The Week in Review - The Most Popular Posts

Good evening from Maine where the first snowflakes of the 2017-18 winter have started to fly. Whether they love the snow or they hate the snow, everyone around here has a comment about it. I'm in the "love snow" camp and I'm excited that the local ski resort opened this week. The snow reminds me that we're entering the middle of the school year. Should you need a little mid-year professional development, take a look at some of the webinars that I'm offering right after Thanksgiving.

Here are the most popular posts of the week:
1. Whisper for Google Classroom
2. Using Icons to Help Organize Google Drive Folders
3. Collection of Google Drive Templates
4. Seven Tips for New Google Classroom Users
5. Using the About Tab in Google Classroom
6. Voice Recording Tools
7. Math Games and Resources

Are you looking for a workshop facilitator or keynote speaker?
If so, click here to learn about my services. 

Online PD opportunities:
Next week I'll have 5 webinars available in one package for just $25. Click here to learn more.

Please visit the official advertisers that help keep this blog going.

Practical Ed Tech is the brand through which I offer PD webinars.

Storyboard That is my go-to tool for creating storyboards.

SeeSaw is my favorite digital portfolio tool.
Metaverse enables anyone to create amazing things.
Kids Discover provides fantastic tools for helping kids discover new information. 

University of Maryland Baltimore County offers a great program on instructional design.

Discovery Education & Wilkes University offer online courses for earning Master's degrees in Instructional Media.

PrepFactory offers a great place for students to prepare for SAT and ACT tests.

Boise State University offers a 100% online program in educational technology.

International Society for Technology in Education

The International Society for Technology in Education, most commonly referred to as ISTE, is a professional organization that plays a major role in technology integration around the world. While there is a fee for becoming a member of ISTE, their website is full of excellent free resources. There are also some ISTE affiliates that are free to join.

One of the most valuable resources that ISTE provides are technology standards that are designed to transform teaching and learning. There are standards for students, teachers, administrators, technology coaches, and computer science teachers. All of the different standards provide benchmarks for what each group should be able to know and be able to do.

The ISTE website also has different articles that you can access for free. There are also numerous news stories that are accessible to non-members.

If you are not familiar with this organization you might want to take a few minutes to check out all of the work they do to promote educational technology around the world.

Blogging with Students

Blogging is a great way to provide all students with the opportunity to have their voices heard. Blogging is also a convenient way to connect your students with students from around the world.

Seven Blogging Platforms for Teachers Compared and Ranked  Provides a snapshot of different popular blogging platforms so you can compare them quickly to see which one fits your particular needs.

Creating Blogs and Websites  A series of videos that show you the steps involved in setting up a blog on Blogger and Edublogs and how to add contributors to a Blogger blog.

Built to Last: Blogger and Edublogs Different ideas for what students can write about.

Three Thoughts About Making Time to Blog This post is geared more toward teacher blogs, but it is also good advice for students who manage their own blogs.

A Guide to Blogging and Examples of Classroom Blogs Five lessons learned about classroom blogging as well as a slide deck with 40+ examples of classroom blogs.

Quadblogging Will Help You Find an Audience for Your Students' Blog Posts Explains the idea of Quadblogging and how to get started with it to build an audience for your students.

Edublogs Class List Check out blogs written by teachers and students.

Now is as good a time as any to start blogging!

Document Studio Google Sheets Add-on

Document Studio is a new Google Sheets add-on that allows you to create certificates, personalized letters, purchase orders and other types of documents. This add-on allows you to take information from a spreadsheet and merge it into a template (Docs or Slides) that you have created. This is a fast and easy way to create customized and visually appealing documents without having to do much work.

The process is a little complicated because there are several steps involved, but the creator of the add-on made a wonderful video that walks you through the entire process.

Autocrat is another document merge tool. I would recommend giving both add-ons a try to see which one fits your particular needs.

Remind Introduces a New Way to Share Resources

Remind, the popular service for sending text messages to students and parents, has introduced a new feature for sharing resources with students and their parents. Remind has partnered with a dozen other popular educational content producers to offer "Share to Remind."

Share to Remind will let you quickly share resources from sites like PBS Learning, Front Row, and Newsela with your students and their parents. Share to Remind can also be used to share links to activities on popular services including FlipGrid, Quizlet, and Quizziz.

You will find the Share to Remind button on the sites that support it. It works just like the sharing buttons you might already be using to share resources to Google Classroom or to a social media website. Click here to read more about how it work.

Applications for Education
I can see the Share to Remind button being helpful in quickly directing students to activities that you want them to complete on Quizziz or FlipGrid. It will also be useful to share news articles and similar reference materials with students and their parents. Doing that will enable you to make sure that parents get a link to the same article that you want their children to read for your class.