A few summer tech PD opportunities

If you have a little time this summer, you may wish to consider some professional development opportunities for new ideas about integrating technology into your curriculum. Here are a few options to check out:

The Santa Clara County Office of Education offers a variety of short (mostly free) sessions on different topics. Some upcoming ones include a tour of Google Classroom, intro to Google Apps and getting the most out of Google Drive, and creating infographics in the classroom. See June's offerings here.

On June 6th, The Harker School and SVCUE hosts the annual Teacher Institute ($20) with a variety of sessions for a variety of levels of comfort with technology. Some of the topics covered this year include more on Google Apps; math games and math modeling; design thinking in the classroom; reinventing summer reading; research skills mini-lessons; teaching with Minecraft and more. Registration is here.

There's also GoogleDriveCore, a two-day workshop covering sharing, use of forms, research, tables, comments, add-ons (like Flubaroo, Flippity and Kaizena), spreadsheet basics and organizing tips and tricks with Google Drive folders and portfolios for students. This is primarily geared for independent schools and is pricey, but Google Apps for Education works the same for public and private schools. Do some exploring and see if any of these work for you!

Searching Google Drive from the desktop app

Once you've made the switch from My Documents to Google Drive, you may miss the ease of searching for documents when you're not sure of the location. If you've been frustrated by the  "no items match your search" response, there's an easy way around it. Just search "libraries" instead of Google Drive (or you can repeat the search in libraries if you forget to start there) and you should see all the files, folders and locations that match your search. It's even smart enough to open a Google Doc in a browser and an MS Word document in Word. Here's a short video to illustrate:

Somewhat counterintuitive, but gets the job done.

Free online Google conference

As you start to plan for next year, you may want to think about more effectively utilizing some of the Google tools available to you and your students.

Here's a free online conference that could get you started. Google Tools: Connect and Communicate is taking place May 16th from 10-3:30 (Eastern time, so that's pretty early for us, but then the day is still young when you are done!). It covers intros to Google Docs, Classroom, power searching, Google Hangouts and connecting with other teachers for your own professional growth. I've seen two of the presenters at other real-life conferences and they are very informative and engaging.

The event is online and free so check it out! Here's a link to more info if you are interested.

Chromebook quirks: changing the languages

On occasion, students may discover that their Chromebook's language is not the one they prefer. It's a pretty easy fix to change it back -- here's a short video showing how. 

Let us know if you have other recurring issues with student Chromebooks.