Dear Friends!
Welcome to this week’s edition of Weekly Tech Tips. The inaugural edition was well received and the feedback was encouraging. Thank you to all who wrote with words of appreciation, encouragement and content for this week’s edition.
Weekly Tech Tips
Printers: If you are new to not-the-US, then you should know that standard paper size is A4, not US-letter. If you send a job to a printer as US-letter, it will not print and throw a “paper source” error. This will cause every job behind yours not to print until you or someone else comes and clears the job by either switching the source to A4 or canceling the job. Even if you have been here for a long time it is not uncommon to download something from the US and have the print settings default to US-letter (happened to me last week). So please check especially if you have just downloaded something from the US. If you have an error on the printer you can usually press Continue Job and select one of the A4 bins on the printer control screen. From your document when printing click on More Settings to make sure you have A4 selected. My attempts to make this the default still get overridden from time to time.
Better yet, consider not printing at all. It may happen that that option will disappear altogether if we go online. Instead of printing hundreds of pages of practice questions for example, you could try something like:
Openstax Digital Assessments Customizable Google Forms (This example is for Chemistry)
This resource has 21 Google Form Quizzes each with 50 - 100 questions. Openstax has made them editable so that you can select, add to, and modify the questions.
Here is a sample:
Chemistry Chapter 1 Google Customizable Form Questions
This Week’s Apps and Resources
Google Keep is a simple but powerful note taking app that is part of our Google for Education Suite of apps. It appears in the sidebar in docs and gmail. Here I have expanded the sidebar in a Google doc and opened a note in Keep that has some grading emojis I saved. I can now copy and paste them into the doc as needed. I wish you could drag them over, but that doesn’t seem to work.
Google Keep also has a decent Optical Character Recognition function (OCR) that allows you to turn images into editable text. Here is a photo of a to-do list I wrote on my board this summer along with Keeps transcription. Obviously not perfect, but if I had written neater and there was no glare I think it would be better.
Google Keep has apps and widgets for you to use on the go. Tips for using Keep on your (Android) phone: https://www.computerworld.com/article/3064305/25-top-tips-for-google-keep-on-android.html
Wakelet is like Padlet. Check this one out
https://wakelet.com/wake/9070cfcc-0c89-49ca-844c-d2747ff8dcbb
Here’s a bunch more good ones
Google Assignments now available as “add on” for other LMSs including Schoology. If you go to the
Schoology App Center,
You will see a list of all the apps you can add to Schoology. There are quite a few and not all are approved, but most are. These are nice because they allow you to use a lot of good tools without having to leave Schoology, which we all in Grs 5 - 12 must use.
MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learn- ing and Online Teaching)
Over 90,000 multimedia teaching resources. This is an option in the Schoology App Center. I installed it, but couldn’t get it to work, so I just visited the website and was very impressed.
This Week’s Courses, Tutorials, Webinars and Talks
Last week saw Google's global back to school event, The Anywhere School, now available on demand. You may have to register to enable the “Watch on Demand” option.
https://educationonair.withgoogle.com/events/anywhereschool2020/schedule
There are about 35 different talks about 30 minutes each on a wide range of topics related to teaching in the Covid pandemic. Here are direct Youtube links to a couple of my favorites. The South Korean one offers insight into the thinking behind the Korean government’s decisions that we may be subject to, but may not know about. You will need to turn on subtitles if you don’t speak Korean.
Sal Khan’s (Khan Academy) fireside chat video from Google’s Teach Anywhere on Youtube:
South Korea: Reinventing Schools for the New Normal
This session is about Korean educators’ journey to digital transformation during times of unprecedented change. Hear from the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education and four teachers about their endeavors to continue educating our students, and their uncharted path to distance learning and making it accessible for all.
Last week I mentioned that a place to gather and share resources would be a good thing to have and Jan Middleton reminded me of the padlet she made last year for that very purpose. She has made it editable to the public so feel free to see what’s there and add your favorite resources if you don’t see them listed. It will be much appreciated. Here it is:
https://padlet.com/middletonj8/dkttjkvc8ast
That’s it for this week.
Have a good one.
Scott
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