Clean Up Your Desktop & Google DriveJust a reminder, our district ghosts all our laptops at the end of each year. Anything that is not saved in Google Drive or in your H-Drive will be erased! You can click here to see my post from last year on Google File Stream, an easy way to transfer things to your Drive! Also, summer is a good time to get your Google Drive organized. I suggest designating an hour or so to go in and make folders and then drag and drop files into folders to make them more easily accessible. Also, deleting out files you don't need is helpful, just don't mess with files in Shared Folders! Doing so will delete it for everyone it is shared with. Folders that have a person icon on them are Shared Folders. Clean Up Google ClassroomAt the end of the year, the best way to clean up Google Classroom is to archive your classes. Archiving a class doesn't delete it, but it takes it off your Google Classroom Homepage and makes it so no one can make any changes (you or the students in the class). It basically makes it a view only class. You can still reuse posts and assignments from archived classes in your classes for next year! To archive, go to the Google Classroom Homepage, click the three dot menu on the class and select Archive. To retrieve or view it, click on the three line menu at the top left and select Archived Classes. While in Archived Classes, you can select the three dot menu on a class and click Restore to bring it back to your Homepage. Eric Curts from Control Alt Achieve has some more helpful tips on cleaning up Google Classroom. See them by clicking here! Happy summer, everyone!
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I have a confession to make. As a former ELA teacher, self-proclaimed "reader" and lover of a good novel, I struggle to get into most nonfiction books. I've been this way my whole life. Give me a piece of fiction, and I can read it in a few days. Give me a piece of nonfiction, and I have to annotate, read, and re-read in order to make sense out of it. This makes it difficult for me to read books on the philosophy of education, which is kind of important in my job as an instructional coach. Enter Dave and Shelley Burgess, co-founders of Dave Burgess Consulting, Inc. Dave is the best-selling author of Teach Like a Pirate, and Shelley is co-author of Lead like a Pirate. Together, they are a powerhouse of professional development and book publishing. They have published TONS of books on various topics in education. The great thing about their books is that they don't read like a college textbook on education - they are fun, engaging, and relevant (no offense, college textbooks).
If you head over to daveburgessconsulting.com/dbcibooks, you can see all of the books under their publishing company. There truly is something for everyone. Keep any eye out for former USD437 Elementary Curriculum Coordinator Tara Martin's book Be REAL! Now, admittedly, I've only read a couple of the books, but I'm working on that! I have, however, seen several of these people speak at conferences, and they are amazing educators with so much to offer. I hope you can find something that sparks your interest, and you can sit by the pool this summer (if it ever stops raining) and do a little reading!!
Sound familiar? I hear ya! In my role as an instructional facilitator, I spend a lot of time responding to emails, and a lot of them are time sensitive because teachers reach out and I want to give them answers quickly. On top of that, I follow the Inbox Zero philosophy, wherein I try to have zero unread emails in my inbox at any given time, and make it a personal goal to have no more than 10 emails in my inbox, total. Yes, I understand this makes me a crazy person, but I get very overwhelmed otherwise. Gmail has a couple of features, one already available and one coming soon, to help manage your email life. The first one, Snooze, has been out for about a year, and it has saved my life, ya'll. All you have to do is select the checkbox on an email in your inbox or have the email open, click on the little clock icon at the top, and select the time you want to snooze the email until (see image below). I use it ALL. THE. TIME. I may get an email from someone, respond to it, and then know I need to follow up, so I'll snooze the email until the time where I need to follow up. Or I will snooze one of the million edtech blog emails I get until a time that is more convenient. The email "goes away" until that time, when it nicely pops back up in my inbox and has a yellow note saying it had been snoozed. You can always see what you've snoozed in the left-hand column of your email under Snoozed. The other feature, which is coming soon to your inbox, is the Send Later feature. This will allow you to compose an email to someone and have it send later. Need to send a reminder email about parent teacher conferences next week and don't want to forget? Select Send Later! Wake up in the middle of the night and remember you need to send an email? Send Later, and then you don't have to worry about the recipient's inbox dinging in the middle of the night. I know Send Later will help me out just as much as Snooze has, and hopefully you can see uses for them as well!
Happy April, everyone! Today I wanted to let you know about an exciting update to Google Slides. In Google's official G Suite stream of updates, they announced that Google Slides is finally getting audio! It's a slow rollout, so we don't have access yet, but hopefully it will be soon (I'm hoping by the end of April). Much like inserting an image into a slide, you will go to Insert > Audio and select a file (MP3 or WAVE) from your Google Drive. You can use music that you already have (be careful with copyright, though), or you can use free stock music. YouTube has a great library of free stock music that you can download, or if you just Google free stock music, there are many sites you can visit to find audio. Once inserted, you have options to play the audio for a specific slide, or have it run through the whole slideshow. You can adjust the volume and also have it play automatically or upon a click while in presentation mode. This feature will be a great addition to Slides. I have had a lot of teachers ask me about how to do slideshows with photos and music toward the end of the year, so they can showcase all of the fun things that have happened throughout the year. Before, PowerPoint was a better option, but now Google Slides can be the way to go! If you pair it with the Photo Slideshow Add-on in Slides, you can easily upload photos you have saved in Google Drive or Google Photos. Each photo goes to its own slide without you having to do it manually! When you are ready to present, you can go to File > Publish to the Web and use the link they provide to have your whole slideshow playing on an automatic loop. This way you can have the music and slides play without you having to click through it! Below is a screenshot of the options you have for publishing. You could also have students utilize this new feature and use a screencasting tool like Screencastify or Loom to have them record their own narration along with their slides and music.
Have any other ideas of how to use this upcoming feature? Comment below! A HUGE part of teaching is classroom management. This, of course, starts with building solid relationships with your students. If this is an area you struggle in, www.smartclassroommanagement.com is a great site that centers around relationships as the foundation for classroom management. Aside from this, organization and daily expectations are vital as well. Students (and the teacher) need to have a routine so that they know what to expect from day to day. When I was in the classroom, students had to be in their seats when the bell rang, and there were always directions on the interactive whiteboard for what they needed to do to get class started. Now they didn't always do this perfectly, but it set the stage for the rest of the class. If students start rowdy and bouncing off the walls, it's hard to get them back. Classroom Screen is an awesome tool - no...toolbox is better - an awesome toolbox to help teachers with this aspect of classroom management. It is a simple concept really, but the creator, teacher Laurens Koppers from the Netherlands, couldn't find a toolbox out there that did what he wanted, so he created his own. Here is a screenshot of a Classroom Screen I created: When you go to classroomscreen.com (and the site recommends using the Chrome browser), you are automatically brought onto your own Classroom Screen. There is no log-in or anything. The downside to this is that it won't save your screen from day to day, but the site maintains that it only takes about 30 seconds to setup your screen, and I can vouch that it is SUPER fast and easy.
Let's look at the toolbox:
I think this toolbox is fantastic. Obviously, you wouldn't want to use all these tools at once on the screen, but with one click you can turn them on and off. If you turn something back on, during that sitting it WILL save your customizations. I turned off the text box with my learning objectives and when I turned it back on, my text was still there!! Some explicit instruction with students on the different features would be necessary, but once all of you get the hang of it, it could be a useful daily toolbox! I have to start by apologizing for my two month hiatus. *Oops*. February flew by and the next thing I knew, it was halfway through March. Luckily, I have been very busy, which I prefer, but unfortunately I put blogging on the backburner. During this time away, I got accepted into the Google for Education Certified Trainer program, which is a dream come true, so look forward to seeing more about that soon! In the meantime, I have a cool opportunity that I saw in blogger Matt Miller's newsletter. At WRMS, we do Mindful Minute at the start of each day to help students focus and get ready to start school in a positive way. Each teacher can do it how they want, and some utilize the Calm app. I've seen it in action, and it's very cool. The company has launched The Calm Schools Initiative, which offers teachers free access to the paid version of their app. You can download the app on a device, or you can just use their website. To get access to the paid version, go to https://www.calm.com/schools and fill out the form. Teachers should receive access within a couple of days. Calm will also provide onboarding resources and tips. Happy almost Spring, everyone! In today's post, I bring you another episode of Bloggers You Should Know, featuring Matt Miller. Not to be confused with Topeka's meteorologist, Matt Miller, this Matt Miller was, in fact, a news reporter before he came into education. He then taught high school Spanish in Indiana, and rose to fame with his first book, entitled Ditch that Textbook. Since then, he's written other books, like Ditch that Homework, and speaks at different venues around the country. He's a Google Certified Innovator and often does his blog posts around Google topics. I have had the pleasure of seeing Matt speak. He's one of those people that makes you feel like you are buds and he really wants to help you. His blog is awesome and has so many resources for incorporating tech into the classroom. He also starting doing Ditch Summit every year around Christmas, which is a FREE PD opportunity, and you can participate from home in your PJs if you so choose, as it's a series of video interviews with different innovators from the education world.
I encourage you to go to ditchthattextbook.com and check him out. If you sign up to receive his blog posts, you'll get a free copy of his 101 Practical Ways to Ditch That Textbook e-book! Now for a little advice: PUH-LEASE, take time over the holidays to unplug. Do whatever it is that helps you de-stress. Limit time on your device so you can enjoy time with family and friends. If you need some tips on limiting screen time, you can look back at my post here. Another tip I have for you is to take a break from your email inbox. If you're like me, you receive a lot of emails every day. Granted, this count will go down over break because teachers aren't in session, but it's likely I'll still be receiving blog posts, product updates, even emails from companies just saying Merry Christmas. To truly take a break from my inbox, I'll be pausing it. There is a Chrome extension called Boomerang for Gmail. This extension has several features, one of which is to pause your inbox indefinitely, or until scheduled times. I will be scheduling my emails to come each day at a certain time, so I am not distracted throughout my break with that familiar *ding* of emails on my phone. You have to set up Boomerang on a laptop or desktop computer, but once done, it should work on your phone email app as well. See below for a video on the feature, and click here to install it and set it up. I hope everyone has a Merry Christmas. See you next year!
Christin I've got another cool new Google feature for you today. This one is only in beta right now, though, so it's not available to the general public yet. Read on to see how you can request early access! Google Forms Locked Mode allows teachers to give an assessment during which students are unable to navigate away to other sites. It works on managed Chromebooks, and it's easy to do: just click a checkbox!
Now our school has a monitoring program for our Chromebooks, but to lock students into a Google Form, it's a few steps. This Locked Mode option makes it super easy to do! If you are interested in trying out Locked Mode, you can fill out this form and Google may grant you early access. The form also allows you to request access to Google for Edu's other new beta feature, an updated gradebook in Google Classroom. Both features will roll out to everyone eventually, but if you're eager to try it out, fill out the form! Happy almost Thanksgiving, everyone! I hope you truly can take a break and enjoy some relaxation with family and friends. This can be a stressful time of year as a teacher and a human in general. Make sure you are taking care of yourself! For today's Digital Tool Tidbit, I've got two Google updates for you. My good friend and amazing science teacher, Kathryn, gave me this first one (thanks, Kathryn!). Google has released shortcuts for creating new files. Just type in any of the following URLs, and you will open up a new, blank file:
The other update is on the Android version of the Google Classroom app. They have updated the app to include a random student selector. Last year, I wrote this post on Cold Calling and how, when used effectively, it can increase student engagement. I included a digital random student selector that teachers can use. While the tool is good, it's not the best for secondary teachers because you have to manually enter each student's name. That's not an issue with Google's student selector! Since it is housed in Google Classroom, it already pulls in your roster. Then, according to Google, you can "randomly [pick] students from your class roster. You can call on a student, skip a student to call on later, or mark a student as absent." Go to Google's Support page here to see step-by-step directions. Also, I'm sure they are already working on this for iOS, but it never hurts to click on that handy question mark at the bottom left of Google Classroom and submit feedback requesting it. Remember, they listen!!! Thanksgiving Photo from Pexels.com
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