The Friday Tech Tip

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 ...

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 activ...

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...

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 tha...

Haaaaaaaaapppppppyyyy Friday! I can't believe we are at the end.  I really don't have a Technology Tip this week. What I would like to do is give you all a  high five for taking a giant step with technology this year.  I was able to run a few numbers and wanted to share these with you all. In the Elbert County School system we have 3,502 Active users . That means that 3,502 Teachers, staff, and students have logged into a Google account or created a Google Document.   Our goal is to add more once we activate accounts for students in Kindergarten and First Grade.  Our Primary kids will have Google Accounts to login into their Chromebooks.  Potentially they could create their first Google Doc and have it with them all the way through their career in Elbert County School System.  On May 15, we had 1,028 Active users using Google Classroom. That means that we had 1,028 students and teachers working collaboratively together, giving and re...

Happy Friday! Google Forms is a great tool to be able to get instant feedback.  Many teachers here in Elbert Co. have used forms for Formative and Summative Assessments.  We also use it to create surveys, create signups. I love it because it can make a quiz go to the next level. You can insert videos, pictures, graphs, equations, etc. . . into Google Forms.     This week Google has announced some new updates to Google Forms that will make creating forms even easier. These will be rolling out in the coming weeks 1 - Answer Suggestions -  It will give you answer choices as you create multiple choice questions! How crazy is that?    So if I create a multiple choice question  for example "What are the parts of a cell?" It will auto populate multiple choices based on your questions. You choose the correct answer. 2 - Grade Grid responses -  One of the options when you create an item in Google Forms you have the ability to create "cho...

Happy Friday! I have recently been reading up on AI Machine Learning (Artificial Intelligence) machine learning in the classroom.  Artificial Intelligence is becoming more and more common place in our lives. Here are a few examples.   This weekend my family and I are taking a good road trip and I'm sure that we will use the "Waze" app or Google Maps to help get us to our destination. These programs will predict traffic patterns and will guide us the quickest way to get where we are going.    When you checked your email this morning you didn't receive all of your Email because some went to the "spam" folder. Your email program is predicting and filtering out unwanted or dangerous E-mails. Your Email program is deciding for you what is important and what is not important.  Google Mail also has smart response and predicts what you are going to say in your Email Response You may have deposited a check this week using your mobile phone. When you take a p...