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…
This year I was lucky again to attend the annual ISTE conference which this year happened in Chicago, a short 5-hour drive away from home. This was my fifth straight ISTE conference I have attended, and my third in a row that I presented at. I was even lucky enough to attend a full day…
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…
Color blindness is something that can affect a number of the students in our classrooms and it is hard for many to understand how these students see the resources we use. There are some free tools you can use when helping to design for students or for the students themselves to use when working with…
One of my fears I had as a classroom teacher was always centered around misspelling words when I wrote them on the whiteboard. I remember one time when I hurriedly tried writing out the word “assignment” but switched around the “g” and the “n” (you should be able to tell what I wrote). This was…
One of the most powerful things we should be able to do with technology in classrooms today is make learning more accessible for all. As I work on my mini-keynote for the Iowa 1:1 Conference on Making Learning Accessible for All, I am still amazed that we aren’t doing more. Then again, it is not…
I fully believe that we can give better feedback using digital tools than we ever could with analog tools. The ability to give quick feedback that is effective and targeted, will allow us to better help our students in the learning process. Hattie lists effective feedback as one of the most impactful things we can…
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…
There are a lot of great features built into the Swivl app and the Swivl Cloud but I go over 4 of these great features below. I will talk about how to use the new Smart Playback while watching a recent Swivl recording as well as how to use the Bookmarking feature while you are…
