Weekly Tech Tips

  Dear Friends, Happy π day ! Weekly Shortcut I learned several neat ideas from the folks at FriEd Technology recently. First, how to use the camera in Google Slides for recording students’ mini whiteboards. If you use those mini-whiteboards for quick formative checks or even if you just need to digitally capture a bunch of handwritten work from your students you can share a Slide or have students create one to share with you and then have them take a picture of the pages you need from them. They can pop that into a slide and you now have all the papers digitized in one place. You can see more about that here: https://youtu.be/jtVJyZ4jQig?t=192 The full video (30 min) also contains how to get a world of new fonts, reuse posts for group work on Google Classroom, pause Google Classroom notifications for spring break, and a hidden secret menu in Youtube that lets you activate picture in picture so anyone can watch a video on top of another window.  Finally there is  a new...

  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...