Pushing Chrome Apps to Students + RealTimeBoard Application

Pushing Chome Apps to Students with Google Play

Chrome Apps are web-based applications that run in the Chrome browser. Teachers can push these applications to students' Chromebooks by following these simple steps:

1. Go to Google Play for Education (play.google.com/edu). If you haven't logged into your isd624 Google account already, log in when prompted.

2. Click on "Chrome Apps" on the left side of the screen. The apps are broken down by subject area.

3. Click on the desired app and click "install."

4. Type the email of the student or group of students that you want to push the app out to. Click here to see a short video on finding pre-made groups for your classes. Your student groups should populate upon typing the name of your class(es).

There are many great content applications, but there are also general tools that you can explore! For example, you could push students the Google Keep application covered in last week's tips! Students find the applications that have been pushed to them by clicking the circle in the lower left corner of their Chromebook screen.

NOTE: Not all applications available in the Chrome Webstore are available to be pushed out to students through Google Play for Education. If there is an application you available in the Webstore that you wish to push to students, please submit a Bear Tech Ticket with this request. Google Extensions that are available in the Chrome Webstore add features to the Chrome Browser. They cannot be pushed from Google Play for Education. If you would like your students to have a specific Google Extension, please submit a Bear Tech Ticket. 

RealTimeBoard: A Chrome App for Collaboration

RealTimeBoard is a Chrome application currently available in the Chrome Webstore or at https://realtimeboard.com/app that serves as a collaboration space. You can add pictures, drawings, videos, sticky notes, Google Drive files and more on an endless whiteboard canvas. Watch the following video for a quick preview of this application:

IFTTT, Community Ed Schoology Page, Schoology Notification Settings (May 13, 2014)

Tip #1: If This Then That

If This Then That is a service that allows you to make connections between many of your online services. You create recipes that trigger an action in one service when something happens with another service. An example that I used in class was every time the daily weather for White Bear Lake was posted on the Weather Channel, IFTTT would add  that weather data to a new row in one of my Google spreadsheets. My students then compared the weather data that they were collecting for class with the data that was automatically added to the spreadsheet from the Weather Channel.  Essentially it is a way to automate some of the tasks that you do already, freeing up some of your time. It also has features that can do some pretty cool and unique things.  For a more detailed description click here.

IFTTT is also an app for Android and Apple.

Tip #2: Stay in the loop: Community Ed Teacher Page

You may have seen the new "White Bear Lake Teachers" page in your list of courses in Schoology. This page was created by the folks in Community Education to keep you in the loop about professional development opportunities.

"This will be where we post all flyers from Colleges and Universities offering professional development for teachers. We are moving away from paper flyers being placed in mailboxes and moving toward an online posting of flyers. We decided Schoology is the way to go to forward this communication to teachers."

-Kristine Wehrkamp

Tip #3: Notifications or not. The choice is yours.

As you are being enrolled in various courses and creating your own, you may or may not want to get an email about everything that happens in the course. Luckily, the choice is up to you! This is how you change notifications for a specific course and here is reminder on how to change notification settings for your account.