript code to your bookmarks bar that will allow you to go fullscreen while in editing mode in Google Slides.
This allows you to move objects and add text while presenting the slides to your students whether through a Meet or in-person on a projector. " Learn more about it here. Turn Docs into Quizzes and Flashcards
Richard Byrne shared new information about Knowt teacher platform to turn documents into quizzes and flashcards the other day. I didn't know that this was possible. Check out his blog post and the video below.
25 Days of Making is coming
Aaron Maurer is once again doing maker projects for 25 days this year. Check it out here. Lots of great ideas; many that the kids can do at home with found/free materials.
Looking for more great FREE PD?
If you've always wanted to attend FETC, but never had the chance, it's your lucky year. FETC is virtual this year- and it's FREE. Sign up today to have 4 full days of great PD- for FREE!
Still trying to convert paper to digital?
Texthelp can help... Click the link to read more, or if you have math worksheets- you can use Equatio- see the video below. We have subscriptions- for the district, including HA and HES. Try it!
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Google sunsetting Tour Creator and ExpeditionsMany of you probably got the email from Google stating that they are retiring Google Tour Creator and Google Expeditions this summer. These are great tools to use, but rather than be sad about the sunsetting of them, Donnie Piercey created this nice tutorial to show you how to do something very similar in PearDeck. Check it out. Wizer AddonFor those who are using Wizer.me for pdf annotation, you may have already seen this, but Wizer just added a Google Drive add-on that lets you quickly convert PDFs that are in your Google Drive into online worksheets on Wizer. Richard Byrne of FreeTech4Teachers explains it all here. Looking for new dramatic ways to present science topics? Check out Frank Gregorio's YouTube channel. "This channel is dedicated to providing teachers and students a powerful new resource to combat student apathy. Here, you will find dramatic, visually stunning video "trailers" in the natural sciences choreographed to powerful music, designed to motivate and inspire students at the beginning of a lesson to the wonders of Biology, Earth Sciences, Physics, Astronomy, Chemistry, Environmental Science and Math. Over 90 million students and teachers worldwide have seen these videos to date, and their comments highlight their exceptional value to education. " Free Stories and EbooksThis was a new resource for me- Clarkness.com. It is a site with tons of free stories and free ebooks for the beginning reader. There are 1,519 online stories, 117 ebooks and 64 personalized stories available. A similar site: Reading Hawk Library also has free downloadable ebooks and Dolch sight word story collections for the beginning reader, offering 4 ebooks, and 45 story collections. Another incredible teacher created resource for free read alouds is Mrs. Lemansky's Library. Check it out here. These are accessible via Google Slides. She has even more on her YouTube channel. FlipGrid ARHave you explored AR in Flipgrid with your students yet? Try it out with this free offer to make Thanksgiving "REALI-Turkeys" Help your students focus on things they can be thankful for with this fun writing activity. Flipgrid "REALITurkeys" gives students the chance to showcase their voice through the fun of Flipgrid's augmented reality. Simple write, record and then batch download student AR codes from the educator dashboard. Cut, paste and hang to share! Grab the free template here! How do you create FlipgridAR videos? Resources from PBS Learning MediaPBS always offers quality programming and great resources for educators. Have you seen the Learn Along Bingo packets? The Teacher Planning Kits? If not, check them out here.
Need more Turkey?Maytal, over at CreateCodeLoad is offering a free Scratch game, along with complete directions, even videos to help you and your class create a Thanksgiving turkey game in Scratch. Check it out here. Professional Development
I had already double booked myself this past Saturday, but then saw that Nadine Gilkison was presenting 2 webinars. I ended up flipping between KernCUE and Educator Alex webinars, skipping one other venue entirely. 5 hours of PD on a Saturday? It was worth it. Especially in the strange COVID world we are living in, I am constantly looking for ways to help teachers. Nadine had great content, and I will share the links to her work at the bottom of this post. Wanda Terral, once again, had great ideas to share and I even caught a great presentation on using Microbits to collect data on rocket launch experiments.
So, what's on tap?
Need to learn more about how to use Pear Deck? Looking for more ideas on incorporating this great tool into your classroom? Pear Fair, the Fall edition is coming up this Saturday, Nov 14.
"We’re thrilled to bring you another round of fresh, free professional development! This special, weekend-edition Pear Fair will feature two different learning tracks, one for educators and one for administrators. Both will be filled with carefully curated presentations on topics relevant to today's teaching community. You'll find sessions focused on building classroom culture remotely, app-smashing, leveraging tech tools in your hybrid classroom, Pear Deck for professional development, and much more. Pour a cup of coffee, settle in, and join us for some fun, mid-semester PD!" Sign up here.
Looking for great ideas on using FlipGrid/ Student Voice?
"Join the Flipgrid and Adobe for Education teams for an epic kick off to ISTE 2020: Creativity + Student Voice. In this event, we will share some exciting new announcements from team Flipgrid and Adobe -- wait until you see what we unveil for teachers! (Plus, some fun giveaways for your at-home or in-person classroom!" Sign up to attend on Nov 21 here.
As we are a Texthelp for Google Chrome district, how about checking out some of the pre-recorded webinars to help you get a handle on how to best use these tools? We have Read & Write as well as Equatio. You can check out the offerings here.
Birdsville Nest presents 12 Days of Innovation Dec 2-17. There will be some great speakers including Dr. Catlin Tucker, Matt Miller, Kim Hicks-Foster, and many more. Register here.
Steve Hargadon's Emergency Home Learning Summit is still ongoing. You can check out the schedule here. This summit is a 2 month long free PD opportunity. There are over 150 speakers, and more are added all the time.
Nadine's Resources
Nadine Gilkison is an amazing Google Innovator. Check out the resources I got to see live on Saturday, links in the tweet on the left, and then take an hour or 2 and explore her Twitter feed. Nadine freely shares her work- no TPT, no freemium... just freely shared. She has a pinned tweet with an absolutely phenomenal resource, especially for these times. "Teaching Digitally- A free resource guide to help any K-12 educator." Check out the resource on the right.
CurioasisWhat is this site? Curioasis is a site that you can use with your students or assign to them via a live video call. "Teachers and students can play live learning activities in a group video call, ideal for game based learning, virtual team building, and online playdate." There are lots of free resources to check out. Here's a video lesson of making music with Scratch. Lots of great ideas to explore, games to play. ChecklistsI tend to use Google Keep for checklists, but the other day saw a short little tutorial that Alice Keeler put together for making checklists in Sheets. So- first- Google Keep... oh and just in case you missed it, they are dropping the "app" and keeping it as an extension. Alice has a short video or you can go step by step through her directions. Google SheetsHave to say that I spent an inordinate amount of time today trying to make Excel save a file as a csv file and not trash my leading zeros in one column. I gave up. For whatever reason, it was not keeping my formatting changes. Looked like it was saving correctly, but when it was opened... they were gone again. I am so not an excel expert, but truly enjoy learning new ways to use this incredible tool. I tend to go to Excel rather than Sheets simply because I usually know where they hid the tool I need, but either one works. This is a link to help you discover some really cool things about spreadsheets. I also subscribe to Ben Collins' tech tips and just started getting Alice Keeler's Slow drips on spreadsheets. You can learn from the replays of Sheetscon 2020 for free. My other go-to person for data and data displays is Wanda Terral. Wanda has been presenting on Google Data Studio of late, which is something that I want to learn. Not enough time to check all this stuff out? Just click on the Explore Star- down on the bottom right of your next sheet of data- lots to play with. Wanda is presenting twice at the KernCUE's Tech Fest this Saturday. Check it out here. One of her presentations is called Don't Fear the F Word, the other is Build an Info App with Google Slides. She recently presented on Data Studio, sharing her slide deck and a YouTube video. PDFsThe tools I get asked about the most lately have to do with editing pdfs. I am not going to go back over how to make worksheets interactive by using pdfs or images in google slides, as you can check back to this post. But I did come across a new tool the other day that you may like called PDF24 Tools. It also has a chrome extension which I will add to the whitelist. It looks a lot like pdfcandy, and I don't know if one is better than the other. Please remember, at HES, we have a copy of Adobe Acrobat- full version- on the computer in the STEAM lab attached to the scanner. Same at HA, the computer that is attached to the Fujitsu Scanner- probably in sped room, should also have a full version of Adobe Acrobat. The full version of adobe acrobat will let you do all the editing, scan with OCR, delete, move pages, etc., that you may need. |
AuthorMaureen Tumenas Archives
June 2021
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