Skip to main content

Weekly Tech Tips 17 October 2021

 Dear Friends,


It’s been a while. Quite a string of long weekends we had there. 


Weekly Tech Tips


Thought I’d get back to basics and share with you two of the most pervasive acronyms in EdTech. The goals here are to be in the center of the TPACK Venn Diagram and taking a ride on the SAMR submarine. I appreciate the part in the center of TPACK that acknowledges that sometimes the best tech choice is no tech at all. 


.


This Week’s Apps and Resources


Remember there are over 300 Apps you can add to Schoology. Some you can activate yourself, others you may need to ask for Raj’s help and still others may not be available, but it is worth a look through the options. In the upper right part of the Schoology site you will see an icon made of a square of four squares. This is the App Center (1st image). Click that and you’re in (second image). When you successfully add an app it should appear as an option when you go to Add Material inside your course.



Here are a few other apps and websites I have come across over the past few weeks that looked worth sharing:


Awesome visuals for all kinds of info

Visual Capitalist

One for the ES. It helps kids read. Haven’t tried this one out myself; would love to hear feedback if anyone tries it

Read Along by Google: A fun reading app - Apps on Google Play

Mr. Raphael over at Android Intelligence claims it is almost as good as Photoshop but completely web-based

Photopea | Online Photo Editor

This was also shared by Mr. Raphael. It is a quick and easy way to make a gif out of a video all from your phone. If you have a bit of instruction you need to share and a video is just the way to go; this website lets you skip the downloading part and take your video straight from your phone to the site. 

Animated GIF editor and GIF maker


Have a great week,


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