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Creating Narrated Slideshows with Google Tools. A Short Explanation of Google Apps Terminology. Earlier this week I received an email from someone who was looking for clarification on the differences between Google Apps for Education, Google Drive, and Google Docs. That request for clarification isn't uncommon. Here's how I typically try to explain the differences between Google Apps for Education, Google Drive, and Google Docs.

Google Apps for Education: Google Apps for Education (commonly referred to as GAFE) is a free service that Google provides to schools. Within Google Apps for Education students, teachers, administrators, and support staff can use Google Classroom, Google Drive, Google Sites, Google Calendar, Gmail, and many other Google products. Google Classroom is only available to GAFE users. It provides a mechanism for teachers to distribute to and collect assignments from students. Google Drive: Google Drive is a cloud storage solution offered by Google. Google Documents: Google Documents is a free tool for creating and editing documents. How to Search for Publicly Shared Google Docs, Slides, and Spreadsheets. Change the Way You Learn & Teach with 15 Educational Chrome Extensions.

A device that beat the iPad at the mobility game? Sounds impossible. Yet Chromebooks overtook iPads to become the bestselling educational device in the U.S market. Some of the pie can be credited to Google’s push with education. That push has turned into a street brawl as Apple, Windows, and Google try to capture young minds. Teachers and pupils explored the role of technology in education. My Study Life Information overload is an epidemic. My Study Life is the tool for teachers and students alike. My Study Life is also cross-platform across iOS, Android, Windows, and Chrome. Quizlet Studying hard without revising is a waste. We have all experienced the panic mode at some point in our lives. There is a huge library of flashcard sets you can also pick from.

As a student, you can also look into FlashTabs which I had mentioned in the list for must-have Chrome extensions for this year. BeeLine Reader Online reading is an information literacy skill. Your mileage may vary. Notable PDF Spell Bee Newsela. Making the Most of Google Keep. 15 Can't-Miss Chrome Extensions for Productivity. Advertisement More Google gold for you! You listed some of your favorite Chrome extensions in one of our recent polls and Dave turned them into a handy list. Today we bring you a few more essential extensions geared toward helping you work better online. Google Gold: 15 Essential Chrome Extensions Google Gold: 15 Essential Chrome Extensions The standard Chrome experience can be made so much better with a handful of extensions.

Read More For Keeping To-do Lists Install: Dayboard When you first sit down to work, use Dayboard to list your 5 Most Important Tasks or MITs for the day. Momentum is another start screen that doubles up as a to-do list. For Blocking Distractions Install: StayFocusd With StayFocusd, you can get online distractions out of your system by indulging in them for a bit. Who’s to stop you from tweaking the time limits or disabling StayFocusd whenever you feel like it?

For Saving Keystrokes Install: Auto Text Expander for Google Chrome There’s not much to the extension. 60 Smarter Ways To Use Google Classroom. 60 Smarter Ways To Use Google Classroom by TeachThought Staff Google Classroom is quietly becoming the most powerful tool in education technology. It may lack the visual appeal of iPads, or the student credibility of a BYOD program. It may not be as forward-thinking as we’d like here at TeachThought, but Google Classroom excels in providing solutions for a broad swath of teachers who have a variety of expertise and comfort level with education technology. It also uses Google’s familiar template that many teachers have used for years. As such, it scratches the itch for many teachers in many classrooms right here, right now. So below are (at least) 60 thing you can do with Google Classroom. 60 Smarter Ways To Use Google Classroom. 20 Chrome Apps & Extensions for Teachers and Students. 100 Ways To Use Google Drive In The Classroom.

100 Ways To Use Google Drive In The Classroom by onlineuniversities.com Students and educators have a wealth of learning and productivity tools available to them online. Google offers some of the highest-quality resources on the web to meet all your study and teaching needs, and all you need to access them is an internet connection. The Google Docs collection provides a streamlined, collaborative solution to writing papers, organizing presentations and putting together spreadsheets and reports. But besides the basic features, there are lots of little tricks and hacks you can use to make your Google Docs experience even more productive.

Here are 100 great tips for using the documents, presentations and spreadsheets in Google Docs. Ed note: This is an older post, so some of these features or links may be out of date. Keyboard Shortcuts Navigate your documents and screen a lot faster when you use these keyboard shortcuts for formatting and more. Productivity Hacks Features & Tools Collaboration. LeadandLearn - Google Apps. Save Your Time With 10 Underused Google Features. Google’s email service was born on April Fool’s Day. Today, it’s no joke. We can’t do a day without it. Trivia about Gmail may not be useful for productivity, but I bet you will jump at a tip that shows you how to delegate your email to an assistant or spouse. It turns out Google is filled with these little nuggets. We ignore them because sometimes we take common tools for granted. Google’s tools are a continuing source of time-saving productivity tips that can help maximize our use of resources available to us. Here are ten time-saving features in Google products we shouldn’t do without.

A Checklist of Google Tasks Google Tasks has often brought me back when my brain had gone for a walk. Matt Cutts, the well-known Google engineer thinks so. As long as it is around, you can also use these five methods to use Google Tasks on your desktop. Remember the Video Meeting Add a link to a Google+ Hangout to any Calendar event in one click. Set up a future Hangout in three simple steps: From the Web. 10 Good Google Docs, Sheets, and Forms Add-ons for Teachers. This afternoon I was asked if I could put together a list of my favorite Google Docs, Sheets, and Forms Add-ons. In the past I had put together lists of Sheets scripts, but most of those lists are outdated as Add-ons have mostly replaced scripts.

Here's my updated list of my favorite Google Docs, Sheets and Forms Add-ons. Google Docs Add-ons: The Tag Cloud Generator Add-on will create a word cloud in the right-hand margin of any of your Google Documents that contain more than one hundred words. One of the most useful Add-ons for Google Documents is the EasyBib Bibliography Creator. The EasyBib Bibliography Creator makes it easy to properly cite resources and format a bibliography in APA, MLA, or Chicago style. Knowing the right keyboard shortcuts to type the accents and characters is one of the challenges that students face when learning and trying to type in a new language. Google Forms Add-ons:FormLimiter is one of my favorite Forms Add-ons. 13 Awesome Gmail Hacks You Probably Didn’t Know. Gmail has so much more to offer than just compose and send. In fact, you can do some pretty amazing things to make managing your email so much easier!

Did you know you can drag and drop (or copy and paste) an image directly into the email you’re composing. No saving to your computer then attaching. Just drag and drop! Click on the gear icon in the upper right corner of your gmail account. Next, click on “Settings,” then the tab marked “Labs.” Labs are tools that people have built to work with Gmail and make it much easier.

Have you ever regretted sending an email and wished you could take it back? Do you find yourself composing or replying the same message over and over again? Speaking of lazy, to check out the nifty keyboard shortcuts you can do in Gmail, simply type “?” Looking for a really old email, or that recipe your mom sent ages ago that’s hidden in your email archives. Don’t want to deal with a certain email, issue, or person right now? Like This Post? How to Search for Publicly Shared Google Documents. Insert Graphs and Equations Into Google Docs and Forms. One of the most frequently asked questions in my webinars and workshops about Google Drive is, "how can I add math problems to my Form? " Thanks to Google Forms Add-ons there is a rather simple answer to this question now. g(Math) is a Google Forms Add-on that allows you to insert graphs and mathematical expressions into your Google Forms. To get the Add-on select "get Add-ons" from the Add-ons menu in Google Forms.

Then search for g(Math). Click the install button, give the Add-on permission to access your account, and then you're ready to go. To insert graphs and equations into your Form select g(Math) from your Add-ons menu and follow the directions that pop-up on the right side of the screen. g(Math) is also available as an Add-on for Google Docs. How to Create Flashcards from a Google Spreadsheet. The Google Docs Template Gallery hosts some templates for creating flashcards from a spreadsheet in your Google Drive account. None of those templates are as easy to use or as flexible as the template offered on Flippity.net. Through Flippity.net you can quickly create a set of flashcards that include pictures, videos, and text. You can even turn your flashcards into a printable quiz. In the video embedded below I demonstrate how easy it is to use Flippity to create flashcards from a spreadsheet. For more tips and tricks like this one, check out my Practical Ed Tech Tips playlist on YouTube.

Now You Can Customize Headers, Footers, and Page Numbers in Google Docs. Google Announces Steps to Clean Up Blogger. Google Classroom Now Lets You Customize Your Classroom Themes. Beyond Knowing Facts, How Do We Get to a Deeper Level of Learning? As educators across the country continue to examine the best ways of teaching and learning, a new lexicon is beginning to emerge that describes one particular approach — deeper learning.

The phrase implies a rich learning experience for students that allows them to really dig into a subject and understand it in a way that requires more than just memorizing facts. The elements that make up this approach are not necessarily new — great teachers have been employing these tactics for years. But now there’s a movement to codify the different pieces that define the deeper learning approach, and to spread the knowledge from teacher to teacher, school to school in the form of a Deeper Learning MOOC (massive open online course), organized by a group of schools, non-profits, and sponsored by the Hewlett Foundation.

So what defines deeper learning? Educators often discuss the difficulty of teaching students who don’t seem to want to learn. Related. Member Appreciation Month. Standards for Coaches 4: Professional learning. Think back to your last professional learning opportunity. Were you anticipating innovative and fresh ideas? Or feeling trepidation because the training was mandatory? In either case, we have all received PD that was energizing or less than engaging. Professional learning is the heart of an effective technology coaching program. Standard 4 of the ISTE Standards for Coaches focuses on PD, program evaluation, content knowledge and professional growth. It is based on the idea that, to remain effective, we must continually evaluate the PD we provide. How does a team of coaches determine if they are effective? The technology coaches in Laramie County School District 1 in Cheyenne, Wyoming, have evaluated their PD program regularly since its creation more than 15 years ago.

In team meetings, the tech coaches have conversations about how they can change their practice and the program’s strategic planning to be more effective. Laramie’s PD is data driven. Edutopia | K-12 Education Tips & Strategies That Work. 3 Rubric Makers That Will Save You Time And Stress. Rubrics can be an incredibly useful tool for your classroom. Aside from being one of those cool words that sounds a little weirder every time you say it, using a rubric can help your students understand the assignments in your classroom, and will make your grading process clearer, faster, and more objective and consistent. Online rubric makers can make rubric creation pretty simple, so we’ve collected a few sites that offers online rubric makers (some of them are free) that can help you out in your classroom. There are many sites out there that also offer shared rubrics from other users that you can use as well – quite a helpful tool if you’re either in a pinch, or at a loss for where to start.

Rubrics4Teachers Rubrics4Teachers offers a LOT of pre-made rubrics covering a variety of subjects that are available for your use. You can search by subject matter or by term. This is a great site with a lot of free content, though the focus is on already created rubrics, not make-your-own. Rubistar. Google Launches YouTube Kids - An for Watching Family-Friendly Videos. How to Email Reminders from a Google Spreadsheet. The Real Benefit of Using Google Sheets Add-ons Like Flubaroo and Goobric. On Friday evening I posted a list of my ten favorite Google Sheets, Docs, and Forms Add-ons.

A point that I should have made at the start of that post is that the biggest benefit of many Add-ons is that they save teachers time. For the most part Add-ons won't change the way you teach, but they can streamline some processes for you. Take that time savings and use it on the things that make teaching fun like having more conversations with students. Or take that time savings to reduce your personal stress level and go fishing, play with your kids, let your mind wander, or do whatever it is you like to do when you relax.

We often talk about the need for balance between professional and personal lives. Here's an example of this from my life. Another example of an Add-on that can save teachers a ton of time is found in Doctopus and Goobric. 10 Good Google Docs, Sheets, and Forms Add-ons for Teachers. This afternoon I was asked if I could put together a list of my favorite Google Docs, Sheets, and Forms Add-ons. In the past I had put together lists of Sheets scripts, but most of those lists are outdated as Add-ons have mostly replaced scripts. Here's my updated list of my favorite Google Docs, Sheets and Forms Add-ons. Google Docs Add-ons: The Tag Cloud Generator Add-on will create a word cloud in the right-hand margin of any of your Google Documents that contain more than one hundred words. One of the most useful Add-ons for Google Documents is the EasyBib Bibliography Creator.

Knowing the right keyboard shortcuts to type the accents and characters is one of the challenges that students face when learning and trying to type in a new language. G(Math) is an Add-on for Google Docs that enables you to easily insert graphs and equations into your Google Documents. Google Forms Add-ons:FormLimiter is one of my favorite Forms Add-ons. Google Apps and Chromebooks Training Resources. Training | Course Details. A Handful of Google Calendar Tutorials for Teachers. Google Launches Google Classroom Mobile Apps. Some of My Favorite Resources for Introducing Google Earth & Maps Beyond Social Studies. How to Email Reminders from a Google Spreadsheet. Math Walks - Google Earth Walks.