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Showing posts from October, 2015

The Worth of SAMR

As the Instructional Technology Coordinator for Pequea Valley School District, it is my job to coach and train our teachers on industry standard, emerging, and any other technology of interest. We are very fortunate to be in a situation where we have a technology rich classrooms and environments! This age of teaching is so cool because we are shaping the future right now! In our trainings we've been focusing heavily on the SAMR model developed by Ruben Pentedura. It's a great way for you to gauge at what level you are integrating technology to gain the most bang for your buck out of your time and technological investment. Watch the video below for a bit of explanation.  Teachers are rightfully thinking about how to roll things out best in their classrooms for their students and with the four letter word of school in mind: TIME. SAMR can take time but when you consider the benefits of the global perspective, feedback cycles, authenticity, and myriad of other added be

Mirror Your iPad to Your Mac with Quicktime

AppleTV is a great device to have but if you're shy $99 and have a Mac, there is another solution. Quicktime. That is if you have OS X Yosemite or newer! When you tether, see also : plug-in , your iPad to your computer, open Quicktime --> New Movie Recording , you have the ability to begin mirroring your iPad to your Mac! Once you click the  carrot  beside the record button, you should see your iPad as a camera source. Select your iPad as the camera source. If you want to create a screencast of anything on from your iPad, simply follow the steps above, press Quicktime's record button and go to town! Your computers mic will pick up your audio, Quicktime will be capturing your every move on your iPad! Once you are finished you can save the file to your computer or begin compiling a "Playlist" in Google Drive like I suggest in this post . Now if I only had a longer iPad cord... Let me know what I can do to help you #Edtech on! ~ Ryan

Google Drive Addressing: How to Force "Make a Copy"

Ever spend time creating a document in Google Drive, share the link with students, ask them to follow the path File --> Make a Copy? There is just always somehow that one student that tunes out during that snippet of the directions and then A. Tells you they can't do anything to the document because they have View access or B. Edits your original, leaving you with a mess to clean up. You are in luck, there is a better way! The process that I'm about to show you will work for Docs, Sheets, and Slides. Here's an example Anyone with the Link can view Sheet :  https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RKjjfjwUosteNmuGI5wk6AYvof8g0XMIsQYmMCLJCIU/edit?usp=sharing  If you want the students to have a copy of this Goal Setting spreadsheet to enter their own scores and see how they are doing in class against their goal use this process. Force Make a Copy Usual Share Link:  https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RKjjfjwUosteNmuGI5wk6AYvof8g0XMIsQYmMCLJCIU/ edit ?us

Google Add-Ons and Writing

With Common Core, writing is more critical than ever and we are all teachers of writing! We are also in luck, there are great Google tools being developed to help us through the writing, revision, and editing processes. One such Add-On is called SAS Writing Reviser.  SAS Writing Reviser What this tool allows my students and I to do is check our writing for things like strong or weak verbs, repeated word usage, sentence variety, and much more. Signing up for an account is great because I can use my GAFE or other Google Account to sign up! Check out how and more on what SAS Writing Reviser has to offer in the video below.  Revision Assistant Revision Assistant is an add-on that allows you to add mark-ups to your or student writing in a easy and seamless manner. This tool would be great for marking up student work, or better yet, creating a peer revision feedback loop! You could have students add this add-on, share their writing with one another, then use Revision Assista

Use Drive to Share Video Playlists

 Google Drive is a great way to work, collaborate, and share with anyone across the table or across the world. Video is no exception to these rules! Richard Byrne recently posted that he recommends privately sharing videos through Google Drive on his FreeTech4Teachers blog . I would take what he says one step further. Frequent Drive users will already know that items within a shared folder, carry the same share settings as the folder, i.e. if the folder's share setting is "Anyone with the Link can View", then everything within the folder is automatically set "Anyone with the Link can View" unless you individually change the setting. This is great to be aware to because using this knowledge you can easily create a playlist within your Google Drive for students to access. Here's how: Create a folder in Drive, giving it a relevant name to the topic.  Set the share setting to "Anyone with the Link can View".  Add relevant videos to the folder