Tech Tuesday Tips

As the school year winds down, let us take this opportunity to THANK YOU for reading our Tuesday Tech Tips emails.  We hope that they have been helpful to you.  You can review all of our tips by going to our blog, and if you have an idea for a future tip, please don't hesitate to submit it. Our tip for today is a FREE summer professional development put on by NWOCA in conjunction with the Bryan City Schools.  Come join us for our #NWOCARoadShow17 as we stop in Bryan on August 9th. We'll have a great mini-conference for you, with over 30 sessions to pick-your-own PD. We've got lots of opportunities to go more in-depth with the G Suite, but we also have non-Google topics such as: VR in the Classroom Coding for Elementary Students Robotics PowerTeacher Pro CleverTouch Boards Cool Tools for Teachers and much more! Be sure to check out the #NWOCARoadShow17 website for all the details and a link to register, and keep checking all summer as we add more sessions and

By now, I'm sure everyone knows about the Gmail interface. But did you know that Google also has a very different way to interact with your email? In this TTT, I'll give you a tour of Inbox by Gmail. Inbox by Gmail is a great way to put the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to work on your email.  You can access it by going to inbox.google.com and using your Gmail credentials.  Here's a shot of the main screen: As you can see, it is much more colorful and clean than Gmail.  But the real power of Inbox is in the AI features.  Inbox uses smart bundling to recognize what type of email you have and to categorize it for you.  Take a look at these: Like emails will be "bundled" in your inbox for you, and they'll be available using the sidebar to quickly find them again.  You can even schedule a bundle to appear at a particular time.  For example, I have my "Promos" show up once a day at 7:00 AM.  This ensures that my time is spent on impor

This week we are looking at some tools that enable you to offer online reading text to your students at a number of reading levels. Often the challenge with online activities is how to differentiate online content for different audiences with differing reading ability. One tool that allows for different reading levels is Newsela ( http://www.newsela.com ) which offers current affairs and selected historical narratives that allow you to choose a Lexile (Reading level) This tool has a free version which is sufficient for many teachers purposes and a paid pro version that adds some teacher friendly features for those who want to use it on a daily basis. For our purposes just browse to Newsela.com and drill down to a story and you can see the story from 1240L down to 570L in both English and Spanish! Here is the same story at 570L. While Newsela is great for non-fiction reading, what about fiction and other reading materials that you would like to simplify for your stu

Our Instructional Services staff was fortunate enough to attend the 2017 ITIP Summit featuring Google for Education last week in Sandusky.  This two-day event provides teachers, tech coordinators and other educators with excellent educational technology information.  We all attended wonderful sessions and learned a lot of great info that will work its way into future trainings. One of the highlights of the conference was being able to hear from keynote speaker Alice Keeler, who is a self-described mom, teacher, author, Google Certified Innovator, keynote speaker, and workshop presenter.  Alice has been called the Queen of Spreadsheets and notes that "the answer is always a spreadsheet!"  She has written three books, "50 Things You Can Do with Google Classroom," Go Further with Google Classroom," and "Teaching Math with Google Apps." Chris, Kim, Kristie and John with Alice Keeler Alice also shared a variety of tips in her workshop sessions

The Google Translate app is very useful.  This free app  uses your smartphone camera to translate text instantly in 29 languages. In addition, you can also translate using your voice, by typing in text, or by drawing with your finger. This tip will focus on the camera translation. Why might you want to use this? It could be useful when working with ESL students or parents, in a foreign language class or when traveling abroad. Here's a short animation showing how it works: Here's how to use it: Download **FREE** App Set Language Select Language To Translate From Select Camera Button Align Text The Word "Love" Will Be Translated from English to Spanish Types of Signs: Filled In With Marker Types of Signs: Printed From Computer View an Example of the NWOCA staff using Google Translate Click here !!