Technology and Instruction to Engage, Empower, and Excite

 Your Macbook can do so many cool things that you probably don't know about.  Who has time for that? One of those cool features is the Spotlight tool that comes on every Apple device. You can get to the Spotlight tool in a couple of different ways: Access it from the top menu bar (or add it there from System Preferences) Type command+spacebar Both ways will get you to the Spotlight search toolbar. The Spotlight search tool can be used for a variety of different tasks: Quickly find an app or program on your Macbook.  Start typing the name of the program you want to open and it will appear in your search results.  Double click it to open the program. Start typing a keyword.  Any files, documents, emails, etc. with that keyword will be displayed in your search results.  The results are organized by file type, so you can see if the results are a PDF, email message, etc. Define a word.  Type the word in the Spotlight search and you will see the definition either pop right up or a result

More Ways to Use Kami Thank you to guest blogger Terry Byfield for this week's info on Kami. Check out these tips and Terry's videos below to see what Kami can do for you! Many of us has experimented with Kami at this point, but we might only be using it for students to fill out PDF forms.  There are more ways to use Kami! Kami’s free plan allows you to: Use a totally no ads service. Access to basic toolbar functions which includes all annotating, highlighting, and drawing functions. Easily view PDFs, documents, images, and e-books. Autosave your Kami files to Google Drive. Convert scanned files into readable PDFs using the OCR tool (Optical Character Recognition). Learn more  about OCR here . Kami can also be used as a whiteboard to demo lessons to students or as a collaboration tool. The 5-Minute Video below demonstrates how easy it is to create a document that all students can annotate to collaborate on projects. Five Minute Video: If you would like more in-depth information

 Many of you are using Screencastify to record flipped lessons for your students.  What was an already cool tool got even better with some recent updates.  This extension now has: More cursor options Stickers Blur tools And more! Before we dive into those, make sure you have the most recent Screencastify update.  To do this, click on the three dots in the upper right of Chrome.  Choose More Tools, then Extensions.  In the upper right corner, make sure that Developer mode is toggled on.  Then, click "update" in the upper left. Now that your extension is up to date, check out these cool new tools. I put them in video form because...screencasting.  Here is a link to the updates in text form.  

Have You Ever Taught Someone to Drive?  The true art of teaching lies in our ability to break down complex tasks and help students build the individual skills necessary to accomplish those tasks. A couple of years ago, I had my first experience teaching a teenager to drive a car. For my academically high-achieving daughter, this was perhaps the first time she really struggled to learn something new. This was a real life application of many individual skills, skills that needed to be automatic but were not yet automatic, skills that needed to be applied in an unpredictable environment with real consequences for error - check your mirror, check your speed, check the car ahead, don't follow too closely, watch for road signs, this lane is ending, check your speed, check your mirrors, you need to merge, check your blind spot, blinker on, don't break too fast, and so on. Let's just say it was many, many months (years?) before I could ride as a passenger and relax with my daughter

Chrome is the preferred browser for most of our school sites, so let's jazz it up a bit. I already blogged about OneTab for making your browser tabs more organized, but there are some other options as well. Tab Groups Much like OneTab, you can create groupings of tabs you use often.  To do this, have all of the tabs open in a Chrome window that you'd like to group together.  Right click on a tab and choose "add tab to new group". Give the tab group a name and a color.  You can then add tabs to this group by right clicking on each tab and choosing "add tab to group" and selecting your choice.   You can always edit these choices later by right clicking on the tab group name. Clicking on the tab group name will expand all of those tabs or then consolidate them to take up less space.  You can also click, hold, and drag the tab group to another location in your browser window. Customize Landing Page      You can customize Chrome further by personalizing your lan

Somebody Wanted But So is one of 8 "fix up" strategies suggested by Kylene Beers and Robert E. Probst in  Notice and Note: Strategies for Close Reading and Reading Nonfiction.  The blog will be highlighting several of the fix up strategies over the next weeks as we look for common strategies to utilize in supporting our readers.  SWBS can be used with narrative and expository texts. Create a graphic organizer and chunk the text. Stop with students and fill in each box as you progress through the text. You can even create multiple rows for each main character in a fiction text or each historical figure when studying events or famous people in your field of study.  The summarizing strategy can be adapted for use with nonfiction text, specifically information or expository text that does not include characters necessarily. The strategy transforms and becomes...  Something Happened But/And Then You will still create a graphic organizer and chunk the text, but it could look someth

All staff members have the option to use Google Back Up & Sync and if you're not, you should be! Read on for what exactly this is and how it can benefit you.  To get Back Up & Sync, go to Manager --> Self Service --> My Apps and either install or reinstall it. Once installed, follow the prompts to sign into your school Google account.  You will then see the icon for Back Up & Sync in your menu bar at the top of your screen.   Now, open it up to set your preferences.  Click the 3 dots in the upper right corner of that screen and choose "preferences". You can choose to back up your entire desktop, document folder, photos, or, you can choose specific folders from within your desktop or documents that you back up.  I recommend picking and choosing so you don't use storage for things you don't need.  If you don't use folders and have a hot mess of a desktop, you might just back up the entire desktop. To choose specific folders to back up, click &q