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Showing posts from August, 2018

Starting the Year with a Professional Learning Network

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Happy Friday! How do you grow professionally? Read books? Talk to colleagues?  Build and improve upon others ideas?  You can do all of this at your own pace using Twitter. By now you probably know about twitter. It's in the news a good bit.   But, it's also a great way to build a PLN (Professional Learning Network) Educators from across the globe are using Twitter to share their ideas. For me personally, this has been a great way to interact with Tech leaders across the world.  Twitter is a professional learning network where you read and share ideas. Twitter is not a place to post pictures of your beach trip.  It is  one of the leading ways that Teachers are giving and receiving Professional Learning. Twitter is a little different than other social media sites because  tweets can only be 280 (Recently it changed from 140 characters.) Many people use twitter to share their experiences in the classroom,  share links to educational blogs or articles, or to take part in twi

The Blue Way on Display

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Happy Friday! I'm very excited about this new initiative this year with our school district.  We have adopted #BluewayonDisplay  this year as our campaign. We would love for you to show off the amazing things that are happening in your classroom or school.  We have launched Thebluewayondisplay.com    to be able to show off your good work.  This is a place where you can submit short videos that can be up to around 2 minutes  of what is going on in your building! For example, you have a great learning activity going on in your classroom ( Sidenote: I saw this on ESPN the other day and this is the most epic game of rock paper scissors of all time ).  You can go to Bluewayondisplay.com and upload the video, tag your school, and it will be on display for all to see. (Please be mindful that  if there are  students in your video they have a media release form). I have created this short video tutorial to show you how the submission activity works. You can watch the tutorial or chec

New Features Coming to Google Classroom

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Happy Friday! I hope that you all have had a good full week with your students! If you are using Google Classroom you may have noticed that it looked a little different this week.  For example, the about page is located in the bottom right and not in the stream.   For the last few years Google Classroom has released  some great new features in August that have been helpful. This year is no different.  There are several changes that have been rolled out or is currently rolling out that I think that you will find useful.  Here is some information from the Google Classroom page New Classwork page— Teachers and students have a new  Classwork  page. Teachers can post assignments and questions on the page, and also group them into modules or units with topics. New grading tool in Classroom—Teachers have a new grading tool where they toggle between student submissions while grading, and  save common feedback  in a comment bank to use later. New People page—Teachers can view 

Welcome Back!

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Happy Friday, I hope that you all had a good beginning of the school year!  If you are new to the Elbert County School District then Welcome!  This the Friday Tech Tip and you will receive this email on, (you guessed it) this Friday. This is the first year that all of our students in grades K-12 have a Google account. This means that all of our students can log into chromebooks and have access to unlimited storage. Your building technicians have really worked hard over the summer getting Chromebooks up and going this school year. K-4 students will log into chromebooks using a QR code (more on that later) but all students now have a tab in campus with their username and password. If you have a student who does not know or remember their username or password then you can go to campus click on the ST email tab and there you will see the students username, email address and password One of the greatest things in the EdTech world that happened over the summer is that FlipGri