Saturday, August 20, 2016

5 New Google Updates

Exciting News.  This week Google released a bunch of updates to many of their tools that are popular with teachers. Here's a short overview of those updates which I think many of you will be excited about as well.  I have heard several teachers over the past couple of years mention these updates as a must fix for Google.  Now they have.  When school gets back in sessions, I will gladly offer training on how to take advantage of these updates.


1. Google Classroom now supports sharing with parents. You can now invite parents and guardians to subscribe to a daily or weekly summary of activities in your Google Classroom classes. 

2. In the Google Classroom mobile apps you can now draw on, highlight, and write on top of students' Google Documents, PDFs, and Microsoft Word documents. The iOS version of the app will also let you type on top of a document. With both apps students can annotate items that teachers have shared in Google Classroom and teachers can annotate items that students have shared back to them.

3. You can now use images as answer choices to questions created in Google Forms. You can also use images as question prompts in Google Forms. 

4. You can now add topics labels to posts in your Google Classroom stream. This allows you to search and sort your stream by topic instead of date. 

5. Starting on September 12th Google will no longer offer Hangouts on Air. Hangouts on Air will be replaced by YouTube Live. YouTube Live will let you create public, private, and unlisted broadcasts. Broadcasts will be automatically stored in your YouTube account. The most significant change for many users will be the removal of the Q&A feature that was in Google Hangouts on Air. Now to host a Q&A you will have to share Google Slides and use the Q&A feature integrated into the presenter mode in Google Slides.

Monday, August 15, 2016

Apps on the Mac to help students with reading

Here is another link that talks about apps on OSX machines that will help students with reading.  Check out  the box features here:

http://www.apple.com/education/special-education/osx/


Dyslexia Font

For those that are interested, check out this free home edition download at https://www.dyslexiefont.com/  This is a free font that has been proven to help with reading for dyslexia. 

Saturday, July 23, 2016

A New Lesson Plan Tool for Google Docs

A New Lesson Plan Tool for Google Docs

OpenEd is a service that offers a huge catalog of standards-aligned lesson plans and other resources for teachers. Today, I received an email from OpenEd informing me of their new Google Docs Add-on called Lesson Plan Tool for Docs.

With Lesson Plan Tool for Docs enabled you can search for standards-aligned lesson plan resources within your Google Documents. To perform a search simply open the add-on then select a standard from the drop-down menu that appears on the right-hand side of your document. You can preview any of the resources that appear in the search by simply clicking on them and opening them in a new tab. When you find a resource that you like, you can click again to add it into your document.

Applications for Education
Lesson Plan Tool for Docs could be a handy Add-on to use when you're developing units of study for your classroom. You could share the document onto which you're adding resources so that your colleagues can help you create a unit of study.

Monday, June 6, 2016

How to Find Famous Quotes in Google Docs

Have you ever been working on a document and wished that you could find a great quote from an authoritative figure to add to it? Normally, this sends people over to their nearest internet browser to search for a quote, but there’s a way to find great quotes right within Google Docs itself.

  1. In Google Docs, go to Tools > Research. 
  2. In the search menu, select Quotes from the dropdown menu. Search for a quote, either by the author or a keyword.
  3. To insert the quote into your document, put your mouse over the quote and click Insert. 

Wednesday, March 2, 2016

3Doodler

Subject: Help me build a better classroom 

Hi All, 

I want to make sure the teachers and students that I work with have the materials they need to succeed, so I just created a DonorsChoose.org classroom request. 

Engineering Concepts with 3Doodler 

Give to this classroom by March 8th and your donation will be doubled thanks to DonorsChoose.org. The website is DonorsChoose.org and the project is Engineering Concepts with 3Doodler.  Just enter the code LIFTOFF during checkout and you'll be matched dollar for dollar (up to $100). 

In return, you'll get awesome photos of your gift in action and our heartfelt thanks. 

Thank you so much,
Elizabeth 

P.S. If you know anyone who may want to help my students, please pass this along! 

Tuesday, March 1, 2016

Two Apps that turn your iPad or iPhone into a scanner available at Apps Store for FREE

Tiny Scanner - The little app that scans everything


* Scan documents, photos, receipts, or just about anything
* Lightning fast and gorgeously designed for both iPhone and iPad
* Batch mode combines multiple scans into a single PDF

Tiny Scanner turns your iPhone/iPad into a portable scanner. Scans are saved to your phone as images or PDFs. Name and organize your scans into folders, or share them by:

- Email
- Airprint
- Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive, or Box


- Wifi directly to your computer
- Fax using Tiny Fax

Tiny Scanner has all the BIG features you need:

* Scan in color, grayscale, or black & white
* Page edges are detected automagically
* 5 levels of contrast for crisp monochrome texts
* Set page sizes for PDF (Letter, Legal, A4, and more)
* Thumbnail or list view, sort scans by date or title
* Quick search by document title
* Protect your documents with a passcode
* Universal – a single app that works on iPhone and iPad too!

Doc Scanner + OCR: PDF scanner to scan document, receipt, photo
Doc Scanner turns your iPhone, iPad into a portable scanner for documents, receipts, notes, whiteboards, and other text. With Doc Scanner, you can quickly scan your documents and print or email them as multiple pages PDF or JPEG files. Beside that Doc Scanner can recognize and extract text from your text image. You can also add your signature to scanned documents.

FEATURES:

+ Smartest scanner
Built with smart artificial intelligent algorithm, take picture and it will always automatically detect page and edge correctly.

+ Scan documents
Doc Scanner scans any type of documents, ranging from a receipt to multiple pages documents to full book.

+ Scan documents into a PDF file
All scanned document are produced as industry-standard PDF file. You can add new scans or delete pages within a PDF file.

+ Recognize text in document
Convert scanned document to a editable text document.

+ Add signature, text to the scanned document.

+ Email or print scanned documents.
Just scan any document and tap "Send" button. If the document needs to be printed, send it to any printer nearby.

+ Storage upload PDF files
Upload PDF documents to a PC using iTunes File Sharing. Plug your iPhone to Mac/PC and transfer all scanned PDF files in a minutes.

+ OCR Recognition in many languages: English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Danish, Dutch, Spanish, German,…..

+ Picture Adjustment: You can crop your picture to only select the portion of text that you want to extract.

+ Editing: You can edit your extracted text to add or remove words.

+ Sending SMS message, email or copy to the clipboard extracted text.

+ Backing up all extracted text and viewing them anytime in the main screen.