Edmonds Digital Learning

The Read&Write extension for Google Chrome is extremely beneficial for many students. It has exceptional features , but the newest one I've found is a little bit hidden within the program.  Here's how students can hear the program read individual words or sentences as they type. 1. Open a Google Doc . 2. Open the Read&Write menu by clicking the small purple puzzle icon. 3. Click the three-dot menu toward the righthand side of the Read&Write menu and select 'Options'. 4. To have text read after each word, check the box next to 'Speak on each word'. To have text read after each sentence, check the box next to 'Speak on each sentence'. Click 'OK'. 5. Please note: The program will read each word after the word is typed and the space bar is pressed. It will read sentences after the punctuation mark is typed. It will not read single words that are followed by punctuation and it wi...

Google Forms is a fantastic and versatile software for quick data collection. It is relatively easy to use, free, and collaborative. What's not to love? Like an onion, a parfait, or young-adult vampire literature, Forms has a lot of layers. The more you peel, spoon, or leaf through, the better experience you'll have. Plus, Forms usually won't make you cry. That's right, I'm looking at you, onion. Here are six tips for getting the most out of Forms.  Use FormRecycler to Reuse Items Remember the Google Form survey you wrote last month? It sure had some great questions! If only there were a way to reuse some of them on your new survey without retyping or copying and pasting line-by-line. Enter the Add-on 'FormRecycler'. This nifty add-on lets you import items from any of your previous Google Forms with no typing required! 1. Go to forms.google.com  and create a new form. 2. Click the three-dot menu in the top right corner and se...

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...

I learned how to make short films with green screen technology a few weeks ago and have spent time the last couple of Saturday afternoons making films with my six-year-old son (see above and below). We're still working on lighting, but imagine the possibilities for student presentations! The use of green screens, or chroma keying, is a common technique in movie-making that dates back to 1898 when French filmmaker, Georges Melies created the silent film, The Four Troublesome Heads . At the time, audiences were panic-stricken as they observed Melies "remove his head" and place it on a table next to him. The strategy is still used today to add special effects in high-budget feature films including, The Avengers. * In the classroom, students have the opportunity to participate in filmmaking with green screens as well! To get started, you will need to cover a small section of classroom wall, preferably about 6 ft x 6 ft, with fabric or paper of a single c...