Welcome to the Fuquay-Varina Elementary School Digital Den Dish blog! We will keep you posted with important technology updates and instructions here! And the best thing is you can come back and search for stuff!
This year, our 4th and 5th grade students participated in the Hour of Code. Students were able to sign in with their Google accounts, which made things much easier this year. There were a variety of themes, from Star Wars, to Minecraft, to Angry Birds, to Frozen. It's a great chance for us to introduce the students to programming and explain a little about how things happen on the computer. It's always exciting to see those students who really get it and don't want to leave at the end of class! There were some students who even finished programming in Block Code and moved on to Java Script. Common Sense Media has other helpful resources for anyone who would like to continue.
Enjoy some Gingerbread Activities, including designing a Gingerbread House, or boy or girl! Start by watching Jan Brett read her book, The Ginigerbread Baby while she talks about her illustrations.
This presentation contains tips for using Symbaloo, How to Create your own help desk ticket, Creative Commons which has a search and let's you use images that are copyright free, information about social bookmarking , how to make short links and To Do List resources!
presented by Barbara Vinal at Fall Convergence 2015
You can insert citations directly into Google Documents directly within the Document using EasyBib. MLA, APA and Chicago Style are available. The EasyBib Add On for Google Drive is one of the first you should enable if you are a writing teacher.
Mindmeister lets you take bulleted lists and convert it into a mindmap for a graphical depiction. This would be a fascinating way to convert a table of contents or outline for a paper into something easier to read. I’d really like it to go the other way and let students create a mind map and convert to a traditional outline, it is a very cool tool that will be useful for education. The Mindmeister Google Drive add-on gives a powerful punch to organizing your writing.
ADD-ON #3: TRACK CHANGES
Track Changes is an incredible functionality win for Google Drive as it is one that publishers or formal publications require. You can now add it into Google Drive meaning you can really publish a book out of Google Drive where you track and edit changes for each other like in Microsoft Word.
This Table of Contents add on lets you have a floating table of contents on the right that is always there. This will help you move quickly through the document.
Yes, Google Drive can insert a Table of Contents but it is placed inside the document. This add-on puts it in the sidebar where it is extremely useful. We use Google Docs to create the scripts and plans for our online presentations and this is now a LIFESAVER making the document much easier to navigate and move around. Remember that for it to work, you have to make things as Heading 1, Heading 2, etc.
The thesaurus will look up words to show on the right. While this add-on isn’t as useful as the right click thesaurus in Microsoft Word, it is a start.
Add a thesaurus into Google Drive. While it isn’t as useful as Microsoft Word’s right click feature (and it is a tad slow) — it will likely improve with time. If students are writing papers, it is a very useful feature.
If you want additional templates than those that come with Google Drive, this is a great add in, especially for those who create documents a lot.
If you miss the large template gallery in Microsoft Office, this add-on template gallery is a start with many useful form letters, spreadsheets, and pre-formatted mailers.
This Read and Write Text Help Add in is free to try for 30 days and has many features for Special needs and ELL (English Language Learners) with text to speech and other tools built right in.
If you have special needs students (don’t we all?) and are using Google Apps for education, Texthelp Read & Write is a must test. Google Chrome gives you a free 30 day trial inside their store.
Note that this also lets you mark up KES files which are for special needs and visually impaired. ePub (for ebooks) and many other formats are available.
If you’re sharing notes, this can be useful, although it should be pointed out that you can highlight without this tool, this certainly makes it much easier than the highlight feature that is built in and requires several clicks to activate. Additionally, it includes: read aloud, text prediction, vocabulary building tools, and many other features helpful for helping students write. The trial is free, but this is one you’ll have to pay for to keep. There’s also an iPad version. They’ve created a nice playlist about their product I’ve been embedded above and recommend it for special needs and ELL (English Language Learners).
Although this is probably considered more a business app, I can see a million uses for this in schools from approval of purchase orders to even signing off on finished student work for newspapers. You could also have peer reviewers sign off on work and track it that way as well. If you need a way to convince administrators that Google Apps can save time, this add-on may just do it.
Voice Conversations Inside Google Docs. I could actually picture a school use for this as well. Could you picture having a folder for student work and you share the document with parents, etc. and then have a voice call to go over the work? It is so hard for parents to get off work and once you sit down to talk, it is easy to drag it on. What if you had short 10 minute calls and they could be connected during their lunch break or a 10 minute moment without having to leave the office?
Another Option for Collaboration: If the live chat doesn’t work for you, there is a feature called “Letter Feed Messenger” which is sort of like iMessage meets Google Drive.
Consistency checker will be helpful for longer documents.
This one is useful for those creating very long documents (doctoral dissertations come to mind) or other documents that have to be consistent. It will do an extra check for spelling but also looks to make sure you’ve handled numbers, hyphenation and other types of writing mechanics in a consistent way. For a subset of writing teachers or for college students writing long documents together, this is a great tool.
Oh, I love Gliffy and have used it a long time. Now, you can add the many diagrams to all of your Google Drive. I used this tool to map out the layout of my computer lab complete with measurements. From organization charts to layouts of just about any kind, this is a great addition to Google Drive.
Note: Some of you may prefer Lucid Chart, but I’ve not use that charting tool and love Gliffy, but think it is worth a mention.
Twitter Curator is an App that you can use to pull together the tweets your class makes as you share your learning. You can also use it to share tweets that are successful or even those made by authors and others to document further information about what you’ve learned. This is sort of like Storify meets Google Drive.
This add-on is a Google Doc version of Storify and could be a way to pull in tweets from your class Twitter account or another source as you annotate and discuss them.
This tool is one that is going to take further notice. The purpose of Kaizenais to help teachers give better feedback to students. You can pull the document into Kaizena with one click using this add-on to easily add voice comments and thoughts on student work. This is a very impressive emerging tool for teacher feedback. (Free)
You might need to be a tad more tech savvy on this one, but go with me here with the 2 main uses I see for this in education.
Document Merge will let you merge documents into new Google Docs or into email and can be a handy tool for the more tech savvy educator who has to customize things for others.
Instead of using a Google Doc template, you could create a standard document and then have a list of the data to go in each document and merge it to make new Google Docs. So, for example, you were going to have different documents for different student groups on different topics — so you might have 2 students write on robins and 2 other ones write on bluejays. But they are younger students and you want a common format for these documents. You can have an original document and have certain fields come from your data (like a merge) and then have this tool make those documents. While a small class might not be a big deal to do them individually, if you’re one IT person working with a whole elementary or a teaching librarian who wants to do many google doc projects with children, THIS IS GOING TO SAVE YOU SO MUCH TIME!!
You can also use this to customize and merge emails. If you’re not using an offline app like Outlook or Thunderbird (many of us don’t) – you can produce customized emails with this service.
Clip art is always an issue and this handy tool seems to mitigate the problem of worrying about licensing for students and clip art. With 50,000 clip art items and icons, it is a great start for quick icons.
So, you want to include clip art and not have to worry so much about clip art issues. This app has 50,000 thousand pieces of clip art and may just be what you’re looking for to use with students for quick graphics. I particularly like that they include icons so you can make it easier to navigate to other sites by making buttons.
While there are other add-ons including those that can let you send a fax from within Google Drive and others that let you sign contracts and documents, these are my favorites for educators. Let me know your favorites in the comments. To see the whole store, just open a document or spreadsheet and go to Add-Ons >> Get Add-Ons
From http://www.coolcatteacher.com/best-google-drive-add-ons/
This post is provided “as is” without any representations or warranties, express or implied. Coolcatteacher makes no representations or warranties in relation to this website or the information and materials provided on this website. The open clip art should be for college and adult students only. Vicki Davis will not be liable to you (whether under the law of contract, the law of torts or otherwise) in relation to the contents of, or use of, or otherwise in connection with, this post.
Here is a great resource created by Dr. Chris Wasko. This is part of the DSAP model: Delivery, Student practice, Assessment, Productivity. Each post will contain technology resources that can be used at school or at home. I'll share each element separately. Enjoy!
Below are a few links on how to get started with Google Classroom.
Our students now have access to this. By using Google Classroom, you can share assignments, links to videos and websites, keep track of what they submit to you and more.
If you have a Smart Projector that looks like this:
You will need to disconnect your VGA cord from your laptop and connect it to your Apple TV. If you want the sound from your iPad to come through your SmartBoard Speakers, you will need to take the cord that is plugged into your headphone jack on your laptop and plug it in next to the vga cord on the Apple TV.
If you have an Epson Projector that looks like this:
You will need to change the Source on your remote to VGA 2:
On your iPad, slide to unlock it.
Slide UP from the bottom and a menu will appear:
Press Airplay
A list should pop up. Find your room number and tap it. Mirroring should be on (green). Now whatever is on your iPad will show up on your SmartBoard.
