Dear Friends!
Will it ever stop raining? I am beginning to wonder if we need to find some gopher wood.
Late last year I started occasionally sending out a few tech tips on Friday afternoons. There have been calls for more pd on ed tech, and if we have to go remote again, tech skills will be essential. I have come across this graphic from Education Week several times over the past few weeks. Maybe you have seen it too.
I don’t necessarily agree with all of these items, but I agree wholeheartedly with items 1 & 2 on the Teacher list. With all this in mind I thought I would make it a regular thing to share with you the tech tools and training I have found to be helpful and applicable to us here at GSIS.
It is with great hope and the very best intentions that I introduce you to the first installment of:
Weekly Tech Tips
I hope this newsletter will provide you with usable technology tips that will be applicable to your teaching at GSIS. I know there are a lot of newsletters and lists out there these days all with good intentions, but I don't think it’s very helpful to just drop dozens of links on you (although I’m still going to do that sometimes). Therefore I have decided to take the best of all of the different newsletters and websites that I visit and subscribe to and share them with you every Sunday along with a few comments on how I think they might be useful to you and how you can best use them. If we all end up back at home teaching online via Zoom, I'd like to help you get prepared with some tools that you should find very helpful. Furthermore, these are tools that you will be able to take with you to your next teaching job or really any other job that you may get. These skills are highly transferable and many are absolutely essential to 21st century productivity.
I am imperfect, biased, and lazy (and these are my good qualities), but I promise that I will try to publish this newsletter weekly, that I will try to check the information for accuracy and applicability, and that I will try to keep my personal biases out of it (but don’t be surprised if I try to recruit you on my quixotic crusade to switch our school to Chromebooks ;).
This Week’s Apps
Master the Screencast
A 1-hour certification course covering the basics of Screencastify and popular ways to use video with students, colleagues, and parents.
I've been using screencastify for several months now. I like it a lot. You can record your screen or you can record yourself or you can record both at the same time. I use this on a Chromebook which allows me to rotate my screen 270 degrees to turn my laptop into a tablet. Then I can write on my tablet and record the things that I write. I use Google Canvas as a whiteboard to solve problems while recording it for my students. Unfortunately Screencastify is not free. There is a free version that allows you to make up to 5 minute videos. I went ahead and purchased the app so that I can make videos over 5 minutes and have access to the other features. I put in a purchase req. with my department and the school paid for it. I had tried other free screen capture applications but always had problems with them either shutting off during recording or making videos that had weird artifacts in them with poor audio quality and scratchy video. Screencastify seems to be the best one that I found
Online exams and assessments with Google Forms.
You will probably get a screen like this if you are logging in
from a GSIS Google account. I have been working on fixing this for a long time now. In the meantime a workaround could be to log in with a non GSIS Google account, use the tool there, save your work and send it to yourself. Not the best option, but this is what I've been doing for the last 4 years
Make interactive slide decks in Google Slides. AND it seems to have found its way through the GSIS permissions settings. It works on my GSIS account. AND you get the premium version free for 90 days. Here is a very good tutorial video (8 minutes) on how to use it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PJgsa-fnmA
This is a page called Resources Teachers Can Use Today from Google
https://edu.google.com/teaching-resources/?modal_active=none
Here’s that massive app dump I promised I wouldn’t drop on you
https://uk.pcmag.com/features/13226/the-best-free-google-chrome-extensions
This Week’s Courses and Tutorials
I don't know what PD at GSIS will look like this year, but you can learn on your own with these courses and tutorials. All you have to do is make the time. These tutorials are made by teachers much more knowledgeable than me, and you can watch them in your own time as many times as you need to. If you have any questions or problems I am only an email or a hangout away.
This is a curriculum from Google called Applied Digital Skills. It is a collection of around a hundred different video courses that teach people how to use Google products to do common tasks like make a resume or create a spreadsheet. You can use this for yourself or you can assign it to your students. It pairs with Google Classroom. Here's the link
https://applieddigitalskills.withgoogle.com/en/teaching-resources
Here is a sign-up sheet for a series of lessons (less than 15 minutes each) delivered to your inbox weekly on Tuesday for 8 weeks. This series teaches you the basics of most of the Google for Education applications.
https://teachercenter.withgoogle.com/gettingstarted
Google’s new Teach from Anywhere Compendium of tools and tutorials
Go ahead and make it official and get certified. Many of us got certified a few years ago in a school-wide tech pd event led by Jason Kaiser. You can do it yourself here:
https://edu.google.com/teacher-center/certifications/?modal_active=none
I hope you find some of this helpful. As I said, I will try to do this weekly on Sundays. Sometimes they might be a little shorter, sometimes a little longer, but I will try to keep them manageable in size so folks actually have the time to read them and explore the links.
Very important before I go, item number two on the Teacher’s list in the Ed Week graphic is SHARE. If you have a tool or tip or tutorial that you have found and fallen in love with please share it. You can email it to me and I will put it in next week’s newsletter or we can make a padlet or a site or find some other way to share. Maybe our new Teacher Portal on our new website would be a good place. I will archive these newsletters and make them available for your reference.
Have a great week.
Scott
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