CometTe.ch

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

The Chromebooks offer a variety of supports for our students, including the ability to type with our mouths and to have the Chromebook read to them! These features are both built into the student Chromebooks, and in the document linked below, you can learn about how to support your students with these tools.

  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!