Weekly Tech Tips

  Dear Friends, Weekly Tech Tips hasn’t been very weekly lately, has it? Sunday November 7 we were live in person at GSIS. I want to thank the folks who came out that day to talk about Google Takeout, Google Drive for Desktop, and Google Classroom.  Great topics and a lot of questions, answers, sharing and learning going on that day. As promised, I am happy to make that a monthly event for those of us who like to be more hands on and face-to-face. It was great to see you. I probably won't schedule one for the month of December with the end of semester and the holiday season, but let’s shoot for January if anyone is interested. And last week Sunday my wife and I were out celebrating 24 years of marital bliss. But this week we are back with…. Weekly Tech Tips Let’s start with something more geared to the youngest among us, since I know this newsletter often tilts towards the Middle and High Schools. It’s called a Make and Take, and I love it. This is a Thanksgiving (US Thank...

  Dear Friends, Is it June yet?  Weekly Tech Tips Maybe a little late for your student and parent surveys this quarter, but here are some tips on using Google Forms. There is a big difference between SHARING a form and SENDING a form. When you SHARE a form you are inviting collaborators to work on editing the form with you or inviting them to make a copy of the form for their own use. When you SEND a form you are activating it in order to receive answers. The person you send it to cannot alter the form, they can only fill it out. To SHARE a form you can either copy the url out of the omni (address) bar and send that to your collaborator or you can click the More button ( the three vertical dots sometimes called the Snowman ) and Add collaborators When someone shares a form with you you should make a copy, like this: In Google Forms, open the form or quiz you want to copy. In the top-right corner, click More (sometimes called the Snowman ) Make a copy. Name the copy. (Optio...

  Dear Friends, It’s been a while. Quite a string of long weekends we had there.  Weekly Tech Tips Thought I’d get back to basics and share with you two of the most pervasive acronyms in EdTech. The goals here are to be in the center of the TPACK Venn Diagram and taking a ride on the SAMR submarine. I appreciate the part in the center of TPACK that acknowledges that sometimes the best tech choice is no tech at all.  . This Week’s Apps and Resources Remember there are over 300 Apps you can add to Schoology. Some you can activate yourself, others you may need to ask for Raj’s help and still others may not be available, but it is worth a look through the options. In the upper right part of the Schoology site you will see an icon made of a square of four squares. This is the App Center (1st image). Click that and you’re in (second image). When you successfully add an app it should appear as an option when you go to Add Material inside your course. Here are a few other a...

  Dear Friends, Come take a Drive through the Cloud with me in  this week’s installment of... Weekly Tech Tips Google has been going through a lot of changes recently, as Google is wont to do, and even more are on the way. You may have seen messages about being 18 years old on Youtube or new security settings on your files and folders in Drive. Mr. Kwon and I should have the Youtube restriction taken care of. The new Drive settings are due to be implemented on Monday 13 September. For weeks now Drive has probably been notifying you that changes are on the way. You can see which files and folders will be affected by clicking “See Files” at the bottom of the notification. I have done this and it looks like only a few of my files will be affected. If the notification is no longer appearing you can search for them with  “ is:security_update_applied ” in the search bar of Drive.  What does it mean? It means that some of your older shared links (Google native files lik...

  Dear Friends, Welcome to this week’s installment of... Weekly Tech Tips This week is all about speed. See below how you can take a flat file MC quiz and pretty quickly turn it into a  Quizziz. Quizziz is also adding adaptive practice which is nice. Notice how you can copy over ALL the MC options then drag down one at a time to populate the choices instead of copying each one over. I was able to make this 13 question MC quiz from an IB database in about 10 minutes.  So now when I give this quiz tomorrow I don’t have to worry about making copies or if the printer works or forgetting about it because I already scheduled it for exactly 10 minutes after class starts. And my favorite part is that when the student are done I get a fantastic report like this: that tells me not only who missed what, but provides some basic item analysis. I also like the fact that the question pops up in the report so I don't have to note the question and go back to the quiz to find it. Solid...