Built to Last - GeoGebra

GeoGebra is the fifth entry into my Built to Last series. This is a series of blog posts celebrating the free resources that have been available to teachers and students over the ten years that I have been publishing Free Technology for Teachers.

When I started writing Free Technology for Teachers GeoGebra was available to use as free software on your Windows or Mac computer. Over the years versions of GeoGebra were developed to work on iPads, Android tablets, and eventually on Chromebooks. One of the marks of a program that is built to last is that it is flexible enough to adapt and change to the tastes of the ed tech community.

I am not a math teacher and have never taught math beyond basic addition and subtraction of fractions therefore I am not an expert on GeoGebra's capabilities. That said, over the years I have had friends and colleagues who do teach mathematics rave about the capabilities of GeoGebra for modeling functions and graphing equations.

GeoGebra has a huge community of users who share ideas and tutorials for using GeoGebra in a wide variety of settings. You can join that community here.

The GeoGebra YouTube channel is probably the best place to find tutorials to help you get started using GeoGebra on your laptop, tablet, or Chromebook.

X-Ray Goggles Help Students See How Webpages Are Made

Mozilla's X-ray Goggles is a neat tool that helps students learn the code that powers much of what they see on the Web. X-ray Goggles is a free tool that lets you remix any page that you find on the Internet. You can install X-ray Goggles in your Chrome or Firefox bookmarks bar. Then you can launch it on any webpage. When you launch X-ray Goggles you will be able to select images and text on a page and then shown the code behind your selection. X-ray Goggles will let you then alter the code to display new things on that page. In the video embedded below I provide an overview of using X-ray Goggles.


Applications for Education
Mozilla offers a free lesson plan called Hack the News that introduces students to the features of X-ray Goggles. In the lesson students will remix a news story by putting their favorite fictional characters into the page on which the story is published.

How to Use Grid View In Google Slides

Last week Google introduced a handful of new features for Google Slides. One of those new features is a grid view. There are two ways to access grid view in Google Slides. I demonstrate both methods in the short video that is embedded below.