History and Literature Text Messages

ClassTools.net is one of my favorite places to find templates for online activities for middle school and high school students. One of the templates on ClassTools.net that I've recommended for years is the Fake SMS Generator. Watch my following video to learn how to use the SMS Generator on ClassTools.


Applications for Education
You could have students use the Classtools SMS Generator to create simple conversations between historical characters as way to get them to think about those peoples' lives and the conversations that they might have had. Another way to use the SMS Generator is have students create exchanges based on characters in a favorite book.

Easy Accents for Google Slides

For the last couple of years I have recommended the Easy Accents Add-on for Google Docs. It's a free Add-on that gives you access to a virtual keyboard to use to write non-English characters in your Google Documents. Recently, the Easy Accents Add-on became available in a version for Google Slides.

Easy Accents for Google Slides is easy to use. Install the Add-on from the Add-ons menu in Google Slides. Once installed you can launch it on any slide. Type as you normally would until you need to add an accent mark that isn't easy to create on your keyboard. Then just insert the letter and accent mark that you need from the Easy Accents keyboard. After inserting the letter and accent mark you can go back to typing on your physical keyboard.  Easy Accents for Google Slides currently supports twenty-four languages.

Applications for Education
Easy Accents is a good tool for students who need to make presentations in world languages class. The Easy Accents virtual keyboard makes it quick and easy to insert accents and then get right back to creating the presentation.