CurioasisWhat is this site? Curioasis is a site that you can use with your students or assign to them via a live video call. "Teachers and students can play live learning activities in a group video call, ideal for game based learning, virtual team building, and online playdate." There are lots of free resources to check out. Here's a video lesson of making music with Scratch. Lots of great ideas to explore, games to play. ChecklistsI tend to use Google Keep for checklists, but the other day saw a short little tutorial that Alice Keeler put together for making checklists in Sheets. So- first- Google Keep... oh and just in case you missed it, they are dropping the "app" and keeping it as an extension. Alice has a short video or you can go step by step through her directions. Google SheetsHave to say that I spent an inordinate amount of time today trying to make Excel save a file as a csv file and not trash my leading zeros in one column. I gave up. For whatever reason, it was not keeping my formatting changes. Looked like it was saving correctly, but when it was opened... they were gone again. I am so not an excel expert, but truly enjoy learning new ways to use this incredible tool. I tend to go to Excel rather than Sheets simply because I usually know where they hid the tool I need, but either one works. This is a link to help you discover some really cool things about spreadsheets. I also subscribe to Ben Collins' tech tips and just started getting Alice Keeler's Slow drips on spreadsheets. You can learn from the replays of Sheetscon 2020 for free. My other go-to person for data and data displays is Wanda Terral. Wanda has been presenting on Google Data Studio of late, which is something that I want to learn. Not enough time to check all this stuff out? Just click on the Explore Star- down on the bottom right of your next sheet of data- lots to play with. Wanda is presenting twice at the KernCUE's Tech Fest this Saturday. Check it out here. One of her presentations is called Don't Fear the F Word, the other is Build an Info App with Google Slides. She recently presented on Data Studio, sharing her slide deck and a YouTube video. PDFsThe tools I get asked about the most lately have to do with editing pdfs. I am not going to go back over how to make worksheets interactive by using pdfs or images in google slides, as you can check back to this post. But I did come across a new tool the other day that you may like called PDF24 Tools. It also has a chrome extension which I will add to the whitelist. It looks a lot like pdfcandy, and I don't know if one is better than the other. Please remember, at HES, we have a copy of Adobe Acrobat- full version- on the computer in the STEAM lab attached to the scanner. Same at HA, the computer that is attached to the Fujitsu Scanner- probably in sped room, should also have a full version of Adobe Acrobat. The full version of adobe acrobat will let you do all the editing, scan with OCR, delete, move pages, etc., that you may need.
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International Day of Women and Girls in Science
Today marked the 5th annual International Day of Women and Girls in Science. We, in the U.S. are still losing the battle to get more girls and women into science. There have been some positive notes, legislation that passed last year may help, but overall, women are not equally represented in science. Strange, since the first step in solving most design challenges is empathy. If women are not equally represented in the sciences, how can we expect the same level of empathy to guide the design process? Check out the video below and a couple of links to share. From the UN, this link, from Forbes magazine- this linkwww.womeninscienceday.org/, and from Women in Science Day, this link. Or follow some of the great links with this hashtag, #WomenInScienceDay.
One way to get more girls into STEM fields is to introduce it early. This is a FREE course from Engineering is Elementary. The PDF link for the syllabus is here.
More Black History Month Links
Rob Morrill has been making a series of lithophanes to celebrate Black History Month, sharing his results on Twitter and his instructables online, as well as the Thingiverse files. These are pretty amazing. I've tried printing them a couple of times, not terribly successful, yet. However, Ken, the infamous art teacher, gave me some great tips to try to improve them tomorrow. I'm still at the copying stage- have not played with codeblocks yet.
Ideas to Share
Before I share all of the great links from TCEA, a couple of others that caught my eye this past week.
The SheetsCon 2020 free online conference is coming up in March (11th and 12th). This is a 2 day conference to help you learn more than you have ever imagined about using Google Sheets. They have some great speakers lined up. This will range from super practical, you can pick this up and use it in your classwork tomorrow, to super geeky, you, or at least I, watch and wonder what the heck that one was...
Resources from TCEA from Wanda Terral
I embedded Wanda's Wakelet below, but what got me really interested in checking out the presentations from TCEA was Wanda's Data Dashboard presentation. This is something I want to learn more about. Enjoy all of Wanda's links, as well as Miguel's. I didn't embed all of Eric Curts' links, but here you go.
Resources from TCEA from Miguel Guhlin
Interesting Links
Veterans Day Reading Passages
Getting Started with Google Sheets
Brain Pop Standards Alignment
New Tool from EdCite
Articles I've Been Reading
Social Media Has Not Destroyed A Generation
Leveled Reading Groups Don't Work. Why Aren't We Talking About it?
Upcoming Events
AR/VR in K-12 Virtual Summit
The Global Education Conference
Coming up November 18-20. Register here.
Upcoming Assistive Technology Webinars
Click on image for live links After a mostly wintery April vacation, it was nice to finally see the sunshine. Hoping to have the last of the snow leave my gardens this week. I have a lot of little catchup items to share this time. I went down to Connecticut today to attend the Greenwich Country Day School's Maker Faire. Although I was very disappointed that the scheduled keynote speaker, Colleen Graves was unable to attend due to a family emergency, I did enjoy listening to Ron Beghetto speak about creativity. A couple points that resonated with me:
My favorite workshop of the day was with Rush Hambleton- "Meet the Microbit". It was fun to experiment with this relatively inexpensive, easy to use pocket size computer that lets you get creative with digital technology. I had played around with these a little bit, but working in small groups I learned a lot more than I had previously tried by myself. With the new version of Scratch coming out in August children will be able to program physical devices (like micro:bit).
Catch Up TimeAdobe Spark
Finally, the wonderful set of tools is free for both teachers and students- and is now COPPA compliant so kids under 13 can use it with supervision. A couple of our 4th grade classes have used this on some of the global projects they have done in the past and now we can give them accounts that they can use for so many projects! Richard Byrne has a nice roundup of the features on his blog.
Images for student work
We have a tab on our HES Symbaloo with a lot of these links, but Tony Vincent recently put up a nice post with some that we don't currently have listed. Check them outhere.
Checkboxes in Google Sheets
One of the things I really like about Google Keep is the quick and easy way to create checkboxes. Now, for all the spreadsheet fans- you can create checkboxes in Google Sheets. Alice Keeler writes about it here and shows you how- step by step.
#FlipGrid
Two great updates from FlipGrid to share. First- and this is happening soon- Wednesday, May 9th - World Record Wednesday.
Quote from the blog: "It starts with you. It starts with us! On May 9, 2018, you can be part of history! Our Global Classroom will aim for the student voice record books and attempt a World Record on Flipgrid. 24 Hours, all nations, all learners, across the globe, sharing the same message. We are calling on students, educators, digital citizens and global ambassadors to join together using your phone, tablet, or computer to record a message uniting The World"
One more from FlipGrid... AppSmashBash. Want to do more with FlipGrid? Looking for ideas? Check out the webinar #App SmashBash.
O.K... it's impossible. No one keeps up with all the changes, however we can try to stay on top of the changes that affect what we do and how we do it. One of the nice changes I saw recently was a training push by Texthelp... the good folks who created Read & Write for Google Chrome, They have created a training portal on their site to help you walk through how to get the most out of Read & Write for you and your students. This fundamentals course covers use of R & W in Google Docs, in the web toolbar and in PDFs and ePubs. They have also updated their quick reference guide- downloadable here.
Explore - New functionality across Google Docs, Sheets and SlidesThis just came out last week. You can read more about it here. Essentially the goal is to make you work more productively. However, there is already a hue and cry in the edtech edu sector because the research tool in Google Docs has "disappeared". The explore button does some of what the Research Tool did, but you cannot search easily for dictionary meanings or quotes. The ability to search for images by license is missing. However it does return images which seem to be copyright-free, but it also sticks the attribution right under the image instead of in the footnote. It looks like you will need to use Easybib or Noodle Tools, etc. to build the bibliography as that is also missing from the explore button. So, either they will respond the numerous complaints they are getting online, or we can get used to a different, "improved" version. The functionality improvements in Sheets look pretty cool. It looks like they are continuing to try to make working with data easier and more intuitive, allowing questions in more natural language. You can read more about them here. John Sowash created a quick overview of the Explore button in sheets. Richard Byrne also created a little video about the changes in Google Slides.
ShortcutsSince Mike Duffy has worked so hard to get all of the chromebook carts up and running at both schools, here is just a quick reminder of all of the "hidden" features on the chromebook keyboard. Now, these keyboards can vary from one manufacturer to the next, but here's a quick animated gif from chrome48.info. How do you get this to come up on your chromebook? Simply press Control Alt ? and you will see the initial screen. Hold down control and you will see all the shortcuts that start with control, or hold down alt or shift and see more. Some folks love shortcuts, others hardly ever use them. To get out of the screen- click esc. Note, this is for chromebooks- not the chrome browser on your PC or Mac. Add-onsSo what are add-ons? Add-ons are additional programs or functionality that can be manually added right from the Google application. How do you get them/find them? On the top navigation bar of your Google Document-click on Add ons. Then click on Get Add ons... Add-ons vary from docs to sheets to forms, etc. My favorite used to be the speech recognition tool, but now that you can get an even better speech to text tool from Voice Typing- right in Tools, I think my favorite is the SAS Writing Reviser. You do have to create a free SAS curriculum pathways account. There is an app with a 4 part writing process built in, but this SAS Writing Reviser is right in Google Docs. If you've never checked out their resources, it is worth your time. Here's a quick video to show you some other favorites- including some for math teachers/students and world language teachers. Add-ons for Google SheetsMy favorite add-on for Google Sheets are Save as Doc and Autocrat. Autocrat lets you take the info collected from a form or a spreadsheet and put it into a document. Save as Doc lets you quickly and easily consolidate data into a text document instead of a spreadsheet. Here's another quick video to show these and a couple others Add-ons for Google FormsThis surprised me... the add-ons for forms have disappeared in the new version of Google Forms... but I know that they are coming back. I can see them in my personal Google account forms, but they have not been rolled out yet on the District accounts. Here's a very quick overview of where to find these- once they come back- and a Google Hangout with a lot more info- but it's over an hour long. Jenn Judkins is an expert as is Erik! Here's a link to the resource doc for that one. This is a link to one of Jenn's Google Forms Cheat Sheets. If you love to play with data, this is for you. New to forms and excel sheets... skip this one.
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AuthorMaureen Tumenas Archives
June 2021
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