Chrome Extensions

Chrome Extensions

Chrome extensions are small software programs that can modify and enhance the functionality of the Chrome browser. You can find Chrome Extensions in the Chrome Web Store. There are many extensions available to improve your workflow. Here are some of our favorites:

• Save to Google Drive: The Save to Google Drive Chrome extension helps you save web content or browser screenshots to your Google Drive. - Imagine you find a great lesson plan - you can click the save to drive extension to send a screenshot of the webpage to your Google Drive.

• Clipboard History 2: The Clipboard History Chrome extension helps you to retrieve previously copied content. Imagine you are giving students digital feedback and you find that you find that you are repeating the same feedback - you can copy the content and then access any copied content in the clipboard history to use again. 

• Awesome Screenshot Capture and Annotate: The Awesome Screenshot Chrome extension helps you take screenshots and annotate them. You can save the annotated screenshots to your Google Drive. You can screenshot selected regions of your screen with this extension.

• Google Calendar: The Google Calendar Chrome extension is a button on your browser toolbar that you can click to see upcoming events from your Google Calendar and add events to your Google Calendar, without ever leaving your page. Imagine you need to check what time your next meeting begins or you need to quickly add a meeting with a student to your schedule - you can quickly add this event to your calendar without leaving your current page. 

• Google Tasks: The Google Tasks Chrome extension helps you easily add and manage your tasks from Chrome in one of three ways: 1) Simply type "t Your new task" into the Chrome Omnibar to add a task from whatever web page you're on. 2) Click the Tasks icon to add a task, see your tasks and task lists and mark a task as completed 3) Highlight text on any web page, right click and add that text to a new task.

• Bookmark Manager: The Bookmark Manager Chrome extension makes bookmarking easier with the smarts of Google Search and a new modern interface. With this extension you can utilize a one-click save feature and add images and notes to your bookmarks to make them more helpful. Also, Google will suggest a folder if it seems like it could be a fit. You can share bookmarks with your friends and family. This extension provides an improved search and your bookmarks will automatically be organized by topic, like “Tokyo” and “Photography,” but you can still organize them into folders yourself.

Street View Treks + Google Forms in Classroom

Google Street View Treks

I often dream of being able to fly my students all over the globe to experience my content firsthand. How engaging would it be to see, smell, hear and feel all of the things that we are talking about in class. Unfortunately, there are limitations to our field trip budget so for now I turn to tools like Google Street View Treks as a way to expose kids to the world outside of White Bear Lake. Treks are online experiences that use tools such as 360 degree panoramas, photos, audio narrations and videos to tell the story of a place. They have a growing collection of experiences for you and your students to explore including The Amazon Basin, Galàpagos Islands, Pyramids of Giza and The Great Barrier Reef.

Check out the list of available Street View Treks here and see if there is an experience that would be relevant to your classroom. Even if you can't find an overlap in your curriculum they are pretty cool to check out on your own.

Formative Assessment Forms in Google Classroom

Google Forms are great at doing one thing, collecting data. That's why many teachers are finding Forms to be a useful tool for formative assessment. There are a number of different question types that you can pose to your class to get a sense of where they are at with your content. Assigning these Forms through Google Classroom now allows you to see which students have completed the assessment and who still needs to finish. Follow these steps while assigning a Form in Classroom. 

1. Create a new assignment in one of your classes and give it a title. 
2. Click the Drive icon and search for the Form within your Drive.
3. From the dropdown menu, select all of the classes that you wish to assign the Form to. 
4. Click the 'Assign' button
5. As soon as students get to the end of the Form and submit it, Classroom will automatically show that the student has finished that assignment.

  

BrightBytes Survey + 4C's Mentoring + YouTube Webcam Capture Alternative

Brightbytes Survey Coming Soon!

In past years we have taken the BrightBytes survey twice. This year we are only taking the survey once You will receive access codes on Wednesday January 13th. The survey will be open through the end of January.

Please plan to complete the BrightBytes survey and make time for your students to complete it as well. Your feedback is extremely important and the closer we can get to 100% participation, the better job we can do of serving your specific needs.

4C's Mentoring Program

The 4C’s mentor program is a differentiated professional development opportunity that honors the work you are already doing with your students and provides a structure to increase your impact while focusing on the use of the 4C’s and technology in your classroom.

The goal is to increase specific 4C’s (Communication, Collaboration, Critical Thinking and Creativity) capacity and spread innovation through the use of technology. Click here for more information and click here to sign up. After signing up you will be paired with a mentor who will contact you.

YouTube Webcam Uploads No Longer Available

  

YouTube is no longer supporting their webcam upload and as of January 16th, the tool will be unavailable. This tool allowed students to record themselves speaking with a webcam such as the one available on the Chromebooks. 

Students are still able to record video with another device and upload to YouTube. We suggest that students use a smartphone or tablet to capture their video and then upload the video to YouTube with the device used for capture.

For help finding alternatives, please contact Matt or Cassie. 

Two Helpful Keyboard Shortcuts (inspired by my most common mistakes)

Control + Shift + t will open the last tab you closed - say goodbye to accidentally closing tabs and having to navigate back to them.

Control + z will undo your last action - say goodbye to having to undo something you accidentally did.

New Dell Deals

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Flubaroo Updates + Flubaroo Your Pear Deck + Conditional Formatting + New Sort By Color

Flubaroo Updates

Flubaroo is an add-on to Google Sheets that allows you to grade form responses and share feedback with students.

Flubaroo has recently developed a new way to share grades via Google Docs. Click here for instructions. Flubaroo also has developed a grade by hand feature which means that you can grade free response types of questions now. Click here for instructions.

Flubaroo Your Pear Deck

You can grade your Pear Deck with Flubaroo. Check out the video below or click here for instructions.

Conditional Formatting + New Sort By Color

Google Sheets allows you to format cells based their content. This can be useful for quickly assessing entries in a spreadsheet or responses to a Google Form. Click here for instructions on applying conditional formatting to a Google Sheet. 

After you apply conditional formatting you can sort by color. This is useful for quickly identifying or grouping students. Check out the video below and click here to get the add-on. 

Pear Deck Takeaways + Kahoot Ghost Mode + Dell Deals

Pear Deck Takeaways

Many of you have already discovered the power of Pear Deck as a formative assessment tool for your classroom. The new Takeaways feature provides even more of an opportunity to monitor student progress and provide feedback.

A takeaway is a Google Document that is automatically created for each student at the end of a Pear Deck lesson. This document details how the student answered each of the questions in your lesson and is automatically shared between you in Google Drive. Take a look at the video below to get a better idea of how this works. 

If you haven't discovered how you can use Pear Deck in your classroom, start here.

Kahoot Ghost Mode

If you've ever played Kahoot in your classroom you know just how engaging it can be. Students get excited to play feed off of the competitive nature of the game. That excitement doesn't have to end when class is over. Kahoot now features Ghostmode in which students can play against their "ghost". The ghost appears as another player in the game and answers the questions just like the student did in the previous round. This allows students to compete against themselves and make improvements. After students create their own free Kahoot account they can play all of the games that you have made while they are at home.

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Dell Deals for White Bear Lake

Dell is offering Black Friday Deals through our Member Purchase Program. You can find access to them here.

Quizizz + Sworkit Kids

Quizizz: A Self-Paced Alternative to Kahoot

Kahoot is a free game-based learning platform that makes learning competitive, engaging, and fun. Many teachers that are currently utilizing Kahoot have found it to be a great addition in their classrooms, but many have also mentioned that students get caught up in answering questions quickly rather than correctly. Quizizz is a self-paced alternative to Kahoot. The students still play against one another and are rewarded with points for answering questions quickly and accurately, but they move through the quiz at their own pace. Click here for a brief video overview of Quizizz. You can create your own quizzes in Kahoot and Quizizz, but you can also search their libraries of quizzes. Not sure which tool to use? Click here for a comparison of Kahoot, Quizizz, and Pear Deck.

Sworkit Kids

Sworkit Kids is an iOS and Android app designed to get kids moving with fun, short exercises. You can choose a workout length of 5-30 minutes. You can choose exercises or let the app create a sequence of exercises for you. Examples of exercises include crab walking and diagonal hoping. This app could be great in physical education classes, but could also be used for brain breaks or transitional periods in the classroom.

Google Slides Templates + Student Gmail Groups + New Google Forms

Templates for Beautiful Google Slides Presentations

Creating a visually appealing Google Slides presentation can take quite awhile if you're starting from scratch. Now you don't have to. Slides Carnival is a website that has templates complete with background images, layouts, fonts, and re-sizable icons. The best part is that they are all free!

I've added all of their templates to this Google Drive folder for you to easily access. After opening the one that you would like to use just click "File" and then "Make a copy" to start crafting your own stunning presentation.

Here is their latest template for Halloween 2015. 

Student Gmail Groups Synced from Skyward

Groups of student email addresses are now automatically generated for every class that is in Skyward.  No more creating email lists for your students in each class.  These can be used to send emails to classes, to enroll students in you Google Classroom classes or push Android and Chrome apps to student accounts.

Here are the steps to finding those addresses (if you prefer a video see below):

1. Go to groups.google.com

2. Click the "My Groups" button

3. Click the "isd624.org" link (under the Red Create New Group button, last one on the right)

4. Open the Group for the class you are looking for

5. Click the "about" link on the right side

6. You will see the address for that group.

100 second video shows all the steps.  https://goo.gl/xTs2zc

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Pushing Android Apps

Pushing Chrome Apps

The New Google Forms

Have you seen the new Google Forms? They just made a few changes including a more simplified design, new themes, and a faster way to view the summary of responses.

Get started with the new version of Forms

You can learn more about the new features here.