“I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.” - Thomas A. Edison What happens when you work in technology and are the go-to expert in your workplace for all things tech? You go home and everything goes out the window, of course. Today's Belly Flop comes from our own computer technician, Darin.
How many times have you changed a password in a day ? How about 5. Yes, I said 5. Why is it so hard to remember a password? My thirty some passwords for work are always ready and waiting for my brain to access. For some reason when I go home and try to access my Apple TV, my brain stops. It never fails! "Daddy can I watch a movie on demand?" "Sure son, give me one second." ...30 minutes later he is doing something else, and I am about to throw my phone and the Apple TV against the wall. Did I ever stop and think to write the new password down? That would be too easy. Let's just say, my lovely wife was kind enough to do it for me when my head was bursting into flames. So how have I fixed this issue, you might ask? I have created a spreadsheet of all my passwords. This has turned out to be very helpful and easy to access. The only downfall is that I am always worried about password security. So how do I fix this new issue? Yup, password protect my password spreadsheet. Did I write that password down the first time? Yes, I did. Will I probably lose the piece of paper with my new password? Yes, I will. Have I learned something from my mistakes? Yes, next time tell your son the Apple TV is broken and to go outside and play! Do I look back at that day as a failure? No, it is what I call a teachable moment. It's nice to see that even our experts are not exempt from the flops that can come from tech. He is human, too! PS - He said he already lost the piece of paper.
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Today's Digital Tool Tuesday is on Sign Up Genius. I had a teacher ask me what the best way to have parents sign up for something would be, and Sign Up Genius is a great option, so I thought I'd post about it this week! It can be used to recruit parent volunteers, and it is a great way to have parents sign up for Parent Teacher Conferences. I know several teams are using Sign Up Genius already, but for those of you who aren't, let's dive a little deeper!
Like many online tools available today, there is a free and a "pro" version of Sign Up Genius. The free version should do the trick for you, though! The website takes you through, step by step, what you need to do to create a sign up. You start with making a group, and giving the sign up a title. Then you choose a theme, and you can even add your own image. Next you decide what kind of sign up to do; One-Time or Custom will work best for a sign up for events like a team lunch, and Time Slots will work best for conferences (note that all the options give you a place to select a time-frame, but you don't have to fill that out). From there you manage your time slots (e.g. 20 minute time slots for conferences) or the items people are signing up for (e.g. forks, plates, drinks, for a lunch). Sign Up Genius will email a reminder to those signed up, and you can push out messages to them as well. Once you are finished designing the sign up, you can put in email addresses, or just use the link it gives you and give that link to parents. Parents will see the slots, and you can see who signed up for what. Sign Up Genius takes off filled slots for you. Easy peasy! As always, if you want to implement this tool but need some assistance, let me know. Using Sign Up Genius already? Comment below to share how you use it! Frustrated with slow bandwidth in the classroom? Watch this quick video from Google for a smile: Just think of that slowness as an opportunity to be mindful and meditate, right?
On a serious note, remember that allowing students to stream videos and music on their Chromebooks does add to our bandwidth slowness. I know it is a great tool for some students to use for concentration, but try to use sparingly during our peak usage hours! “The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.” - Henry Ford This segment of the blog is meant to help us learn from our failures. In today's Pinteresty, Instagramy, "show my perfect self" world, it's difficult sometimes to take ownership of our shortcomings. Social media makes it easy for people to lash out and attack people on a mass level (mom shaming, anyone?). So in an effort to grow and learn from our mistakes, I present to you: Belly Flops!
The first Belly Flop is one of my own. I am new to this blogging world and learning as I go. The blog builder I'm using on Weebly has this cool Newsletter function. I saw it and thought, "Oh cool, it'll notify people whenever I post! This will be so nice and convenient for my readers and me! Add that now!" Well, I was wrong. All it does it send me an email saying that you put in your email address. Then I have to manually email you every time I post...which I do anyway. Needless to say, I apologize to those people who signed up for the newsletter and are not actually receiving a newsletter (Thanks, though! It was great to see people are reading!). So lesson learned. Newsletter function deleted off blog. Onward and upward. Got a Belly Flop to share? Email me at [email protected] and I can feature it here! #failsohard Today's Digital Tool Tuesday is on Screencastify. If you are unfamiliar with screencasting, it is a way for you to record what is happening on your computer screen and/or record yourself through the webcam. For example, the Canva directions I sent out were done on Screencastify. This tool is great to have on the Chromebooks for student and teacher use!
Screencastify operates as an extension and interacts with your Google Drive. To install, you can go here. So how can you use Screencastify? A couple of examples include differentiation and having students show what they know by integrating Screencastify and Google Slides. To differentiate, the teacher can record different lessons with Screencastify and then post them in Google Classroom. Classroom allows you to select which students you assign things to, so you can select which students get what lesson, or you can let them choose. The great thing is that it frees you up during class to help all students with questions, and you are not stuck trying to clone yourself so you can be working with different groups of students. As far as students' use of Screencastify goes, there are endless opportunities for learning. An easy way to use it is to have them create a Google Slides presentation about a topic, and then they can record themselves narrating the slideshow. When designed smartly, an activity can really take students to Depth of Knowledge Level 3 by having them explain, interpret, and come to conclusions. Want more ideas? Matt Miller of Ditch that Textbook has some great ones here. Tech Specs:
If you are interested in using Screencastify for the first time and would like some help, let me know. Any other great ways to use Screencastify? Comment below! Welcome to WRMS EdTech, the site for all things WRMS curriculum, instruction, and technology! I hope you find this site useful and, dare I say, fun. I will be posting various things throughout the year, and some things I will do regularly. I hope to get teacher input on things you would like to see here, so feel free to let me know your ideas. Also, if you enter your email on the right hand side and subscribe to the newsletter, you will receive email updates when there are new posts! And now, for our first post: Digital Tool Tuesday! Every Tuesday I will post about some kind of digital tool that you can learn about and hopefully use in your classroom! As I said above, I really want your input, so if you know of a tool that you would like me to showcase, let me know. I am going to start with something that is familiar to a lot of you for our first Digital Tool Tuesday. With our 1-to-1 Chromebook initiative, Google Classroom is really an integral part of using the Chromebooks successfully in your class. If you have not used Google Classroom before, or you have only played around with it, I hope you can take off this year and use it to its full potential. It is fairly straightforward and easy to use. Google came out with an awesome site called First Day of Classroom, which includes how-to videos, PDF guides, and even live training sessions, all centered on Google Classroom. If you are a Classroom beginner, this is a great place to start. For those of you who are ol' Classroom pros, they have come out with some great updates over the summer to make your tech lives easier. This article goes into detail about all of the new features. Some highlights? You can now see one student's assignments on a single page (great for tracking students' missing work). You can also now put in decimal grades, something I have been wanting for so long! They also added batch grading in Forms. So say you give a quiz that has a short answer question, you can see every student's short answer on the same page and grade them all from that page. Yay! Time saving tools are the best. If you are using Classroom for the first time, and you would like any help, let me know and I can help with setup, activity integration, or just being there the first time you use it with students! Your friendly neighborhood Instructional Facilitator, Christin |
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April 2020
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