Skip to main content

Weekly Tech Tips 13 September 2020

 Dear Friends!


I’ll be keeping it short again this week as we are not getting any less busy. I really feel like that as we continue online and blended, technology takes on new meaning and importance. We literally cannot do our jobs without technology anymore. This week a look at a few ways to make sure you get relevant information without getting swamped in the process and ways to maybe stay in touch with each other.


Weekly Tech Tips


If you are in Secondary and teach grades 8, 9, or 10 you would have received a whole bunch of emails over the last 2 weeks about joining a group followed by several concerning a certain student’s attendance. If you want to change how you receive emails from these groups you can go to your Groups here:

https://groups.google.com/my-groups

and then change the settings for your subscription:

This can help you keep your inbox in control while staying up to date on important information.

On a side note, while looking through these groups I noticed that in the past we had a group for communicating with one another. See the top entry in the image above. But that was 2016. So I thought, you know, we DON’T talk enough with one another. We rarely have whole staff meetings and when we do we don’t have a lot of free discussion. We should have a forum, thought I. Maybe we do and I just haven’t been invited. So I decided to make a place we could talk about stuff. I realized then that we are not allowed to make a Group in the gsis domain so I started experimenting with ways to make one externally, and that's what you see at the bottom of the list in the image above (GSIS2020); an external Google Group for GSIS teachers. What I DID NOT mean to do was spam out invitations to the group. So if you got an invitation to a group earlier today and you are not interested, please accept my apologies and either ignore it or hit the unsubscribe link in the body of the email invitation. However, if you’d like to drop by to join or start a conversation, you are most welcome.

Another good way to get the information you need when you need it is to add notifications to your docs. For example, the Office Sign Up sheet many of us use can be set up to notify you with an email when a student signs up for an office appointment by turning on notifications. It’s in the Tools menu.



This Week’s Apps and Resources


An Elementary Math Site in case you'd like to try something other than Khan Academy or IXL

Assistment

https://new.assistments.org/

And it promises to be ALWAYS FREE!


I have talked a lot about Google Keep as a simple yet powerful note taking app that integrates very well with all of our other Google apps. BUT if you love taking notes and are looking for much

More Powerful note taking apps you can try.

OneNote (Microsoft, prolly heard of it)

Trello

Notion

Notion has mad options and deep templates. Check out the grade calculator! It’s insane


This Week’s Courses, Tutorials, Webinars and Talks

Nah.



That’s it for this week.


Have a good one.

Scott

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Weekly Tech Tips 29 August 2021

  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...
Post a Comment
Read more

Weekly Tech Tips 9 May 2021

Dear Friends, Man how time flies when you have 1001 things to do!  Weekly Shortcuts  You have to know that if you ever accidentally close one or more tabs in Chrome that you can get them back with CMD + SHIFT + T. You can do this multiple times to get back tabs you may have closed earlier and need back. If you need to go farther back, go over to your history under the “snowman” (three vertical dots in the upper right corner of your browser). Weekly Tech Tips I keep the focus on spreadsheets again this week. I mentioned last week that it's spreadsheet time of year and I think that is the case whenever it's time to log scores and calculate final grades. I don't know of any of my colleagues who use Schoology or PowerSchool to actually calculate grades. I'm not sure how the elementary teachers keep up with it, but as far as I know everyone in secondary has some version of their own spreadsheet to manage all the calculations required by the IB (Intentionally Byzantine?)...
Post a Comment
Read more

Weekly Tech Tips 7 March 2021

  Dear Friends, I hope you are happy. Weekly Shortcut Ever need a scratch pad to work out a calculation or idea on? Especially during grading season I always find that a scratch spreadsheet comes in handy if I am looking at grades and different ways to calculate them. A scratch spreadsheet is always up when I am doing grades. It lets me quickly and accurately copy my grades over from my gradebook and run any calculations or stats I want without fear of messing up my actual gradebook. Instead of going into the matrix (the nine dots in the upper right-hand corner of most Google App windows) or going into Drive and clicking the rainbow plus New button, you can just open a new browser window and type:  sheet.new. You can create a new blank doc with doc.new and yes a new blank slide presentation with slide.new These are by default stored in the upper level of My Drive. If you do this enough you might like to save another step and just make new sheets and docs a part of your New T...
Post a Comment
Read more