North Idaho EdTech

So, It's been a long time since my last post. I had a busy summer and the start of this school year has been the busiest that I can remember, which makes things go quickly. But in the spirit of the split lives that teachers live, here is a quick guide on using Chrome profiles to manage the important separation that teachers work to maintain between home and school. Why use Chrome Profiles? Chrome allows a user to create separate browser profiles for each google account. This allows users to keep work, school, and/or personal accounts all separate, but still use them at the same time. They will operate independently with their own settings, bookmarks, extensions and more.  In other words, there is no need to switch between accounts anymore – all of them can be open at the same time. *In addition, Add-Ons in Google Drive work better when profiles are kept separate (like Goobric). Set Up Profiles: Sign in, or see who is signed into Chrome: When Google Chrome is first o...

It's been a while since I posted, especially about Google Classroom updates. The team at Google Classroom has been busy and super responsive to feedback from its user community. Since the last time I wrote about it, they've made a bunch of changes. I just wanted to highlight the ones that I think make the most impact on teachers in my district, I've created the list below: Mobile app updates: Add/Edit assignments - This is big for users who want to be able to manage their Classroom pages from anywhere. Grade student work - This is also great for teachers who like to work via mobile devices or in our 1:1 iPad classrooms. Take a photo to post to the stream or on assignments - This also great for our mobile teachers who want to share products from other students, class notes, or anything else out to the class right from their mobile device. Add other teachers as co-teachers. Not only has the Classroom team worked on making it more mobile friendly, but they've d...

I prepared this Forms walk-through as a source for teachers in my district to learn the basic use of Google Forms. Please feel free to use and share it as you need.

Well, it seems as though the folks behind Google Classroom have been listening and making improvements as we get into the start of the second half of the school year. Wednesday of this week, Google announced the newest updates to Classroom , which include a new iOS and Android app. Today, though, I'm going to specifically mention the things that they've done to boost the teacher experience in Classroom. Assignments for Teachers: In the student version of Classroom, there is an option for students to view all of the pending assignments that they have for all of their classes. For the teacher, however, we used to have to go to each class to see what assignments are pending and how many students have completed them. Now, we have our own Assignments section (actually two of them...one for our teaching classes and one for the classes that we are enrolled in as students). Here, we get to see all the pending assignments for all of our classes and the number of students who have...

Right before Christmas break, I interviewed 4th grade teacher, Kelli Ogle, about how she is using Google Classroom with her students. This is the first episode in a series that I have planned for showcasing technology use within my district. My hope is to have other teachers in the district see what is happening around them, right in their own backyard, and work to enhance what they are doing in their classrooms. There is a video version of the interview on our department's YouTube channel , as well as the audio only version posted to my iTech website . The next episode is going to feature a middle school Language Arts teacher and we'll talk about using Doctopus + Goobric + Classroom to give students feedback via a rubric.