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Weekly Tech Tips 14 March 2021

 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 QR generator that, as far as I can tell, makes a QR code that takes you to the website "as is" when you snapped the code. For example, this time stamped Youtube video.


 

This comes from a larger collection from Google for Education ProductTraining Series :

https://events.withgoogle.com/google-for-education-product-training-series/current-recordings--resources/#content

Not for everyone, but some really good stuff.


Quote of the Week


“If we don’t [take] this year as an opportunity to think about how we want to make our system better, we really are missing the boat on this one,”

Chris Minnich, CEO of NWEA, and former executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers when ESSA (Every Student Succeeds Act) was enacted commenting on standardized diagnostic testing like MAP.


Have a great week!

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