August 2020 Tech Tips & Sir Ken Robinson

 Sir Ken Robinson, passed away on August 21st, he has one of the most viewed TED talks of all time and was always a proponent for change in education.

He also wrote a series of books including one that Hal gave to us a few years ago called Creative School.

http://sirkenrobinson.com/

Here are a few of his talks,

Why schools kill Creativity?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY

Changing Education Paradigms

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

Learning Revolution

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFMZrEABdw4

Tech Tips August 2020

Screencastify replacement LOOM

Screencastify has ended their free subscription for Covid, I recommend trying Loom as a replacement.

Zoom Updates

Only a few updates including saving a whiteboard or multipage whiteboard to image or pdf, more reactions heart, surprised face, laughing face, or party emoji and a whole bunch of upgrades for noise background reduction, video quality and speed improvements.

Zoom has currently not reinstated the 40 minute limit on our accounts so for the time being we are continuing the same logins and access we had during the third trimester.

Seesaw

Big update to organize Activities

•  Assign an activity to a class and then directly link students to the activity (perfect for sharing in a student announcement, Google Classroom) 

•  Edit folders in the menu below and sort folders in the Activities tab for better subject-level organization 

• ️ Print activities to help students and their families complete activities offline 

• ✅ Students view their activities organized in three sections To Do, In Progress, or Done

• ️ Students click on the folder icon to easily sort their “Literacy,” “Math”

Go Formative

Selwyn House now has a school license for Go Formative so if you want an account just let me know and I will send you the invite.

This is a very powerful quizzing platform that integrates easily with Google Classroom, we have already begun doing some of our Admissions testing using this platform as well.

https://goformative.com/

May 2020 Tech Tips

Giving Audio or Video Feedback:

You can easily give audio or video feedback on assignments, especially with us doing distance learning,  students want to have a connection so visual and or auditory feedback could have more of an impact.

First you're going to need a URL or Hyperlink of your Video or Audio feedback, but first you need to make it:

For Video:

You can use Screencastify to record yourself and get the sharing URL of the video that is saved in your Google Drive.

Free 1 year if you use CAST_COVID code when activating your license.

For Audio:

You can use Google Read & Write Voice Notes, Talk & Comment Add-on or Mote, each of these allow you to insert an audio comments in a Google Doc. 

You can add the audio comment to any doc file, it does not have to be in the students' work file, once you have the audio, it will also have the hyperlink to that audio clip.

You can insert these hyperlinks or URLS in emails, seesaw, google classroom, etc....

I recommend adding Permanent Clipboard Chrome add-on, this allows you to easily paste the code whenever you need it. You can also keep a few URLs of pre-done audio feedback clips to insert quickly as well whenever you want without having to re record or search the link.

April 2020 Tech Tips

Interesting Article from the New York Times:
Coronavirus Ended the Screen-Time Debate. Screens Won.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/31/technology/coronavirus-screen-time.html


https://whiteboard.fi/#about-section
Easy to use Whiteboard system, you can ask questions and see students answering live on their own whiteboards. Thanks to Elisabeth Jean for the tip.

GoSoapbox https://www.gosoapbox.com/
An online student response clicker system

30 Activities from Apple These activities are great for children ages 4–8+

The full versions of Popplet and PicCollage Edu are currently free on IOS(iPad or iPhone)

Popplet

https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/popplet/id374151636?l=

Popplet is a mind mapping app

PicCollage

https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/piccollage-edu-collage-maker/id977081997?l=

An easy to use photo editor

February 2020 Tech Tips

Microsoft Report on Education in 2030 Infographic
https://edudownloads.azureedge.net/msdownloads/Microsoft-Staff-2030-Infographic.pdf

Student Selector in Google ClassroomTo randomly call on your students, you can use Classroom’s Student selector. The Student selector randomly picks students from your class roster. You can call on a student, skip a student to call on later, or mark a student as absent.https://support.google.com/edu/classroom/answer/9123699?hl=enhttps://imclient.herokuapp.com/audiorecorder/

Cloud Audio Recorder is a fun, simple and easy to use audio & voice recorder.This audio recorder is a free recorder that can capture any sound, voice made by your computer microphone. You can save the recorded audio to the mp3, wav format. Supports HTML5, Flash recorder. You can also save the audio file to your computer or Google Drive directly.

https://www.citnum.caDévelopper la citoyenneté est devenu essentiel à l'ère du numérique. Amener les futurs citoyennes et citoyens à faire preuve d'autonomie, à agir en étant guidé par une réflexion éthique et à démontrer une vivacité dans leur façon de penser de manière critique.

L'IAJe suis allé à une présentation sur le IA par Valérie Bécaert d'Élément AI à montréal, voici un TED Talk sur le sujet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcqmkJmi10o et voici un bon vidéo qui explique les différents type de IA sur le marché. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUrME1t21gc

December 2019 Tech Tips

Just a couple this month:

Cool tips to get more out of Google Docs, Sheets and Slides:

https://gizmodo.com/21-tips-to-make-google-docs-sheets-and-slides-work-for-1840196294

Canva is now free for educators:https://www.canva.com/education/

How Canva can help in your classroom, Infographics. Presentations. Posters. Documents. With Canva, you can create anything you can imagine.

Get all the pro features for free.

November 2019 Tech Tips

Google Slides:

I know this should have been available a long time ago but by the end of the month you will be able to insert audio in Google Slides

https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2019/11/slides-audio-update.html

Google Earth:

Brand new Google Earth Stories feature allows you to build a story from different locations adding interesting facts or build a narrative. Collaborate with others to build an amazing experience. Only on Google Earth Web via a laptop/desktop but the experiences can be shared to IOS or Android devices as well.

https://www.blog.google/products/earth/new-google-earth-creation-tools/

Phishing:

Just a small reminder against phishing attacks such as the one we got this week with Hal's Email address, here is a brief article to help detect these attacks.

Stop That Phish | SANS Security Awareness

For a brief quiz to try to beat the scammers try Google’s Phishing Quiz

Jigsaw | Phishing Quiz

Presenter Coach:

A free service from microsoft and available to everyone (you will need to setup a Microsoft account, you can use your selwyn email to generate this). This service allows you to run a presentation and an AI will give you pointers and a grade approximation on how well you did.

You can read Richard Byrnes analysis of the service and how to convert your slides document to work with the service as well.

How to Use Presenter Coach as a Google Slides User

Green Screen: 

I found this great ressources that outlines very easy, classroom projects and tools (mainly doink green screen) with loads of links.

Green Screen Magic | Smore Newsletters for Education

September 2019 Tech Tips

ios 13 and iPadOS: Apple has released a new version of ios on iPhone and iPad. on iPad especially we have a bunch of changes to multitasking, gestures and pencil tools. Here is a video that goes over all the new stuff, it's quite long but you can skim through sections. IOS 13 Features & Gestures

Kahoot!: Kahoot has a new creator tool to build even better quizzes. 

Seesaw: New Creative Tools allow to have a sort of Explain Everything(Whiteboard) features.

Remixed Conference hosted by LEARN, this free conference is a great mix of presentations and presenters. The conference takes place at Concordia downtown.