I'm a big fan of the EdtechTeam and the great ed-tech PD they put on for educators across the country and even world-wide. In last month's post I showcased a local summit my colleagues and I put together, modeled after the EdtechTeam summits I have attended in the past and gained so much knowledge about effectively using technology to enhance student learning and teacher delivery of content using all the great edtech out there.
This year I decided to take the plunge and put in a proposal to present at the 2016 Breckenridge summit. I submitted two proposals because I hoped they could find one of them worth accepting and then I was surprised with an email letting me know that both had been accepted! It was exciting and nerve-wracking to be selected to speak to fellow educators about what great things you've learned and worked with that could help them. Just like teaching a group of students you want your presentation to be engaging, informative, differentiated, and useful, which we know are not always easy to put together in one neat package. My topics were customizing Google Chrome and Google Forms, two tools I had a lot of experience with and had already discussed with my own staff many times. I put together two presentations that I tried to overload with information to enable advanced folks to work ahead and beginners to continue to digest well after the summit.
The summit was fantastic and as always I walked away inspired by the people I met and learned from, and with a head full of new great ideas to bring back to my own district. When it came to presenting, I think the biggest take-away is to not be afraid to put yourself out there and engage with your peers. Fellow educators are always so appreciative and excited to learn from one another and there is a recognition that we are all in the same boat and just want great things to make our students more successful and our teaching more dynamic. That sense of community and desire to continue life-long learning is what makes summits like these so successful.
Below you will find my two presentations which you can feel free to copy for your own learning regarding Forms and Chrome. Take a look and don't hesitate to contact me with any questions.
Diving Deep into Google Forms looks at the customization that can be done in the old Google forms and what your options are in the new Google Forms. Take advantage of all the great advanced question features and add-ons to really make Forms an amazing tool!
Making Chrome Work for You is a quick guide to how you can customize the Chrome web browser to work for you and use the multitude of apps and extensions to work smarter, not harder.
0 Comments
The 2nd annual RFV Edtech Summit was held on Saturday, April 9th and it was so encouraging to see local teachers from around the Roaring Fork Valley come together in order to share and learn about various ed-tech tools and strategies. The summits were a concept borrowed from the wonderful work done by the EdTechTeam and their various summits run throughout the country and world to bring educators together to network and share how edtech and GAFE can work for them. If you haven't attending one, I highly recommend checking one out near you and getting geeky and inspired with all the great resources available to you! After attending several of their summits in the Colorado area, my cohort, Anita Moose, and I got together with a fellow integrator from the neighboring district (Roaring Fork School District), Ben Bohmfalk, to think how we could bring that same excitement and opportunity to our small valley. We wanted to enable teachers who might not be able to give up a whole weekend and travel away from home an inexpensive opportunity to learn and work with their colleagues right down the road, creating a network of support that they can easily access. Engaging, useful, and exciting Professional Development is always a want and need in any school district and a summit environment is a great way to deliver it. Thus the Roaring Fork Valley Edtech Summit was born as a one day event that would be put on by teachers for teachers. We worked with administration to offer teachers in-district credit for attending and presenting and approached local businesses to provide give-aways and discounted catering options. Our first Summit was held in February, 2015 at Aspen High School with 70 teachers in attendance and over 15 presenters. We learned a lot about successfully putting that many educators together and what needs to happen in order to make them feel comfortable learning something new and working with each other. Fast forward to 2016 we were ready to launch RFV Edtech Summit #2 at Roaring Fork High School in Carbondale, CO. Taking feedback from last year, in addition to our presenter sessions we added a 'Sandbox' area for participants who needed time to wrap their heads around concepts/tools they just learned. The 2nd annual RFV Edtech Summit was held in April, 2016 and had over 80 participants and 20 presenters. Other improvements made were offering graduate level credit or in-district for participants and presenters. With two summits in the books we are showing no signs of slowing down. We plan on continued growth in participants and presenters and will look to branch out for sponsorship's and ed-tech partners. Here's a list of things I learned along the way: Organizing participants/presenters- Getting your participants and presenters organized is the key to having a successful summit. If you can't get quality presentations and enough participants to attend you are done before you start. We used Google Forms to gauge interest, gather presenters and their materials and have participants register. It was great to get all the information into Google Sheets and then be able to run the add-on Autocrat to provide confirmations and completion certificates. Keynote/Intro- Having some type of introduction to get people motivated is crucial to a good summit. Having a big name is great, but for our local summits we kept it simple by having a few tech staff and teachers speak the the group about what excites them about edtech and what their hopes for the group are. Then a quick rundown of logistics and directions and you get people off and running. Passing time- Though this doesn't seem like an important element, it is! Giving your participants and presenters time to process what the last session delivered, time to use the bathroom, grab a snack or cup of coffee, and most importantly, network and inquire with other participants and presenters is so valuable. In my opinion 15 minutes is the absolute bare minimum and any more than 30 minutes you risk losing people. Sandbox time- This concept was born out of feedback from our first summit. It was mentioned that there was so much great information floating around that near the end of the day it was hard to try and stay focused on a new topic when there wasn't much time to explore an earlier idea. For the 2nd summit we added a space for the third, fourth, and fifth sessions where participants could sit in a tech facilitated room to dig into something cool they learned and truly process how it could work for them. Food/snacks- Teachers LOVE food and snacks! If you are going to have an overworked teacher give up their weekend in order to better their craft, in addition to great content you better have some delicious food, drinks, and snacks to keep them going throughout the day. We made sure to provide great local coffee, continental breakfast, granola bars, and a fully catered lunch to keep everyone's stomach full and mind open! Sponsorship's/donations- Extra funds aren't typically laying around in an educational setting (let's not get started on this...) so finding support from the community is key to putting your best foot forward. Not being familiar with knocking on doors and asking for things I was surprised at how kind and generous so many businesses can be, especially when it comes to teachers! Great give-aways, food, and drinks were donated to our cause. Don't be shy, get out there and be amazed at the support your community can give you! Wrap-up/give-aways/feedback- At the end of any training it's so important to bring the group back together to allow time for reflection and decompression. It also helps to have some great prizes to reward the participants and presenters for all their hard work! Having a short wrap-up is a must and giving away fun prizes ensures most of your group will come back together. This is where all the great support we had from the community came into play and once we had everyone's attention we reminded them of what needed to be completed in order to receive credit and help us make the next summit better. We combined a form to provide feedback to the organizers and presenters and turn . This proved to be such a useful set of data for planning our next summit. There are so many good PD opportunities out there, but sometimes you need to stay local and take advantage of all the great resources around you. Find a topic that gets teachers excited and you're off and running with a homegrown PD that is really helpful. Don't be overwhelmed at the thought of organizing your own PD event, use the tools at your disposal and make something happen that benefits your teachers and students!
We are living in a digital world where just about any information is available at our fingertips. This has increasingly made a boxed curriculum more irrelevant as finding information that is current and valuable to students online can be as simple as a Google search.
DocentEDU is an amazing tool that enables any teacher to easily create a lesson using the most updated content they find on the web and share it with their students. This extension or add-on makes the development of your content accessible from anywhere and available on most web browsers. The DocentEDU layer works with most webpages, online pdfs, and published Google docs. The process is pretty simple: Sign up for an account, add the extension or add-on to your web browser, and find relevant web content you would like to incorporate into a digital lesson for your students. I personally prefer to utilize this tool with Google Chrome as an extension which works really well as one more tool in my favorite extensions list.
With a free account you can create up to 5 "Docents" to share with a class. For the low price of $40/year or $8/month you can have unlimited Docents and be able to refer back to any of your created content to reuse again with future students. I recommend getting set-up with the free account and playing around before making the decision to purchase. If you and your colleagues find this tool useful, you can work with your school's tech and/or curriculum department to look at a volume purchase for a large group of teachers who can then share content with one another.
DocentEDU is fully integrated with Google to make all you GAFEers out there one step closer to implementation. Google Classroom can be used to create your classes with existing rosters and assign Docents to your students through the Stream.
Sticky Note: This is DocentEDU's do all tool. It works as a simple sticky note within a document or accepts embed code for YouTube videos, Google Slides, images etc... in order to allow you to add more information to an existing webpage for your students to review.
Question: Just like it sounds add a short answer or multiple choice question that your students can answer and the results will get stored in the DocentEDU database for you to go back to your teacher dashboard and review and grade/provide feedback.
Discussion: Create a thread where you and your students can discuss topics based on content in your lesson. Provides a safe place to host an online discussion within the realm of your classroom.
I got a chance to speak with Karin Hogen, the co-founder of DocentEDU, in my early stages of discovery and DocentEDU's early stages of release. She walked my fellow integrator and I through her creation and development of DocentEDU, how it can be used, and what her hopes were for the tool in the future. It's great to see a teacher look to create such an innovative solution to an up and coming problem of trying to give students the most updated information when teaching them concepts across subject matter.
If you try and teach using new web content and current events then you need to check out DocentEDU as a easy and innovative way to deliver lessons to your students.
Check out this video from DocentEDU on how easy it is to create questions.
If you have access to GAFE (Google Apps for Education) and haven't taken advantage of Google Classroom yet, what are you waiting for?!? Classroom is a great way to organize a Google workflow with your students without the headache of trying to manage sharing options for Google apps back and forth. Being one year removed from the classroom since the introduction of Google Classroom I cringe at the thought of the old system I had set-up with my students, attempting to utilizing folders within folders and individually going in to set sharing settings for each folder and document (Ughh!) Now Classroom makes the process so much easier and organized, a completely digital and paperless classroom is not such a crazy idea. As useful and amazing Google Classroom is for working with students in my role as a Technology Integrator, which involves a lot more staff interaction and training , I have found using Classroom as a conduit for getting information and resources out to fellow staff members is just as productive. Instead of sending and receiving a barrage of emails or losing items in the 'Shared with me' list in our ever-growing Google Drives, the important resources, links, documents, etc.. can be placed in a Classroom that will keep it contained and organized for people to access before, during, and after a training or meeting. Teachers vs Students: One important consideration is who will be a teacher of the Classroom and who will be a student. The ability for teachers to interact with various elements posted is somewhat limited compared to students. If you want to fully take advantage of some of the collaboration pieces (questions and assignments) you'll need to have the majority of participants as students in the Classroom. In my district the Technology Team has created a Classroom for each building (AES, AMS, and AHS) and had all the teachers and staff enroll as students. This enables us to easily deliver content and get feedback from all the teachers as well as give them unlimited access to resources, links, documents, agendas, etc.. after we have finished a training. Most useful elements: There are several components of Classroom that I have found most useful when interacting with peers. About Section: This section lets you post 'static' information to your Classroom students. Any important documents, links, or videos you feel will be a constant reference should live here. This way participants always know where to get them and won't have a scroll down a ever-growing stream as you post more and more in the Classroom. Announcements: The announcements are one of the all purpose elements of Classroom. They let you post web links, file attachments, YouTube videos, and Google Docs. This is the go-to element I use when sharing resources with staff. It's a great way to have documents available for staff to follow along with as you're presenting with them. Assignments: The assignment is a great way to hand out individual copies of a document or resource without the recipient needing to go through the process to make their own copy. One thing to keep in mind is not setting a due date if you're not expecting anything to be returned (this will avoid those late notifications). Assignments with or without documents attached are also great ways to collect items and keep them organized in one place easily. Questions: The newly created question element of Classroom is a great way to quickly get feedback or promote group discussion. Depending on your settings when you create the question, you can either have answers only seen by teachers to provide anonymous feedback or you can let students see and reply to each others responses creating an online discussion to further any work done in a meeting or training. Google Classroom has proved to be an extremely versatile tool when it comes to working with students and staff. If you have any experience utilizing Classroom or another edtech tool for alternate purposes leave a comment below and share the wealth!
One great adaption of using Google Docs in the classroom is the ability to transform the way you deliver content. Creating Hyperdocs and Multi-media text sets is a great way to deliver curriculum material, supplemented with the wealth of resources you can find online, especially if you have begun working in a GAFE environment and taking full advantage of Google Classroom. Don't let the names fool you! They are incredibly easy to create and as long as you put some thought into what your desired outcomes are and what students can achieve they prove to be incredibly effective! I'm a big proponent of working out from the academic standards you are trying to achieve with your students and building a lesson from there. This always helps me keep my goals in perspective and really utilize technology to enhance student learning as opposed to simply shock and awe engagement for using some fancy new tool. I was first introduced to the concept of Hyperdocs and Multi-Media text sets from working through the new and improved Google for Education training program. They give you great examples of each which you can access here (Hyperdoc and Multi-Media text set) and use as a base to begin to create your own based on your specific needs. Though I feel these two tools are somewhat interchangeable in their name and purpose I think the main difference to keep in mind is that a Hyperdoc is a digital document used to replace a more traditional worksheet that enables you to add a slew of elements and resources to your instruction to engage and enrich your students' learning. A Multi-media text is more of a focus on gathering digital resources and materials students can use to learn about a particular subject all in one location. Interactive elements or critical thinking questions can be added for students to process or respond to after consuming the content you have curated for them. Below you will find two images of Hyperdocs/Multi-media texts I've created for teachers in my district to help them teach science and social studies standards. Click on the image to access a fully functional doc that you can copy and use as a template to begin to create your own library of curriculum resources. Now get out there and start to redefine your teaching and students' learning by taking some time to redesign how you deliver curriculum and accomplish your academic standards. Please comment below with any questions or additional information you may have experienced with using these tools.
If you have been using the Chrome web browser for any extended period of time hopefully you have dove into the world of apps and extensions that can be used to enhance your web browsing and overall GAFE experience. Here are ten of my current favorite extensions: 1. Black Menu: Love Google and everything about it? Black Menu is the extension for you! It provides access to all things Google right within your browser tab/window without having to move away from whatever you're currently working on. Though you can initiate anything Google from Black Menu once you decide to dive in it will open up a new tab to allow you to work further. 3. AdBlock and Adblock for Youtube: Use AdBlock and Adblock for Youtube to strip away annoying ads that pop-up during your web browsing sessions. Both extensions are free (AdBlock asks for donations) and there are paid versions that offer more features. Though not 100% effective they do a great job getting rid of most ads and Youtube commercials. 4. Capture, Explain, and Send Screenshots and TechSmith Snagit: These two extensions are great for taking screenshots that can be annotated and shared out. I like having both applications for there different abilities: Snagit allows you to capture specific regions or whole screen and also allows you to screencast. The annotations you make are all editable and any image file you create can be saved to Google Drive. Capture, Explain, and Send Screenshots does much of what Snagit does, but also allows you to use 'print screen' to quickly grab the entire screen which I especially find useful when trying to capture menus within browser windows to better explain processes. The editing of annotations is not as easy as Snagit, but completed images can be downloaded or saved to Google Drive. 5. Screencastify: Making screencasts is a great way to explain computer or edtech processes that people can watch repeatedly at their own pace. Screencastify is a great extension to record screencasts and save them to Google Drive or immediately upload them to Youtube. There are several types of annotations you can make during your screencasts and if you decide to upgrade to the full version of Screencastify you have several more options available to you. 6. Share to Classroom: This extension is a must for all classroom users! Easily access any classrooms you are teaching or participating in from your Chrome browser and have the option to instantly create announcements, assignments, or questions right from the extension. If your students have the extension installed you can also instantly push web based content right to their devices, easily putting everyone on the same page without the need to share and copy links. Our district has forced the extension to student chrome profiles using the admin console which makes the teacher and student interaction much easier. Don't use Google Classroom without it! 7. RefME WebClipper: When doing online research it's always difficult to properly reference material for students and adults alike. Though there are many avenues you can use to create correct citations, one useful tool in extension form is called RefME. This extension allows for quick collection of citation information and even allows you to highlight and collect quotes or portions of an article for reference. All the material can be collected and categorized by project and then referenced back to in your RefME account database where you can review your citations and choose the format you need them in. 8. App Launcher Customizer for Google: Being an avid GAFE user I always want quick and easy access to my most frequently used Google tools. If you've ever used the quick app launcher in the upper right corner of your chrome web browser you've probably noticed it might be missing some of your preferred apps in the home screen. By adding the App Launcher Customizer you can now pick and choose what apps show up so you truly have a customized experience that works for your GAFE needs. 9. Goobric: Moving to a paperless (or maybe just fewer papers) classroom only works if you have the right tools to support it. Edtech innovations like Google Classroom, DocentEDU, GAFE, Kahoot, Socrative, etc... definitely make it easier. Another great tool to assist the transition to less paper while still providing meaningful feedback is Goobric. This rubric tool works in conjunction with Classroom and Doctopus to allow a teacher to grade any of the Google Apps with a digitally created rubric and share that information back to the students. Rubric scores are collected on the Doctopus Sheet for teacher reference and can be emailed to students. If grading a Doc, the rubric will be inserted directly on the document for student reference. Recently Goobric for Students was added as an easy way for students to view a rubric attached to their assignment. Add Goobric to your paperless toolbox and start providing students with meaningful digital feedback. Watch the tutorial video below to get a better idea of how Goobric, Classroom, and Doctopus work together. 10. Save to Pocket: I'm always finding great articles that I don't always have time to sit down and read. With a Pocket account and the Save to Pocket extension I can now save those articles to read later (or never again...). It's as simple as it sounds, click on the pocket extension when you are looking at an article you want to save and add any tags you may want to use to keep it organized. Then simply use the Pocket extension to view your account on an empty web browser page and refer back to any articles you saved. So there you have my top ten favorite Chrome extensions to date. They are always updating and changing so I have no doubt the list won't be the same soon. Feel free to comment below on some of your favorites.
One of the biggest buzzwords flying around the education world is "Flipping" the classroom. When you Flip the Classroom you attempt to enable students to learn concepts at home (or anywhere) and come to class prepared to take the next steps in the learning process. This strategy is a great way to cover a lot a content in a limited amount of classtime or re-enforce concepts to individuals or the whole group. You can also differentiate for small groups or individuals. Edpuzzle is a free service you can sign up for (In addition to email you can use a Google or Edmodo account to register) and create classes/groups that can then be assigned videos from a large list of video databases. (Youtube, National Geographic, Kahn Academy, Vimeo, etc...) Once you have picked a video with content that meets your students needs you can trim the video in order to focus on specific ideas or content. You can only trim from both ends of a video so be careful of what you are removing. If you prefer to customize your video's audio you can record your own narration over the video content. If you start your own narration you do have to record over the entire clip so make sure you aren't removing any original sounds or narration you want to include. Throughout the video you can add audio notes for your students to listen to as they watch the video. They can be added at specific points in the video to allow you to highlight ideas or concepts in the video. One of the coolest features is the ability to add questions throughout the video at specific points to assess if students are understanding the content they are watching. You have three options: Open-ended, Multiple Choice, and comment. Answers are collected and can be graded and sent back to students. Finally, you can assign your video to one or more classes/groups and enable or disable your two 'Superpowers' which can prevent students from skipping around in your assigned video and set a due date.
No teacher has enough time in the school day to teach everything, so make sure you're taking advantage of great free tools out there like Edpuzzle to easily flip the classroom and customize learning for students in a variety of ways that can best meet their needs. Comment below any great ways you've used Edpuzzle or any other useful flipping tool.
Last month I wrote a post about the massive potential for Google Forms in education and you can't really talk about Forms without mentioning Google Sheets. Though Sheets is its own application within the Google Apps for Education (GAFE) it is the default collection spot for Form responses and is still the best choice when looking to sort and analyze data you've collected. When Form data comes into a Sheet it is organized by TimeStamp, Username (if you create it under a organization account and opt to require and collect it), and then each question's response. The order of the responses going left to right across the sheet matches the order in which you created questions on the Form. A great new update is the ability to move the columns (aka the question/responses) to any location on the x-axis. This used to be prevented because of the connections between the Form responses and the Sheet, but now you can arrange the responses how you see fit without out affecting the Form. Quick tips:
Here are some great add-ons and tools you can use in Sheets to work with Form data: Flubaroo: Great add-on that lets you create an answer key and grade submitted forms. The grade report is created on a separate tab for easy viewing. An answer report can be emailed to the Form respondents identifying their correct and incorrect responses. After you run Flubaroo once you can set it to auto-grade any new incoming responses. SuperQuiz: A more in-depth tool to work with Forms and Sheets to create quizzes and assessments. Check out this video to get a full explanation of how to set it up and make it work for you and your students. WorkFlow: A new add-on that helps increase the productivity and collaboration of working with information on a Sheet. The WorkFlow add on lets you send an approval request to someone to let them know they need to look at something contained within your Sheet and respond which in turn lets you know they've seen it. If you start to explore the use of forms as a way for staff to register for events and PD using WorkFlow is helpful to keep all interested parties informed of changes and stay updated on incoming information. Autocrat- This is an amazing mail merge add-on that lets you create form letters and customize them with information collected in a Sheet. It works really well to send confirmations of Form data when you want your respondents to be aware or remember the responses they gave you. (i.e. reminding respondents who have used a form to register for an event) It allows for a PDF or Google Doc letter created and the ability to automatically email your merged document. SaveAsDoc: If you've ever tried collecting paragraph style answers in Forms you know how difficult it can be to try and efficiently review the responses without giving yourself a headache. Using the SaveAsDoc add-on can save your eyes and sanity by taking each set of responses and created a running Doc that is much easier to read and can even be easily printed out if you want respondents to review their answers. Each question becomes a bold heading with the responses below. Notifications: By going to the 'Tools' menu and selection 'notification rules...' you have a few simple options to have emails sent you when any changes are made or when a user submits a form. You can receive these notifications in an immediate email or in a daily digest. This is a great way to keep track of Form submissions without having to leave the response sheet open and keep refreshing. Conditional Formatting: Conditional Formatting is a built-in tool that allows you to color code Sheet cells based on a value, or range of values you identify. This is great to identify specific or correct answers quickly as responses come in or to go more in-depth with your analysis of any amount of data by creating flags for certain benchmarks. Sorting and Filtering - Every column allows you to do a simple ascending or descending sort A-Z, but you can also enable the 'Filter' feature for a more in-depth sorting to help organize the data you want to see. In addition to collecting Form data, Sheets works as a cloud spreadsheet that can be used to collect, organize, and analyze data. Graphs and charts can be created to make visual representations of data collected. You can even make the visuals living documents so they grow when new data has been added. In the past I've had students record their monthly math fact scores and track their progress. The Specials teachers in my district use a form to collect behavior data from each class and chart their progress to reward positive behavior. If you're not sure of how to best chart or graph the data you have collected in a Sheet, Google has added the 'Explore' feature that suggests various ways to chart and analyze the data you've collected. Pivot tables- This is a whole other beast when it comes to sorting and organizing data within a Sheet. The Pivot table allows you to reorganize massive amounts of data and add various values and fields to shape the data in a way that works for you. In order to achieve the growing/living chart for Specials behavior as I mentioned earlier a Pivot table was needed in order to separate the grade-levels and teams so the data was useful and specified enough to allow teachers and students to quickly look at their progress. Now that you have several tools and places to start, don't be shy about getting into Sheets and using it to really dive into your data analysis and make some good decisions about your next steps. Feel free to comment below any additional tools or strategies you've found to be helpful.
The information and data you can collect with Google Forms is astounding! They have become so versatile that the uses in education seem to keep growing. Now with Google Forms one thing that needs to be remembered is that your responses are often collected in a Google Sheet (look for a post about the great add-ons and uses for Sheets coming soon!). You can now opt to see the results directly in "Summary of Responses" from the "Responses" tab.
You hopefully are familiar with the various types of questions you can ask in a Form (Text, Paragraph Text, Multiple Choice, Checkboxes, Choose from a List, Scale, Grid, Date, and Time.) Each question type can serve a unique purpose to helping shape the type of data you're collecting and how it can be used. Let's go over some of the advanced features you can enable for certain question types:
There are several add-ons you can use in Google Forms to make them more dynamic and useful. Here are some of my favorites and what they do:
CheckItOut- Allows you to modify several question types to create a dynamic system of check-in and check-out items. I have personally used it to create a Chromebook check-out for students in my high school. Choice Eliminator- This add-on lets you pick or create a question with a set of answers that can be removed from the list as they are picked. Great for sending out a sign-up for snacks for a class party or time slots for a conference. You can even set the number of times an answer can be selected before being eliminated. Form Notifications- Quick and easy way to have emails sent to one or multiple people when a certain number of responses have be collected with your Form. Respondents can also receive emails with custom messages after they complete the Form. formLimiter- Lets you set a number of responses or set a specific date and time of when your Form is no longer accepting responses. Very useful if you are using a Form as some type of sign-up and need to ensure you only allow a specific number of participants. formRanger- allows you to populate multiple choice, list, checkbox, and grid options from columns in any Sheet or Doctopus roster. When you've already done the work once use formRanger to ensure consistency and not retype the same information you have. So if you haven't jumped into all the amazing uses of Google Forms, go a little deeper and see how you can utilize this amazing tool for the betterment of your teaching and your students learning! If you're like me then you always come up with a bright idea right when it's needed most and wish you had the foresight to put something in place ahead of time. If you haven't checked out IFTTT.com yet then you are doing your productivity a disservice. If This Then That is a web tool that allows you create "Recipes" for a multitude of processes including web services, apps, android and iOS notifications, and email. I was introduced to this tool from James Sanders when he was presenting a GAFE session on how to create problem-based learning for students. Countless numbers of recipes can be created when you sign-up for an account with IFTTT.com and then let the fun begin. On the site they are divided into DO and IF recipes. DO recipes let you create a process you control like quickly adding events into your calendar. IF recipes let you create processes that run in the background like automatically saving Instagram posts into a dropbox folder. The site provides an easy search function as well as galleries and channels containing hundreds of suggested recipes you could spend all day browsing. Once you get the hang of the process you can even start to create your own recipes that are tailored specifically to your exact needs. One recipe that I use all the time is creating an email alert when iOS or Android educational apps go on sale or become free. One thing I think all educators are looking for is great, FREE tools to help them and their students. It's so convenient to have a daily digest sent right to my inbox and then be able to vet the app and share it out with other educators. Recipes can be made to retrieve photos or information on NASA activities, you can collect and read current event headlines from NPR, even keep track of the U.S House and Senate voting record. This list goes on and on and they are adding new ones all the time. Do yourself a favor, create an IFTTT account and start finding amazing recipes to make your personal and professional life more automated, organized, and productive. |
About EvanDirector of Technology for Traverse City Area Public Schools. Level 2 Google Certified Educator. Former Tech Integration Specialist and 4th grade teacher at Aspen School District and Spartan for life! Go Green! Categories
All
Archives
February 2019
|