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Weekly Tech Tips 13 December 2020

 Dear Friends!


Merry merry Christmas! 


Weekly Tech Tips

I read a good article on what kids are saying about breakout rooms and how teachers can use them more effectively. Since we may be stuck in zooms for a while I thought it might be helpful to share these tech tips accumulated and amalgamated over the last near year of online zoom classes. I extracted and pasted the abridged list below and you can Read the full article here.

  • Assign roles: 

  • Mix things up: 

  • Use shared docs: 

  • Keep it short: 

  • Except when it’s useful to go longer: 

  • Find the right group size: 

  • Give each group a different assignment: 

  • Put everything in writing:

  • Give students agency: 

  • Create connection: 

I had surprisingly remarkable success with my 8th graders giving them a task to do on zoom a few weeks ago. One girl had them organized and working in no time and they managed to successfully clean up and format a massive amount of data on a shared spreadsheet.

StudyIB has free 3 month subscriptions. It generates random or customized quizzes from a database of IB-like, but not past paper, questions. They have subscriptions for the Sciences, Math and even Spanish

Flipgrid now syncs with GCR if you are a fan of either or both; this is a nice new synergy. Flipgrid is a phenomenal way to communicate with students online and they have recently added several exciting new features which you can also read about at the ink above.

AI Poetry is a Google machine learning project that writes poems for you. AI language generation is getting very very good. I have been interested in this for a long time and it seems to have recently hit an inflection point. If you too are interested in AI language you should check out the state of the art: Generative Pretrained Transformer 

“Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3, more commonly known as GPT-3 is an autoregressive language model that was created by OpenAI. It is the largest language model ever created till date and has been trained on an estimated 45 terabytes of text data, run through 175 billion parameters! The models have utilized a massive amount of data from the internet, which gives them the power to generate human-like text.” 

English teachers beware.






Courses, Tutorials, Webinars and Talks


InThinking IB approved workshops. Pricey at $720 but only 2.5 days instead of 4 weeks. Talk to your IB coordinator about these courses as a possible alternative to the 4 week IB courses. They are IB approved and about the same price.

20 Fun, fast and free cert courses from EdPuzzle. Not just Edpuzzle itself, but Planning, Project-based learning, and more. You get a badge, certificate of completion (pdf and LinkedIn) and it’s worth continuing education credit.



PowerSchool Webinars

I attended one of these last week. It was essentially a case study of how one tech leader at one school was leveraging certain capabilities of PowerSchool to meet the reporting demands of her district. Can offer insights and power user tips.

CK-12 Certified Educator Program

This is the one I am currently taking. A bit longer than most free online product cert courses, but I am really liking it. CK-12 has a lot of powerful features and this course introduces you to them in a systematic manner.

Applied Digital Skills from Google offers hundreds of video based tutorials and 

courses on a wide variety of topics.

G Suite for Education Certification Exam Courses. These courses are free from Google and are designed specifically to prepare you for the Google Certified Educator Level 1 and Level 2 exams. Each is about 13 hours long. 

I will be conducting similar courses in January(free of course). The consensus seems to be for f2f classes after school or on the weekends. More information about that in the new year.

Casey Bell offers an Online Academy for GCE L1 and L2 for $329, but she has lots a great free stuff here:

https://shakeuplearning.com/google-certified-educator-level-1


When we return next year I will be helping anyone and everyone who would like to become a Google Certified Educator.

 

That’s it for this week and this year. I won’t be bothering you over the holidays. I hope we all get a chance to unplug and relax as we celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ.


Happy holidays! 


Scott

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