Over the holidays we all set goals for the year to come. Some may choose to exercise more, start healthier eating habits, get more sleep or whatever it is there seems to be an app that can help you achieve those goals. While watching the Today Show with Hoda and Jena, there was a segment on just this... Take a look at the video below and find out more about all the apps they talk about. Under the video is the list and the link to each app with a little description for what it does. As we start the new year in the spring semester of remote/hybrid or all in person learning, these apps may offer some needed assistance to keeping on track with meeting those new year goals.
Did you know that on the Google Classroom App on Android and IOS you can use the student selector which allows educators to call on students randomly in class to participate. Here is how you can get to it and use it in your classes....
Download the app from the Android or IOS app store.
This summer, Flipgrid was bought out by Microsoft and has since given the pro version to teachers for FREE! YES! FREE!!! Which means, you can make as many Grids as you want!!
Last year the free version only allowed for one grid with multiple topics. This year you can create as many grids as you would like with as many topics as you want under those grids.
If you have never used Flipgrid, it is a video discussion platform where student's can video booktalks, reflections, practice speaking in a foreign language,and much more. Student's can access via their computer or the app on their phones. Take a look at this video to get started.
The world is quickly becoming smaller, more connected, and eager to share. Google Hangouts lets us bring that world into our classrooms and professional lives like never before! Here are a few simple ideas for using Hangouts to broaden the horizons of your classroom.
Do you have PowerPoints which have a lot of animation in them and when you transfer to a Google Presentation the animation gets lost? Well here is a solution for you. Download the Google Drive app Office Viewer for Google Drive. This app will allow students who do not have Microsoft Products on their computer to view PPT presentations in full animation mode.
Go to the New Tab in Drive, More, Connect More apps. In the search area key in Office Viewer and several will pop up. Select this one:
Once the app is installed you will open it. In the upper LEFT hand corner click on the icon below and login to your Google Drive:
Once access has been granted, you will be able to open any Microsoft PPT, Word or Excel docs.
On September 2nd, Google announced a set of updates to many of the core Google Apps that you are familiar with (Docs, Sheets, Forms, etc...). Highlights include Voice Typing in Docs, updated See New Changes feature in Docs, Templates across all apps, a data visualization feature called Explore in Sheets, and an awesome new feature where users of Google Classroom can push out their current webpage to their whole class through Chrome. Check out the full details in the official post below!
Posted by Ritcha Ranjan, Product Manager
School’s in! As you settle into your classes and start to juggle soccer practice, club meetings and homework, we’re here to help. We’ve been spending the summer “break” creating new tools to help you save time, collaborate with classmates and create your best work—all for free.
Schoolwork, minus the work
Writing papers is now a lot easier with the Research tool in Docs for Android. You can search Google without leaving Docs, and once you find the quotes, facts or images you’re looking for, you can add them to your document with just a couple taps. That means less time switching between apps, and more time perfecting your thesis statement.
With Voice typing, you can record ideas or even compose an entire essay without touching your keyboard. To get started, activate Voice typing in the Tools menu when you're using Docs in Chrome. Then, when you’re on the go, just tap the microphone button on your phone’s keyboard and speak your mind. Voice typing is available in more than 40 languages, so we can help with your French homework, too. Voilà !
Do more, together We’ve made it easier for you to tell what was added or deleted in Docs—and who made the changes. Now when you’ve left a document and you come back to it later, you can just click “See new changes” to pick up right where your classmates left off.
Forms helps you get a lot of information easily and in one place—so when you want to vote on your class field trip or collect T-shirt sizes for your team, you don’t have to sort through dozens of emails. With the new Forms, you can survey with style—choose one of the colorful new themes or customize your form with your own photo or logo, and we’ll choose the right color palette to match. Easily insert images, GIFs or videos and pick from a selection of question formats. Then send out your survey and watch as the responses roll in!
Your best work, your best you Creating presentations, crafting newsletters and managing your team’s budget is hard enough without having to worry about making everything look good. With the new collection of templates in Docs, Sheets and Slides, you can focus on your content while we make sure it gets the expert polish it deserves. Choose from a wide variety of reports, portfolios, resumes and other pre-made templates designed to make your work that much better, and your life that much easier.
With Explore in Sheets, you can now spend less time trying to decipher your data, and more time making a point. Explore creates charts and insights automatically, so you can visualize trends and understand your data in seconds on the web or on your Android. It’s like having an expert analyst right by your side.
Mission control, for teachers and students
A year ago, we launched Classroom to save teachers and students time and make it easier to keep classwork organized. Today we’re launching a Share to Classroom Chrome extension to make it easy for teachers to share a website with the entire class at the same time—no matter what kind of laptop students have. Now the whole class can head to a web page together, without losing precious minutes and focus to typos.
Rock this school year with Google Docs and Classroom. Your first assignment? Try these new features, which are rolling out today.
Working with coworkers. Exploration time. Help from instructor one-on-one. Everything was great.
Getting one-on-one help with specific questions is so much better than just being presented to.
The ability to determine the path/content of the PDA was refreshing, as was time to work and collaborate.
This was so personalized, since I got to choose what all to work on and go at my own pace.
For the fourth time I was privileged to serve as a PDA instructor for Using Technology to Engage and Inspire Your Students this spring; this time as an "advanced" section. The quotes above, which came from our feedback activities through CMS, epitomize what this PDA offers to our staff members. Technology should enable individualization, collaboration, and more time for one-on-one feedback. I am happy to report that this year's offering was a rousing success!
I thoroughly enjoyed my four weeks working with these 18 dedicated individuals. Their hard work and willingness to explore, ask questions, implement, fail, and implement again, led to dozens of success stories for their students. Here are a few examples of such successes...
Formative Assessments Through Kahoot!
Advanced Quiz Techniques and Course Streamlining in CMS
Padlet for Classroom Conversations
Exploring Google Classroom
Google Forms and Flubaroo for Automatically Graded Surveys and Formative Assessments
I am blown away every day with the passion and dedication that I see in our classrooms. Opportunities like these PDA's do not come around as often as I would like, so if you are interested in anything that you have seen here, make sure to sign up for our next PDA! Additionally, if you would like to hear about the details of these, or any other technology related classroom instructional techniques, please contact your district instructional technology coach today!
Sean Mullins | District Instructional Technology Coach
Improvements to Google Classroom are arriving at a steady pace. This time around we are treated to a sleek mobile app that, among other things, allows students to take photos from a device and attach them directly to their assignments. Additionally, teachers now have their own Assignments page to keep track of what they have assigned to all of their classes. Read the official post below!
Posted by Jorge Lugo, Software Engineer, Classroom
While it’s a new year on the calendar, many teachers and students are just midway through the school year. They’ve clearly been hard at work, turning in more than 30 million assignments with Classroom since it launched six months ago. If those assignments had been on paper instead of Google Docs, they would stretch from New York to Los Angeles when laid end to end. If every assignment had taken just one minute to print out, Classroom saved 57 years that would have otherwise been spent waiting for the printer.
Today we’re launching a native Classroom mobile app for both Android and iOS (also available in Google Play for Education) to help teachers and students connect from wherever they are, and save even more paper and time. We’re also launching two new features to help teachers stay organized as they head into the second half of the year: a teacher assignments page and the ability to archive classes.
With the mobile app, students and teachers can:
Snap a photo: Right from the assignment page in the mobile app, students can snap a photo and attach it to their assignment — whether it’s the experiment they just did for a science class, or a drawing they made of their family tree. And if they’ve forgotten their homework, they can ask someone at home to snap a photo, text it and then turn it in with the app. Of course, if the dog has actually eaten it, Classroom can’t help you.
Share from other apps: Students can also easily attach images, PDFs and web pages from other apps to their assignments. For example, when you’re in a drawing app, you can create a graphic for an assignment. When you click “share” in that app, Classroom will come up as an option, and you can attach the graphic to an assignment.
Offline caching: Even when Internet access isn’t available, students and teachers can get information about their assignments in the Classroom mobile app. Class streams and assignment information are automatically cached every time you open the app with an Internet connection, so that you can see them when you don’t have a connection.
For the best experience using the Classroom app, make sure you (or your students) also have the Google Docs, Drive and Slides apps. We’re looking forward to adding new features to the app on both iOS and Android in the coming months, so that students and teachers can get more done from any device they have.
Teacher Assignments Page We’ve heard from many teachers that they want one place to keep track of all the work they assign across all of their classes. On Classroom for desktop, we’re launching a teacher assignments page. Teachers will have quick access to any assignment, track which ones they’ve reviewed and see how many students have completed their assignments.
Archive Classes We also know that classes don’t go on forever. You don’t want to have to scroll through old classes to get to the ones you’re teaching or attending now, but you’ll likely want access to the valuable information in previous classes and work from them. That’s why today we’re launching the ability to archive classes. Archiving a class will remove it from the home page and make it read-only — teachers and class members can still view archived classes, but can’t make any changes or turn in assignments. We hope the new mobile apps and features for teachers will save you some time and paper this semester. Please keep sharing your feedback with us, and stay tuned for more new Classroom goodies before the school year is over.
*Keep in mind that this post only applies if your building has allowed the use of personal devices for educational purposes in the classroom
Problem:
You have an amazing activity planned, and you want students to record their progress through photographs or video. Many of them have phones with wonderful cameras that are easy to operate, but it is difficult for students to get those photos/videos from their phones to their computers.
Solution:
Students can download the Google Drive App for their Apple/Android device, sign in using their Google Account credentials, take a photo/video through the app, and have it immediately appear in their Google Drive folder on their computer. Likewise, they can upload directly to the app on their device for the photos/videos to appear in their Google Drive.
All you need to do for this process to work is to follow these simple directions...
Your students will need to download the official Google Drive App for their Apple/Android device from their appropriate app store.
Once they open the app, they would sign in using their Google Account credentials.
All of their Google Drive files will then appear on their device.
They can navigate to a specific folder, click the "+" button, and take a picture directly from the app.
[caption id="attachment_1697" align="alignnone" width="199"] Once the "+" button is pressed, this menu is displayed.[/caption]
The picture will then be saved in this folder in their Google Drive.
If they have the Google Drive App for PC downloaded on their computer, the photo will automatically be synced.
Using this technique, students can quickly and easily use a combination of their own devices and their district provided Google Account to add a new element into their learning experience.
You can also use this to quickly take a photo/video and have it appear to your students in a folder that you have shared with them!
