Applying tech tools to meet classroom needs.
This weekend I picked up a pair of Apple AirPods largely due to the accessibility feature they introduced with iOS 12. You can now use the microphone on your phone to send audio to your AirPods using a feature called Live Listen. This is an awesome feature and one that I hope to make a…
A great update came out recently where you can turn on automatic Closed Captioning in Google Slides. All you have to do is to start a presentation and click the Closed Captioning button in the toolbar that pops up in presentation mode. This feature should be rolled out to all education accounts by now but…
Recently many educators were very sad to see Today’s Meet go away and now will have to find a new way to have a backchannel in the classroom. While there are many options out there, more on that in a bit, we need to understand why backchannels are a good thing in the classroom. Backchannels…
There is no built-in option to add audio clips to a slide in Google Slides but there is a pretty easy workaround. Using a screen recorder, like Quicktime on a Mac or Screencastify in the Chrome browser, you can easily record yourself speaking over a slide and add that clip to the slide to add…
Kahoot is an engaging and fun tool to have a review or a quick formative assessment. I see it being used in a lot of classrooms, but it is not always the best tool for the task, depending on the task. While it is an easy tool to use to do that quick review or…
Google has included OCR (Optical Character Recognition) functionality in both Google Keep and Drive. You can simply upload an image of inaccessible (printed) text and convert it to a digital format which can now be used with a wide variety of tools to make the learning more accessible for students. We discussed this tool and…
This is the first in a series of videos I am going to do where I take about 3-4 minutes to discuss technology use in the classroom. Each video will be about 50% pedagogy and 50% technology as we need to ensure that we have strong pedagogy whenever we use technology, or anything, in the…
The other day I was in a Language Arts class working with some students around Google Search tips and techniques. Knowing that we are now living in the information age, when we have access to so much information, it is more about how you find the information as opposed to what information you know. We…
I have been using a Swivl for a couple of years now and I believe it is a great tool. I am part of the Swivl Pioneer Program and received a Swivl to try out but that is not the reason why I like the Swivl so much. I like it because I believe that…
One of my favorite outcomes of technology being so readily available and cheaper for students to use, is that our students can make use of green screens in videos that they create. There are so many apps or programs out there that have the ability to do the green screen effect well that this is…
