September's Most Popular Posts on Free Technology for Teachers

Good evening from Maine where the sun has set on the week and on the month of September, 2022. I don't know about you, but for me the month seemed to come and go in the blink of an eye. My oldest daughter started Kindergarten, I hosted a bunch of webinars, and tried to enjoy some cool autumn evenings. I hope that the first full month of the 2022-23 school year went well for you. 

As I mentioned above, I hosted a bunch of professional development webinars in September. I'd be happy to host one for your school or library. I'm also have some limited availability for in-person events this year. Please send me an email at richardbyrne (at) freetech4teachers.com to learn more about those opportunities. 

At the end of every month I take a look at my Google Analytics account to find the most popular posts of the month. Take a look and see if there's something interesting that you missed in September. 

These were the month's most popular posts:
1. A Great Alternative to Quizlet
2. My Top Ten Tools for Social Studies Teachers and Students
3. Quizalize Games - Turn Any Quiz Into an Epic Game
4. A Great Place to Find Free Images for School Projects
5. Two Tips to Make Chrome Run a Little Faster
6. A Free STEM Toolkit for Librarians
7. A Short Overview of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine - And How I Use It
8. 5 Little Things You Can Do To Improve Your Videos
9. How to Create PDFs in Google Classroom
10. The Physics of Soccer Kicks

I'll Come You!

If you'd like me to come to your school or conference, please send me an email at richardbyrne (at) freetech4teachers.com or fill out the form on this page. 

50 Tech Tuesday Tips!

50 Tech Tuesday Tips is an eBook that I created with busy tech coaches, tech integrators, and media specialists in mind. In it you'll find 50 ideas and tutorials that you can use as the basis of your own short PD sessions. Get a copy today!

Other Places to Follow Me:

• The Practical Ed Tech Newsletter comes out every Sunday evening/ Monday morning. It features my favorite tip of the week and the week's most popular posts from Free Technology for Teachers.
• My YouTube channel has more than 43,000 subscribers watching my short tutorial videos on a wide array of educational technology tools. 
• I've been Tweeting as @rmbyrne for fifteen years. 
• The Free Technology for Teachers Facebook page features new and old posts from this blog throughout the week. 
• If you're curious about my life outside of education, you can follow me on Strava.

This post originally appeared on FreeTech4Teachers.com. If you see it elsewhere, it has been used without permission. Featured image captured by Richard Byrne.

Significant Changes to Screencastify's Free Plan Take Effect on Monday

Those of us who are using Screencastify's free plan will have some choices to make on Monday when the changes that Screencastify announced back in August take effect. 

What's Changing?

Starting on Monday, October 3rd Screencastify's free plan will limit you to having just ten videos in your account at a time. Previously, you could have as many videos as you wanted in your account as long as they were each less than five minutes. The new free plan limits you to ten videos, but the videos can now be up to 30 minutes. 

You can still export your videos, but not as MP4 files in the free plan which limits what you can do with the exported video file. So if you find that you bump up against the ten video limit, you can export one or delete one to get back under that limit. But bear in mind that Screencastify is also now limiting you to 30 minutes of export time in the free plan. That's a change from the previous unlimited export time. 

Screencastify vs. Chrome OS Screencasting

Screencastify built its reputation by being one of the first companies to offer a screencasting tool for Chromebooks. Then in June of this year Google added a screencasting tool to the Chrome operating system. In doing so it appears that Google is going after some of Screencastify's market share. 

The free version Screencastify still has more editing options than the Chrome OS screencasting tool. That said, if you don't need all of those options and just need some basic editing functions, the Chrome OS screencasting tool is probably going to be your better choice now because it offers unlimited video storage (via Google Drive). 

Five Ways to Use Screencastify in Your Classroom

• Build Interactive Questions Into Your Videos
• Blur Faces and Objects in Your Videos
• Add Comments to Google Docs
• Create Common Craft-style Videos
• Record Virtual Tours

A Quick Way to Check the Safety of Links

One of the best ways to protect your computer and network from malicious software is to simply avoid opening links that appear in your email from unfamiliar senders. Additionally, you should avoid clicking on links that you weren't expecting and those that just set off your spidey senses. When you do come across a link that you think might be okay, but you're not entirely sure it is okay, you can check its safety with Google's Transparency Report Site Status tool without having to open the link your computer. 

In this short video I demonstrate how to use Google's Transparency Report Site Status tool to check the safety of URLs. 

Applications for Education
Over the years I've helped countless colleagues and students with problems on their computers. The vast majority of those problems can be traced back to malware or spyware that was installed by clicking on nefarious links. Using a tool like Google Transparency Report Site Status can help students avoid accidentally installing malware. Of course, the bigger solution is to teach students to be wary of clicking on links that they don't expect or don't trust.

Grading Google Forms Short Answers Without Google Classroom

Last week I got an email from a reader who was looking for advice about grading short-answer questions in Google Forms. Specifically, the person wanted to know if there was a more efficient way to grade short-answer questions than tabbing through the "responses" pages. 

While you can have short-answers automatically graded for you in Google Forms, it only works if students write their answers exactly as you wrote the answer key. That doesn't work well if you are requiring students to write complete sentences in their own words. In those cases you have to manually grade your students' responses to your questions. When I'm not using Google Classroom I do that by having Google Forms generate a spreadsheet of responses for me. I can then grade students' responses in one long column and update the scores in one long column. 

In this short video I demonstrate how to grade short-answer questions in Google Forms when you're not using Google Classroom. 

Five Time-saving Ways for Teachers to Use Technology

Making time for yourself is one of the things that I talk about in my new keynote presentation titled Using Tech to Bring Joy Into Your Teaching. There are many ways that technology can help you get more time for taking care of yourself and doing the things you enjoy outside of professional responsibilities. To that end, here are five time-saving ways to use technology so that you can have more time for yourself. 

Use Smart Replies
If you use Gmail or any G Suite-based email account, enable the Smart Replies function. Smart Replies will predict what you want to write in response to an email in your inbox. Using Smart Replies saves me ten to twenty seconds per reply. Taking an average of fifteen seconds per email for twenty messages in a day and you’ve gained five minutes. Watch this video to learn how to enable Smart Replies in your inbox.

Use Canned Responses
This is similar to using Smart Replies but instead of letting Google guess what you’re going to write, you actually create replies that you save for reuse at any time. This video will show you how to use Canned Responses in Gmail.

If you're an Outlook user, you can create canned responses to use to answer frequently asked questions in your email. Here's a good video overview of how to create and use canned responses in Outlook.

Give Quizzes in Google Forms or Microsoft Forms
If you have to give multiple choice or similar quizzes, use Google Forms or Microsoft Forms. Both will let you create a quiz that your students can take online and have grades automatically calculated for you. An overview of creating a quiz in Microsoft Forms can be watched here. A series of Google Forms tutorials can be seen in this playlist.

Use Scheduling in Your LMS of Choice 

Every popular LMS contains a scheduling tool that you can use to write up a list of assignments and have them distributed on a schedule over the course of a week or month.

Block Yourself from Social Media Sites 

Those times when we check Facebook for “just a minute” are never just a minute and they quickly suck time out of our days without adding much, if any, value to them. Use a Chrome extension like ReCall Study Time or Stay Focusd (intentionally misspelled) to limit the amount of time that you allow yourself to spend on social media sites. Better yet, teach yourself to ignore social media distractions by using Focusable.