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. 

Using videos to create complete lessons

If you are interested in flipping your classroom (where students watch the lecture at home and do the work in the classroom), you may be assigning videos as homework. There are a number of tools that let you modify your own videos (or videos from YouTube, Khan Academy and lots of other places) to get better information about how students are interacting with and learning from what they're watching. Two easy-to-use tools are EdPuzzle and Zaption. Both let you crop a video, add your voice and embed quizzes at specific parts of the video for student response. You can also view analytics (student quiz results, time spent on the videos, etc.) for each.

With EdPuzzle, you can log in with your GAFE account, and select a video from wherever you want. Then you crop it to use only the part you like. You can add a vocal overlay, or you can add audio notes (like text notes). You can also add as many embedded quizzes as you like, with open-ended questions, multiple choice, or "comments". EdPuzzle also allows you to set up classes (like Google Classroom) where you can see data on who viewed the video and how they did. Students do need to have an account to join a class (but they can also log in with their GAFE accounts). You can see an example here, although you'll need to join my class to participate.

Zaption is another tool with much the same functionality. It looks a lot like Google Drive in its interface, so it feels familiar and is pretty easy to use, but is intended for a broader market (EdPuzzle seems primarily for education). Zaption does have the option to add videos to a single lesson, so you can have multiple clips from different sources in the same lesson, which is very useful if you really want to flip your classrooms It also does not require that students join a class -- they can simply follow a link and enter their names. Here's a Zaption sample.

Both have "pro" features, which are paid accounts that can enhance functionality, but you can do most everything you might want with a free option.  Check them both out and see which works for you! This video below does a great side-by-side comparison of the two tools as well.

Web-based ways to design beautiful posters and infographics

Made with Canva in 15 seconds

One of the benefits (or limitations) of using Chromebooks and mobile devices in the classroom is our reliance on the design tools of MS Office, like brochures in Word or slide shows in PowerPoint. There are well-known web-based options for presentations, like Google Slides and Prezi for presentations, but there are also some great tools for posters, infographics and more.

Piktochart (www.piktochart.com) and Easel.ly (www.easel.ly) lets you create an infographic, report, banner or presentation graphic from a variety of templates. It provides a huge number of shapes, icons, backgrounds and fonts to beautifully customize a poster or document. You can import and display data in various ways and can even connect an infographic to dynamic data (like a Google Form that continues to populate). It's a good alternative to the design features of the Microsoft suite and an addition to the limited design options available in Google Apps for Education.

Canva (http://www.canva.com) is a beautiful and very easy-to-use option for posters, brochures, and other display formats. It also offers design tutorials, with lessons on using color, fonts, images and backgrounds, and even an introduction to branding.

There are Pro options for Piktochart, Easel.ly and Canva, but most of the features in the free versions are plenty for creative presentation of information.

Google Classroom update

For those of you using Google Classroom to manage and respond to students' assignments, there is a new Classroom app for both iOS and Android, which allows students to view class resources and interact with Classroom from their mobile devices. It's also now on the campus Chromebooks.

Check it out on the App Store for Apple devices or on Google Play for Android. You can also learn more from Google here.

If you want to know more about Google Classroom or other tech tools, please contact the library or sign up for a training here.