Edmonds Digital Learning

Need to have your audience read along with your live presentation? Turn on closed captions in Google Slides! Here are the steps: 1. Open your Google Slides presentation. 2. Click the 'Present' button to start the presentation. 3. Hover the cursor near the bottom of the screen to view the presentation menu and click 'CC Captions'. 5. Your spoken words will display at the bottom of the screen!

In 'Mission: Impossible', Ethan Hunt's top-secret messages self-destruct in five seconds. He's got just enough time to get away before they cause injury, but the practice ensures these messages will never end up in the wrong hands. G-Suite products such as Docs, Slides, and Sheets allow for fantastic collaboration, but collaborators may not need to have access forever. To solve this problem, you can set an expiration date on document sharing and, unlike Ethan, you don't have to worry about an explosion! Here's how to do it: 1. Open the document you'd like to share. 2. Near the top right corner, click the 'Share' button. 3. Enter the name or email address of the person you'd like to share the document with, select whether they are able to edit, comment, or view the document, and then click 'Send'. 4. Click the 'Share' button again and then click 'Advanced'. 5....

How many slideshows Or documents Have you seen With bullet points That look like this? What if we could jazz it up? Let's say...turn those bullet points into a rainbow or a unicorn, wouldn't that be more fun? Yes. It. Would. Here's how:  1. Open your slideshow and click a slide that has a list marked with bullet points. 2. Right-click one of the bullet points. 3. Select 'More bullets...' 4. Search for something fun, like 'unicorn'. 5. Click the icon that appears (like the unicorn above) and your bullet points will be replaced with cute little unicorns! 6. Alternatively, after your right-click and select 'More bullets...', you can draw what you're looking for in the 'Draw a symbol here' box and Google's draw recognition software will find matches for you. 7. TA-DA!!!

The time of day/week/month that communication is sent matters. Don't believe me? Just ask Juliet Capulet who conspired with Friar Lawrence to fake her death with the assumption that Friar John would deliver a letter, explaining the whole thing, to Romeo Montague who was kicking it up in Mantua. Unfortunately for our young heroes, Friar John got himself locked up in quarantine, the letter never made it and all was lost. Bummer. If you ask me, Juliet should have used GMail to write an email with a scheduled send to ensure her beloved boo would get the message. Or, she could have just texted him, but you know  Lady Capulet was monitoring those. Here's how she should have done it: 1. Go to gmail.com to open your email. 2. Click the '+ Compose' button near the top left corner. 3. Type the email address of the person or persons to whom you'd like to receive the message, type a subject line, and your message. 4. Instead of clicking 'Send', ...

In the third grade, I was involved in an uncomfortable relationship with my teacher's chalkboard. Speaking without raising a hand, accidentally tearing a blue ditto worksheet, or any number of other relatively minor infractions led to her drawing a small circle on the board. The dissident student was called to the front of the class and instructed to put her/his nose in the center. If the incident was deemed especially heinous, the student would be called to the board before the circle was drawn so the teacher could sketch it just high enough that the perpetrator would be forced to stand tip-toed to serve out the sentence. To this day, I'm not a fan of the smell or the feeling of chalk. Starting my teaching career, chalkboards made way for whiteboards and such punitive procedures were, thankfully, deemed barbaric. Nonetheless, whiteboard marker tips were notorious for getting pushed in and, if erased by human hands, the boards started looking nasty alarmingly quickly. ...

Google Slides is an awesome Google app. It's got a ton of great features that make it adaptable for many different class projects - far beyond just presenting. Unfortunately, one major and legitimate complaint is there is no option for adding sound. The good news? There are some workarounds. One of the clearest ways to do this is to embed YouTube videos in a Slide and then 'hiding' them so a soundtrack can play when you get to a new slide in the presentation. Here are the steps: 1. Open the slideshow where you'd like to embed a video. 2. Once you're in the slideshow, click on the slide where you'd like the video to play. I want my video to play on the slide shown below. 3. Click the 'Insert' menu and select 'video'. 4. Here, you can search YouTube for a video or go to youtube.com first and then copy and paste the URL for a video you want. 5. Click the video you want and then click 'Select'. 6. The video will drop ...

For those of you who don't have a three-year-old at home and maybe haven't seen every Disney princess movie 6,000 times, you may not know that Ariel, the young mermaid in The Little Mermaid,  desperately wants to, "be where the people are." She wants this so badly, in fact, that she makes a Faustian bargain and trades her voice with a sea witch in order to transform her tail fin into legs for three days. Yikes! "NO...Don't do it, Ariel!!!" Perhaps coincidentally, every Google Doc automatically has the font set to Arial. While you may consider your fonts and think they're neat and may even think your font collection's complete, you can choose a font and keep it permanently by changing the...What's that word again? Oh...default. You won't even have to make a deal with Ursula! Let's take a journey under the sea to find out how! 1. Open any Google Doc or create a new one 2. Click the font menu, it will say 'Arial'. Se...

Hello, all you Google Classroom users! If you've signed into Classroom in the past few weeks, you'll have noticed a slew of changes. As a matter of fact, the entire interface looks different and, for the most part, these updates improve the overall experience for both teachers and students. As Aladdin would say, Classroom has entered, "A whole new world!" So, let's fly through some of these updates and don't you dare close your eyes! First, what's all the buzz about Topics ? Organizing assignments into Topics will make life way easier for students. You no longer need to have multiple Classrooms for each subject area. Instead, use one Classroom and create a Topic for each subject. Each Topic will have its own heading that you can drop your assignments into. No longer will you have a long stream of assignments dating back to September, now assignments will be broken into sections that will be easy for students to find! Cool, but I can't find t...

Using Hapara to View Student Work Are you tired of getting shared document emails from students? Do you want to know an easier way to access student work without having your students share it with you? Well, I have some good news for you! There are a couple ways for teachers to see the work a student has done on their Chromebooks using G Suite tools (Docs, Sheets, Forms, and Slides). In the next two posts I’ll explain how you can view student work to edit or comment on it without getting 30+ daily sharing emails from students. As a classroom teacher you have access to student files through Hapara in grades 2-8, or Google Classroom which is recommended for use in grades K-6, without any extra sharing. Accessing Hapara All student documents are available for teachers to view through Hapara. This means students never have to share a document, slide, form, or spreadsheet with a classroom teacher to give access. To view student work in Hapara follow these steps: Navigate to www...

Topic: Integrating Google Apps for Education (GAfE) with the writing process.  Videos of three teachers were featured at Thursday, March 3rd's CLP meeting discussing how they are integrating Google Classroom and Docs into the writing process. Watch the videos to hear how these teachers use GAfE to organize materials, conference with students and increase student engagement in the writing process.   Jason Aillaud, 5th grade at Cedar Valley Community School Mike Ochoa, Edmonds Elementary 6th grade Tom White, Lynnwood Elementary 4th Grade

Google Forms can make a teacher's life easier.   When I first started using forms, I was impressed with Flubaroo and it's ability to quickly grade multiple choice questions. That feature alone makes it worth using Google Forms. However, there is so much more that can be done than just quizzes, surveys, or exit slips. Have you considered providing review or remediation activities through Forms? How about simplifying record keeping for accommodations, behavior, or communication with parents? Depending on the type of form that is created it may take some time to initially set it up, but once it is done the results that you will see are completely worth the time. Check out some of the alternate ways and examples provided below on how to use Google Forms in an educational setting. 1. Provide Review and Remediation: Educators would love for 100% of their students to learn the material the first time it is taught. However, the reality is that students learn a...