Links You’ll Love
Mathschase is a fun site to review multiplication. No sign up required and looks like it’s completely ad-free.
If you’re a fan of Boomerang, you’ll be happy to know that now you can schedule your Google emails right in Gmail. You’ll notice that there’s a little drop down menu next to “Send” – just click on that and schedule when your email will be sent.
Links You’ll Love
Many of us rely on using videos in class. Why not? They’re engaging and open explain concepts much more efficiently than we can. Commonsense Media has some great strategies teachers can use to help students think critically about videos, including backchanneling, integrating videos into your curriculum and using tech to customize videos.
Just when I think that I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t have to explain what “GAFE” is any more, Google goes and changes the name! Google just announced that GAFE will now be known as G Suite. We’re not sure what that means long term (paid model, maybe?), but if you want to read about what it means now, check out the Google Cloud blog post here.
Want to give your students a brain break? Edutopia has some nice ideas here.
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Here’s a terrific article about some updates in the Google Classroom iPad app that allow you to annotate PDFs and documents right in Classroom. This is cool!
Using Chromebooks in your classroom? Check out this awesome collection of tips!
Links You’ll Love
Pear Deck is a formative assessment tool/presentation tool/student participation tool that you run from within your Chrome browser, or from a tablet. It’s similar to NearPod and can use existing Google slide presentations to create interactive lessons.
QR codes! Flipped classrooms! Comics and games! The presentations from last week’s Google On Air conference are available on YouTube.
Here are some great suggestions for keeping your Google drive nice and tidy.
Here’s a great article about helping students read images. So much of what our students see online is image-intense these days – it’s important to help them with this skill! Check it out.
Google’s news archive is terrific if you want to search through newspaper archives. Start here and you can search by topic or you can browse by newspaper. This is a great primary search tool!
Here’s a great video that’s worth fifteen minutes of your time. Did you know that you could connect a Google document with more than one folder? HOW COOL IS THAT? This video is a great explanation of how folders work in Google Drive and in Google Mail. There’s some useful information about understand how shared folders work, too.
Project procrastination. We’ve all done it. Here’s a good article about how to help your students avoid it.
Links You’ll Love
FakeiPhoneText and iFakeText are a simple little websites where you can enter text and the site will render an image that looks like it’s a text. This would be a great way for students to create fake texts between two historical characters. Ifaketext even lets you choose your carrier.
Need an easy way to create an animated video? Check out Explee. You can add images, text, music and voiceovers. Movies export to YouTube or can be downloaded.
Design thinking – tackling a problem at a deep level – is something you can do with your students at any grade level. This article gives some valuable tips on how to do it with iPads.
You know that there have been dozens of times when you thought, “if only I could create a Google form from this Google doc that I have…” If you install the Google add-on Doc to Form, you can do that! Check it out!
Links You’ll Love
ICE is coming! Yeah – you’re probably thinking, “Well, duh, I’ve been outside . . . I know.” No… ICE as in the Illinois Computing Educators. The annual ICE conference will be held in February in lovely St. Charles, Illinois (so it doesn’t involve a whole lot of travel, and no overnight stay). The ICE workshops take place just before the general conference and provide in-depth training in a variety of techie topics. ICE workshops are also a great way to use your professional development dollars. Check out the workshops here.
Kahoot.it is another one of those online multiple choice quiz sites where you can put questions in and your students play entering the game pin that you specify, and answering questions. I think it’s very engaging – you can type in Hebrew, there’s fun music, and it ranks players as you play the game. You can also put photos in to increase engagement, and a video option is in beta right now (that’s cool – play a video and stop in pre-determined locations to ask questions).
Where do good ideas come from? That’s a fascinating question, and one I think about often. Here’s an interesting video on the subject:
Google tip of the week: are you going batty with folders in your Google Drive? Here’s a neat tip that can help. Change the color of your folders by clicking on a folder and right-clicking on it (to right-click with a one-button mouse, hold down the control key and click). Lookie there – you can give a folder a star (which puts it in Starred in your drive), and/or you can change the folder’s color! Makes it easier to locate. Sadly, folder colors don’t show up (yet) on mobile devices.
Links You’ll Love
Most of us are old enough (cough, cough) to remember when there were no food allergies. When we could throw a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter into a bag so kids didn’t go hungry on field trips . . . Well, Stanford University is making some fascinating inroads into bringing those days back. Read more about Stanford’s medical trial in oral immunotherapy here.
The folks at TED-Ed have created a video and lesson for every element on the periodic table. You can view them by starting here. Not only are there videos, but there are also accompanying lesson plans with questions to deepen understanding, suggestions for further research, and, in some cases, guided discussion questions. This is obviously a great resource for teaching the periodic table, but also a good model for how to use video as a starting point for lessons.
I’m super excited about this article on digital learning. The author, Dr. Tim Clark, focuses on the various elements of a classroom (essential questions, assessment, classroom environment, etc.) and how technology can support them. I like this so much that I’m thinking about structuring a series of classes around this concept – let me know if you’d be interested.
Oh my! Wait’ll you see THIS! Here’s a beyond awesome Google tip: Did you notice that there’s a “Web clipboard” command under the Edit menu in many Google apps like Slides, Docs and Drawing? Do you have ANY idea what that means? Check it out: select the thing you want to copy to the web clipboard, and go to Edit > Web clipboard. Select “copy selection to web clipboard.” Unlike the invisible Mac clipboard that can only hold one item at a time, Google will save all the things you copy. Then you can paste whatever you’ve copied at a later date. But wait! There’s more. That elegant little web clipboard is available on any computer, any time you log in using your Google account. How sweet is that? I also tested this with Google Docs on the iPad . . . it worked as long as I used Chrome to edit the Google Doc (as opposed to using the Docs app). If you need a tutorial on this, here’s a good video:
Links You’ll Love
How BIG is Google? Check out this great documentary:
Shake Up Learning is a website that features tips and techniques for educational technology, including Google, mobile learning and social media.
Well, now, this is interesting…here’s a nicely crafted revision of the traditional rubric. Instead of working on all those columns and rows, why not try the single-point rubric? Very cool! Read more here (and I love the name of the website, too!).
Google tip: If you’ve been using Google Classroom, be sure to check out this blog post to get an idea of some of the new features that were introduced this week.
Links You’ll Love
If you use Animoto, you’ll want to apply for a free Animoto Plus account. That allows you to choose from 57 styles to create 10-minute long videos. Plus accounts normally cost $5 per month but this is free for educators if you apply here.
Teaching with Google strategy: Here’s a useful strategy for using Google’s comments feature with students to help make their thinking visible. Nice!
Google tip: Need an online timer for a classroom activity? Just type timer into a Google search box. Simple and elegant. You can click on the brackets icon to have the timer go full screen, too!
If you want a quick collaborative space, check out Awwapp. It’s simple to create a whiteboard and invite by URL. You can post completed whiteboards or save them as .png images.
Links You’ll Love
EduCanon is a website that enables you to take a video and assign questions for your students to answer at pre-determined spots. Check out my sample video here. This is great for flipped classes.
Still haven’t signed up for JEDcamp Midwest? What’s holding you back? Here are 10 reasons to sign up TODAY.
Google Tip #1: If you love Google forms (you know I do!), check out this blog post about recent improvements. For instance, you can now shuffle questions (which is great if you want to use a form for an assessment), and limit people to only submitting one response per form. You can also insert a video into a form, which lends itself to using Google Form as part of a flipped classroom experience. Finally, (I LOVE this), when you go to “Send form,” you can now specify a shortened URL, eliminating the need to paste the long URL into goo.gl. Yay!
Google Tip #2: Did you know that you could use Google to “read” PDF files and turn them into text documents? Here’s how:
- Upload your PDF file to your Google drive
- Click in the box to the left of the uploaded file to select
- Click on More (at the top of your screen) and choose “Open with”
- Choose Google Docs
- Google will proceed to open your document. The beginning with have the image, and the digitized text will appear at the end of the document.
Now, it may not be perfect, and you may have to tweak it a little, but it beats retyping!
About
Debbie Harris is the director of educational technology at the Sager Solomon Schechter Day School in Northbrook, IL. Involved in Jewish education for over thirty years, she has an education degree from Northwestern University with a concentration in instructional media and a master’s degree in professional Jewish studies from Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership. She is skilled in using and teaching desktop publishing, video editing, presentation and animation software; and consults and presents regularly on integrating technology into Judaic studies. Her students podcast, blog, edit video and create claymations. She co-chaired the technology track for CAJE 33 in Vermont, is a SMART Certified Trainer for SMART Notebook, and a 2011 recipient of the Grinspoon-Steinhardt Award for Excellence in Jewish Education.
When not learning, teaching or writing about technology, Debbie likes to sketchnote and craft. She likes to knit, do calligraphy, sew, watercolor, paint fabric and just generally play with fun toys like scrapbooking supplies and anything with texture. Debbie travels to California every summer to paint tallitot with high school aged campers. Finally, she is incredibly proud of her two daughters; Lori, who teaches English at a community college; and Allie, who is the director of the URJ’s Camp Newman in California.
Look for her at:
Debbie Does Desktop
Flickr
Twitter
Diigo
YouTube
Ravelry
Email Debbie here
MuseForJews 