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An important part of Coloma Community Schools is the staff directory. We value being able to see and know a little about the people working with the students in our buildings. Thus, one of the requirements of staff is keeping a picture and short bio on our Edlio staff pages.  Here is a document on how to update those Edlio Staff pages . If you run into questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to reach out to the helpdesk. As a reminder, you will only be able to log into the webpages of the buildings that you work in. One of the most common fixes is making sure that you are on the proper building page. 

Google continues to improve Google Docs and the Google Workspace platform! In one of the newer updates, they have added the ability to do Smart Chips that add drop down menus to documents. While this is usually useful in project management, and if you have the students working on complex projects you could introduce these items, but you can also create standardized test like questions where students have to select the proper response.  To set this up, open up your Google Doc and then type a quick reading passage or text set for the students to review. Once you have that, figure out what words you want to remove from the text. Highlight the words and then high the @ sign on your keyboard. Then, create a new drop down list.  Next, add the words that you want to the drop down list. Don't forget to add a blank option first so as to provide the students with a blank. You must add a space or five to create the drop down option. Change the color to allow for easy, quick visual cues as you

Adobe Spark was one of my all time favorite EdTech tool. It allowed students to create without having to learn how to use complicated programs. This allowed for students to truly demonstrate their knowledge and not their technological know-how or ability.  The good news is that Adobe Spark is still around, it is now known as Creative Cloud Express . All of the awesome features still exist! You can still create graphics, websites, presentations, infographics, and videos quickly and easily. When we talk about novelty and allowing students to prove their knowledge in a different way and this tool allows content to shine through instead of the technology tool.  Not to mention, they have added a ton more functionality including:  The ability to remove backgrounds from images Convert to GIFs Resize Videos Resize Images Merge Videos Convert from PDF!! Combine Files and more!  The best news is, everyone in our district has a free upgrade to the premium version of the account! No need to apply

  Google Docs recently got an update that allows you to add a quick summary to longer documents that are in Google Docs format. Using Artificial Intelligence to scan and read the document and prepare a short summary of the document. If you are looking at it, and disagree, you can set your own! This is a cool feature. As students are writing an essay or paper, this tool can inform them if they are on topic and have written a comprehensive and understandable paper. If the summary is not their position, they might want to start over. From a staff standpoint, this is great to make sure that items match our intent and purpose as we prepare to share findings, data, and more!  To create, simply like the little icon in the corner and select summary. 

  Google Docs has recently launched a new feature that is perfect for a world in which our students are not printing! The Pageless Feature allows for larger photos, graphs, and tables without worrying about page constraints, as well as being able to move seamlessly through a document.  Applicable features in the classroom would be looking at large sets of data, large images, and formatting in tables without worrying about page breaks and how things might get messed up. In order to add it to your Google Document, you can use the GIF below to navigate to the Page Setup Menu and then select pageless. 

In our last post, we introduced the idea of adding a - between the t and the u in YouTube.  This got me to thinking about a few other cool URL tricks that I thought I would share.  If you or your students need to quickly create a new document, presentation, or spreadsheet, you can use this trick. Simply type in docs.new, slides.new, or sheets.new into your browsers URL bar, and you will be taken blank document ready for you to create! Try it out!  This can be useful when a thought comes to mind, or your class takes a turn for something amazing. I know that while I was in the classroom, we would take a turn for something and then have to get something to take some notes. 

One of the things that always had me worried in the classroom is the suggested videos that would pop up after sending a student to YouTube to watch a specific click. Having fallen victim to the YouTube never-ending rabbit hole, I know that you can watch one video and it feeds you another video and so on, and each one tends to go further into the topic or to an opposite extreme. In fact, there is even reporting about this exact effect .  If this is something that you have worried about with your students, I want to share with you a trick that I recently learned about in a book study of the book Building Blocks for Tiny Techies . An amazing educator from the middle part of the state shared this awesome trick: by altering the URL prior to sharing, you have more control over what the students see.  Take a classic YouTube Video . When you follow this link, you are taken to the YouTube that most of us know. You have the video in the middle, a side bar with suggested videos, and maybe an area

Over the summer, our district had the opportunity to participate in a book study of Dr. Phillip Schlechty’s book, Engaging Students: The Next Level of Working on the Work. While the work was originally published in 2011, many of the ideas and thoughts in the work continue to drive what we should try in education. The fascinating thing about this authors work is that the qualities in engaging work have nothing to do with driving technology or a specific tool, instead, it is about what we offer to our students on a regular basis and how we can change it up.  While I would love if you were to read the book, I have provided the slides from our second session this summer that talk about the design qualities of engaging work. Feel free to check it out below. If you have any questions, please let me know! 

Putting together an engaging and visually appealing slideshow can be a daunting task. While Google (and PowerPoint before it) provided users with templates to help the process, times have changed and the templates have not kept up! Enter some amazing resources to gather up some excellent templates. One great way to help me while I was in the classroom is to use a different template for each unit, so that if my naming structure was clear, I could visually see what was what.  Slides Carnival Slides Carnival was one of the first on the scene. They offer hundreds of slide show templates, including holiday templates, for free with no restrictions or account sign up necessary. (To provide credit to the creators, you have to leave the last slide providing credit to the creator(s) in your slideshow to abide by the license rules). You simply make a copy of the slideshow presented on the website and you are free to design to your hearts content. They offer plenty of options depending on what yo

Google Docs recently just added the ability to add a watermark, or an image behind the text of the document, to their already widely popular online word processor. A watermark can be useful for adding context to a series of documents, marking the specific order students are to work in, helping with branding, or, my personal favorite, creating “highly classified” documents for a social studies class simulation.  Check out how to do this in the video below! 

Google Docs recently launched a new feature that makes collaboration amazingly simple. With this launch, Google Docs now allows users to type the @ sign and it will open up a world of possibilities.  Previously, the @ sign in the comments would allow you to signal and notify a person of a potential action item, but now, if you type @ in the document, you will get a list.  The first thing is a suggestion of people to tag. For instance, if you need someone else or are meeting about someone, you could tag them in this document.  Next, you have the options for Building Blocks. This is currently limited to meeting notes, but it allows for an easily created template for tracking notes in a meeting. The next option is to tag a file. If you have a meeting about a specific test, standard, or are building a newsletter, you can tag that document using an @ sign in the meeting agenda, providing all users with quick access to it.  The @ sign also allows you to save time by replacing a lot of the “i

  GoGuardian has been hard at work to help teachers in the past year. As the company has seen exponential growth during the COVID-19 pandemic, the engineers have been hard at work to give teachers more permissions and abilities!  One such feature is the ability to check a website as a teacher to see if it is blocked. This tool will only check to ensure that a site is blocked by the “Thou Shall Not Pass” block screen, but it can be helpful for teachers to do a self-check to ensure a site that they are planning to use is open to their students.  To begin, on the Classroom dashboard, locate the “Check if a website is blocked” link.  Next, you will enter a website to check to see if it is blocked. For this example, I used Poker.net, an online gambling website. Once I check, I get a report that show whether or not the page is blocked and for what classrooms. It will also check to see if it in a scene.  There are two fantastic uses for this feature in GoGuardian. First, you can check to see

This week, we welcomed 8 new certified staff to our district and they spent some time becoming acclimated with the technology we have in district and some of the best practices associated with technology. While this is specifically geared towards our newest staff members, we wanted to make sure to share it with you as well! There are some helpful tips, refreshers, and ideas in this document to help you kick your year off right!  Download the document here!

 GoGuardian is a filtering system we use for students that travel with their devices. One of the features is the ability to import your Google Classroom classes into your GoGuardian set to scenes for your students. Check out the video below to watch how you can do that. 

The third session was taking what we do so well in the classroom and making it work in the digital realm. Check out this video for a how-to get started on making your classroom instruction work digitally !

Screencasting is a helpful tool for creating how-to videos or helping to reinforce the teaching of a specific topic. Below you will find some tips and a how-to screencast with the preferred tool of CometTe.ch, Loom [Click here to download] .  Check out this CometTe.ch Screencasting 101 document !

    This post is part of a 4 part series about Google Classroom, the Learning Management System (LMS) that is part of Google Workspace. After a while, Google Classroom can become overwhelming. This video is here to help you keep your Google Classroom efficient!

  This post is part of a 4 part series about Google Classroom, the Learning Management System (LMS) that is part of Google Workspace. Creating an assignment is a fundamental step in using Google Classroom. In this video, learn how you can quickly create assignments for your students. 

This post is part of a 4 part series about Google Classroom, the Learning Management System (LMS) that is part of Google Workspace. Understanding the assignment types and what each assignment option in Google Classroom can be used for is an important step in understanding how to utilize Google Classroom. 

 This post is part of a 4 part series about Google Classroom, the Learning Management System (LMS) that is part of Google Workspace. Creating a Class and Adding people is one of the first steps in using Google Classroom. Whether you have been in a class before or creating your very first class, this video is a helpful tool to learn more about Google Classroom.