Innovation @477 - Up Your Google Game

Being a GAFE (Google Apps For Education) school district gives us access to myriad of educational tools. These tools directly support the teaching and refining of vital communication, collaboration, creativity and critical thinking skills. If you are feeling like you need some more training with these tools or are just looking dig deeper with google tools, check out these resources from the Google Training Center!

Google Classroom 

Topics include: Make Fewer Class Copies, Assign Work More Easily, Give and Receive Feedback, Create Beautiful Learning Materials and more

Google Chrome

 Topics Include: Share Chrome Apps and Extensions with Your Students, Use Chrome to Explore the Web with Your Class, Promote a Safe and Responsible Online Presence

Chromebooks

Topics include: Using Chromebooks with G Suite for Education, Getting Started with Your Chromebooks, Your Devices in the Classroom

Google Forms

Topics include: Bring Your Quizzes Online Using Google Forms, Measure Student Progress, More Ways to Add Interaction to Instruction, Get Inspired by Alternate Learning Models and more

Innovation @477 - What's My Password?

                

Have you ever had to press "forgot password" or had to call tech support because you got yourself locked out of your account? Maybe more than once....a week 😉 . No worries dear colleagues, I have THE perfect extension for you - Last Pass! Last Pass is a chrome extension that saves all your logins and passwords making it much easier for you to login into to the many different websites and apps you use as an educator!

How it works - add Last Pass as a chrome extension and sign up for an account and set one Master Password - the last password you ever have to remember!

You will see you now have this icon in your extensions lists .  As long as it is red, whenever you login to a new website you will get a popup asking if you would like Last Pass to save your login and password. The next time you go to that website's login page you will see this in the login and password box  and you should see your login and password (encrypted) already filled in.

If you ever need to change a password, check on a password or adjust your account settings, click on the extension image  to access your settings menu.


Last pass can also help you generate secure passwords and let you know when you've used the same password on multiple sites.

I've used Last Pass since I started in this position and now I can't really imagine not using some type of password protected password keeper.

For more help with logins and passwords for accounts managed by our district, don't forget to refer to the District Managed Software, Apps and Websites.


Jodi

This Week in Innovation @477 - Creation

In the world of EdTech we often hear we want to move students from consumption to production. The idea being the device should not just be a replacement of paper, it should be a tool that allows our students to produce and create their own learning.

 But a shift you’ll see down the road is that tech will be used less for presenting content and more as a tool to design and create and explore and connect to other learners, to experts around the world. It will be much more of a tool to enable new types of learning than it will be a tool for distributing content. -Ricchard Calcutta in EdWeek

This is the direction many of our classrooms are heading. Growing access to 1:1 technology in our buildings is supporting this change. Tools like Seesaw, Flipgrid, Google Slides, and more give students an avenue for creating and producing their own, individual products to demonstrate their learning.

Staff Highlight:
Melissa Kisch, 4th grade teacher, took the common back to school practice of sharing classroom rules and expectations with her class and allowed her students to teach one another. Students responded to the Flipgrid question: What Does Tiger Pride look like in each of these areas?

Kisch Flipgrid - Showing Tiger Pride

Tool Highlight:
Flipgrid is a tool that allows students to record up to a 1min 30 second response to any question. Many of our teachers who attend Digital Bootcamp, and were introduced to Flipgrid, are now using it in their classrooms.
Here's a great list of ways to use Flipgrid in your classroom.

Share your creation projects below or send them to Jodi! 

You never know when a shared idea will be inspiration for another teacher. 

Innovation @477 Get To Know You with Technology

Welcome back to another great year in Princeton Public Schools. This year our 3rd, 4th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th graders will all have 1:1 devices with increased access for all other grades. With more technology at hand, it's time to see how those tried and true back to school activities can be done using technology!

Erin Franson, 5th grade teacher at our Intermediate School created this great activity that could be used in just about any classroom! It's the tech turn on Two Truths and a Lie where you each student tells two truths and one like about themselves, the class has to guess the lie. Erin has put this activity into a Google Slides format. She will share the slides with her class, giving each students the ability to edit the document. This could also be shared using Google Classroom quite easily!

Once the students open the document, they will find the slide with their name and work on entering their two truths and a lie. Putting student names in the document ahead of time makes it easier for students to find their workspace without accidental writing on or deleting information on on a classmate's slide.
A couple of options for how to use the completed document:

• Project it on the smart board and go through each slide as a class, taking guesses together. 
• Share it on Seesaw (it will share as a pdf) and have students share their guesses using comments. 
• Have students access the document and go to each slide, using the comments feature in Google Slides they can give their guesses. 

Other ideas? Share below in the comments!

Here's the link to the Two Truths and a Lie document for you to use!

Make a Copy, Rename it and put in your own student's names and you are ready to go!

Thank you to Erin Franson (@eefranson on Twitter) for sharing her great idea!

Two Truths and a Lie