1. Bookmarks-Bookmarks can be a great way to save frequently visited websites but can get difficult to organize or fit onto our bookmarks bar. For easy to identify websites, like Drive, Schoology, and PowerSchool, I recommend deleting the website name to save space. Just right click on your bookmark, click edit, and then delete the saved name. I would also recommend keeping any new websites that you would like to explore later in a separate bookmarks folder. This ensures that your visible bar only holds your most important websites. Below, my bar is about halfway full and holds 13 bookmarks! 2. QuickTime Player-QuickTime can be a really easy way to record lessons or tutorials. QuickTime can be used to record your computer screen and audio. I have used this program for pre-planned flipped lessons, directions when I had a substitute, or on the spot lesson recordings. For on the spot lesson recordings, I would reflect my iPad with our concept/example onto my computer and then record the lesson I gave to my students. The kids loved 'filming' and would take it very seriously. They were motivated to pay attention and volunteer so that their voice would be on the recording. I would then post the video to my class website as a resource for the students to go back to and watch. I was careful not to say any student names since I was publishing the videos to a public website. This is an easy way to record and publish lessons, without taking up more of your plan and after school time. There's also the added bonus of being able to then use these videos in following years. Don't worry about the recordings being perfect-the kids won't notice and it doesn't impact the overall goal of the videos. Here is a step by step tutorial and here is a helpful video. 3. QuietTube-This website takes any YouTube video and clears out all comments, sidebar suggestions, and ads. Go to thiswebsite and drag the QuietTube icon into your bookmarks bar, then go to any YouTube video. Once the video begins playing, click on the QuietTube icon in your bookmarks bar and it will open the video in a clean page. This is useful when you are projecting videos from YouTube to the class.
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1. When Schoology is Down-We had a great start to the week when Schoology was down Monday morning. Since we know this was a one-time only situation and will never happen again, here is a possible workaround. Create a GoogleDrive folder for each of your courses and share it with your students. If created ahead of time, you can post your share URL to Schoology and have the students add that folder to their Drive. If done in a jam during class, you can shorten your URL and either project it or write it one the board. This video discusses how to create and share a folder with your class and how to shorten your URL. Essentially, if Schoology is down during class, you can upload your files into this folder and it is automatically shared with your students. This could be useful for a Plan B situation!
2. Schoology Assignments-Sometimes you might find the need for students to only complete a small portion of a larger assignment. You could certainly have the students submit the full document and only check the pieces that you want. This could mean scrolling to various parts of an assignment, which can get time-consuming or can eat up class time to check student iPads. One possible solution would be to have the students take a screenshot of only the piece that they need to complete and submit it through Schoology. This ensures that the students turn it in on time, give you only the info you want, and allows you to check it in without using class time. 3. Computer Maintenence-Don't forget to clean up your desktop on your laptop occasionally! The more items that are there, the more things that your computer has to find, create an icon image for, and place every time you open up your computer. I always have a folder on my desktop called "To Sort" just as a spot to put items I need to organize later. 3a. Helpful Commands-When cleaning up your files, hold command while clicking files that you would like to move in bulk. Once you are done selecting the files, you can drag them all at once to a folder or the trash can. 1. Study Island & Schoology-Now that we have gone through our Study Island training, we can start creating ways to integrate it into our classroom routines! One way to integrate the two would be to link Study Island to a Schoology assignment and have the students submit a screenshot of their assignment/practice results. Any other ideas to merge these two platforms?
2. Charging iPads-Occasionally iPads will not recognize a charger when it has been plugged in. Usually, this is because the iPad has not been restarted recently. To fix this, hard reset the iPad by holding the Home and Power buttons until the screen turns black and the white apple appears. 3. EdPuzzle-This is a wonderful app that you can use to integrate questions into any video! Jeni Teramoto has used this site to mashup the STEMScopes video guide with the actual video. Christine O'Brien has added questions to her own flipped videos for stronger student participation and understanding. Take a tour of EdPuzzle here and decide if this is something that you can use in your classroom! 1. iPad Storage-Are your students running out of storage space? Have them check in "Storage & iCloud Usage" under "General" in their Settings to see what is taking up their space. Most of the time, this is due to photos and videos. Even if they have already deleted them from their camera, those items are still taking up space. They need to go to the album "Recently Deleted" in their Photos app and clear them out from there.
2. TCI (or other) Logins-Some students have had trouble logging into their TCI account. Most often, the students are using the Autofill feature that the iPad provides when typing in their username. This method is fine, but it treats the username like it would a suggested word and adds a space after the name when it's clicked on (just like it would on an iPhone when you're texting). The students need to DELETE that space in order to log in. This could be applied to any other instance using Autofill for usernames. 3. Grammarly for Chrome-Thank you to Megan Windsor and her student for passing this extension along! This is a free extension you can add to GoogleChrome that will check all of your spelling and grammar. It is a really useful tool and goes deeper than just the routine grammar checks! You do have to create an account, but it is so worth it! You can find more information here! |
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