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Weekly Tech Tips 20 September 2020

 Dear Friends!


What wonderful weather we're having now. I hope you are enjoying it. Unfortunately I have been a little under it the past couple of days which is why this week’s Tech Tips is a little late to your inbox. 

Last week we got Jamboard cleared, which I think is a really great tool for all ages. It is even showing up in my matrix now:

If it is not in your matrix yet try accessing it here:

https://jamboard.google.com/

and once you use it a while it has a way of magically appearing in your matrix, or you could just bookmark it. This shared whiteboard allows you to “invite” your students up to the board remotely.


Weekly Tech Tips


I have been waiting for this for what seems like years and I am so happy that it is finally working. I am talking about COLLAPSABLE TAB GROUPS for the Chrome browser. Google has been promising this for months and I finally got it to work on all my machines (Chromebook, PC, and Mac) last week. First, this is for the Google Chrome Browser only. I recommend Chrome at work since we use so many Google apps. Make sure you are updated to Version 85.0.4..You will also have to enable what’s called a flag. Type “chrome://flags” in the omnibar then search for “tab groups”


Enable tab groups and tab group collapse. You will be prompted to restart Chrome. Do so and then you should be able to right click on an open tab and create color-coded groups. This has worked for a while, but now you can also collapse these groups. This is great for those of us who have way too many tabs open and want to keep our windows neat and organized. If you need help with this let me know. I’ll be happy to help you set it up.




This Week’s Apps and Resources


I didn’t know Google owned 

SOCRATIC. 

I guess I was thinking about

SOCRATIVE


Similar names, both Edtech apps, but quite different. Thanks to JR Raphael for pointing out Google’s Socratic which is an AI app that solves problems with your camera. Pretty cool, but not super smart.

Socrative has been around a while and is a quiz-type app that helps teachers make knowledge visible with quick formative assessments through the app. I used this a long time ago when it first came out and when I read JR’s newsletter I thought Google had bought them, but upon further investigation I see they are two different things, so I wanted to clear that up for everyone in case you were wondering like me. I use other apps like Quizziz, Pear Deck and Google Forms more for that now, but Socrative was a thought leader in this sector of Edtech and I bet the app has evolved quite a lot since the early teens.


This Week’s Courses, Tutorials, Webinars and Talks


The Socrative site above offers free webinars on boosting hybrid learning skills

https://www.showbie.com/webinars/


That’s it for this week.


As next weekend starts the Chuseok Holidays there will be no Weekly Tech Tips next Sunday 27 September.


Happy Chuseok,


Scott

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