Technology and Instruction to Engage, Empower, and Excite

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

Canvas Studio, Google Docs, Screencastify, Flipgrid - so many options and so little time! Which of these tools works best for you to collect formative assessment and deliver timely, target-aligned feedback for students? Check out tips and features in the blog this week and then join us Wednesday after school to dive into deeper conversation about what's working best in the middle school classroom.  Digital Tools for Formative Assessment If anything, we have an over-abundance of tools for collecting formative data digitally. Online textbooks, Google Forms, EdPuzzle, Skyward quizzes, Flipgrid, Pear Deck, Mentimeter, Kahoot, Quizlit, Webex Polls, etc. And that doesn't even get us started on what you can do in Canvas! Sifting through all the digital tools to find which ones meet your needs can be daunting. Consider this breakdown of tools:  In the Moment Data  Tools like Pear Deck, Mentimeter, Nearpod, and Formative (GoFormative) are excellent ways to collect data right in the midd