A Very Belated Welcome Back to the New School Year.

Now that we're back and have had a chance to experience some of  the new technological initiatives that our district is starting this year (Chromebooks at the high school, Illuminate, Reflect, Atlas Rubicon, go big, or go home, right?) I've decided that its time that I resumed my posts here on the Instructional Technology Blog.  I'm going to start posting tips and tricks, throughout the month, to help people become more comfortable with the technology that we have available.

The first set of tricks that I'm going to share are meant to help you save time and use the mouse less.  Using the Tab button along with either Ctrl or Alt button allows you to quickly switch between open tabs, or windows respectively.

If you hold down the Ctrl button and hit Tab once, it moves you to the next open tab.  Each time you hit Tab while holding Ctrl,  it moves you to the next tab, the next tab, etc.  I find it easiest to hold the Ctrl button with my thumb and use my middle finger to hit Tab when I'm doing this.

Chromebook Tips

We're wrapping up the process of rolling out Chromebooks through our middle school (5th - 8th grade), and throughout the process I've heard a lot of talk about how teachers are worried that they won't know how to use Chromebooks.  At first I didn't understand what the problem was, I mean it's just a laptop that's based in the cloud, right?  After talking to people and listening to their concerns, I realized that a lot of people don't quite understand "the cloud" and think that Chromebooks are going to be some new type of technology that they're going to have to master.  Aside from the main difference that there isn't a hard drive and that you have to use some sort of cloud based storage e.g. Google Drive, or Drop Box, there really isn't much difference in how you use the device compared with the laptop computers that we've been using with our students for years now.

Along with the need to share tips and tricks about new technology with teachers in my building and throughout the rest of the district, I've also found that there are a lot of shortcuts that I commonly use that other teachers never knew about (I guess working in the business world before becoming a teacher has some advantages) which brings me to the point of this post.  This first infographic covers some basic keyboard shortcuts that work on all types of laptops as well as on Chromebooks; I created it using Piktochart.  I plan on following this post up with more helpful hints in using Chromebooks in your classroom.

For When You Just Need the Text to Speak to You

Last year, our district started its 1-to-1 initiative by putting Chromebook carts in my classroom and each eighth grade classroom (because we had all taken REMC's Blended Learning in the Classroom course).  I was on one of the teams that had a number of students who had accommodations stating that texts and assessments be read aloud to them.  My problem that year was that I only had support during one quarter of my classes, so if I was going to read every chapter from the book, and every quiz and test aloud, ALL of my students had to hear me; while this benefitted some of my students without IEPs, many of my students complained of being distracted.

In order to make sure that I was meeting the needs of all of my students, I started recording myself reading chapters using Audacity, but found that that was very time consuming; there had to be another way.  I'm not sure how I discovered Chromevox, which is a screen reader extension for Google Chrome, but I do know that many of my students benefited from hearing the text read aloud while they followed along in their books.

Hey everyone, it's that time of year again...Computer Science Education Week (CSEW) where the organization Code.org is trying to get tens of millions of students to to try an Hour of Code during the week of December 8-14...oh yeah, and its the holiday season, too, I suppose.  I'm sure that some of you are saying "But Erik, I'm not a computer teacher, why should I be interested in CSEW?" and one of the best answers that I can come up with is creativity.

More and more things that students are interacting with on a daily basis were created using coding, from the apps on their phones and tablets, to the newest and fastest operating systems, the creation of all of these things rely on people knowing how to code. "Ok, so I get why it's important" you say "but you still didn't answer the question of 'How will it help me?'".  If we can give students the skills to think more creatively, they will start to bring those skills to our classrooms; we'll start to see children thinking outside the box, making more connections, looking for creative solutions to the problems that we present to them.  This can be summed up by Doug Belshaw, in his article This is Why Kids Need to Learn to Code when he states

Cleaning up the Distractions

I've recently attended professional developments on reading apprenticeship and teaching students how to read informational text.  One of the concerns that came up is getting quality text for students to read.  Most of the science and social studies classes at our school only have one class set of books, which means that if a students want to take a book home, they have to check one out, and hopefully bring it back the next day.  I've had good results getting online sources of information using websites like Newsela, where you can search by subject, and then adjust reading level.

Aside from being able to individualize the articles, another nice thing about Newsela is the fact that when you are reading the articles, the website is relatively clear of distractions.  Sometimes, however, you find an article on the web from another news source that fits perfectly with what you're currently working on in class - the only problem is that there are ads peppered around the screen trying to grab your attention away from what you want the students to read.  Enter apps like Readability and Evernote Clearly.  Both of these extensions, which can be downloaded to your Chrome browser toolbar, or onto a Chromebook, allow you to clean up the background of the article and just show you the text and pictures that actually pertain the the article itself.

If This, Then That...let's give it a try

So, now that I've started a tech blog, I'm suddenly thinking about how my friends who have blogs are always linking their new posts to Facebook and Twitter...specifically, how do they go about doing that. I figured it was a simple option that you choose from within the various social media sites. After looking around for a while on Google (that's how I answer technology questions that people ask me) I found an option that I'm trying out right now - IFTTT.com which stands for if this then that for those of you who don't know coding.

IFTTT

Making Infographics

OK, you've all seen them on Facebook, Pinterest, and the various blogs that you read. Someone takes what normally would be a long, drawn out description of something that would normally take a few pages of text and turns it into an infographic which takes all of the pertinent information, puts it into bullet points and interesting pictures and makes you actually interested in learning about the subject matter.

I've always wanted to learn how to make infographics because, let's face it, kids don't have the longest attention spans, and I personally think they look really neat. I tried downloading an app to my iPad but could never get around to find the time to figure out how it works. Today when I was reading Richard Byrne's blog, Free Technology for Teachers I saw his write-up for a tool called Canva and thought, it can't hurt to take a look, can it?

Canva.com