Videvo (Week of 6/2)
Videvo.net is a website that has over 3 million stock footage clips, motion graphics, Premiere Pro templates, After Effects templates, royalty-free music, and royalty-free sound effects. As a free user, you'll gain access to over 50,000 free stock video clips and motion graphics, including animated backgrounds and hundreds of free sound effects you can use to enhance daily lessons and activities.
Set Google Drive access expiration dates (Week of 5/19)
Did you know that you can set an expiration date for files you share from your Google Drive? As long as you are the owner of the file, you can grant someone edit/view/comment access that only lasts until a time and date that you designate. This can be helpful if you are sharing examples with students that you only want accessible for a certain amount of time, or sharing data with a colleague that you don't want to be used after a certain point. You can add the expiration dates in the same panel as you would use to share your documents/forms/sheets.
QuestionWell (Week of 5/5)
QuestionWell is an AI focused site that offers a free version for teachers. The free version allows you to upload short reading excerpts, videos, docs, pdfs, images, or websites as source material. The AI will then generate learning outcomes, discussion questions, vocabulary terms & definitions, and multiple choice questions. There is a feature to export the multiple choice questions to various platforms such as Blooket, Kahoot, Quizziz, GimKit, Google Forms and many more! Have a topic in mind, but looking for a new source? No problem! QuestionWell's AI will do the search for you, generate the materials listed above, and provide you the tools for a gamification activity within minutes.
Flaticon (Week of 4/7)
Flaticon offers an array of free vector icons that you can customize, download, and use for just about anything you can think of! Download Free Icons and Stickers for your projects. Resources made by and for designers. PNG, SVG, EPS, PSD and CSS formats.
Text Blaze: Templates and Snippets (Week of 3/24)
Text Blaze is a Chrome extension that allows you to create shortcuts that will automatically populate text in its place. For example, if you give similar feedback on student assignments and don't want to retype or copy and paste, create a snippet for it! Through Text Blaze, you'd be able to program that when you type "/rubric", it will be replaced with the specific feedback you choose. You can create many different snippets to represent different feedback.
Video Capturing & Editing Tools (Week of 3/10)
Looking for video capture and editing tools or a replacement for Flipgrid, or just in general? Consider these district paid tools:
Quizizz: students can respond to questions by recording either audio or video.
(Click here for more information)
Formative: students can respond to questions by recording audio or video.
(Click here for more information)
Nearpod: offers an audio reply option.
(Click here for more information)
Adobe Express: All staff and students can have access to the premium version of Adobe Express which has a lot of features, including editing videos and creating AI images.
(Click here for more information)
Staff Chromebooks: can be used to make a screencast.
*Adjust the settings for microphone and camera before recording.
(Click here for more information)
Google Slides: presentations can be recorded.
ZeroGPT AI Detector (Week of 3/10)
ZeroGPT is a free website that will allow you to detect if a student's writing was AI generated (without having to make an account). Simply go to the website, copy and paste the writing sample into the box provided and click detect. The site will generate a report of the portions of the text that were AI generated. Click here to try it out!
Scheduling Emails in Outlook (Week of 2/24)
Did you know you can schedule emails to go out at a designated time or on a designated date? If you know you need to send a reminder to a student or parent, just schedule the email to send in the future! To do this in a new email, click the dropdown next to the "SEND" button. Here you will see the option to "SCHEDULE SEND".
Stickity (Week of 2/10)
Add stickers to Google Docs and Slides with Stickity. A fun way to add feedback and spice up your directions/documents. Sticky stickers can serve as purposeful visual aids and help facilitate the incorporation of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) strategies to enhance teaching! Visit www.stickity.co for more info.
Keep Awake (Week of 1/27)
Is your Chromebook going to sleep when you need it to stay active? Is the display turning off even though you're monitoring it? Try the Chrome Extension "Keep Awake," which allows you to keep your Chromebook on while you are actively using it, even if it is outside of the district's set timeout settings.
NoteGPT (Week of 1/13)
NoteGPT will allow you to transcribe YouTube videos for free, without having to make an account or ad a Google extension. Simply go to the website, copy and paste the link to your YouTube video and click generate. You can then download or copy the transcripts to paste/share wherever you'd like. To give it a try, click here.
Wix Tomorrow Classroom (Week of 12/16)
Wix offers a free suite of resources designed to teach middle and high school students how to create their own websites. It includes lesson plans, activities, templates, and classroom management solutions that allow you to monitor student work and give feedback as they go. Create portfolio websites, capstone projects, passion projects and more. For more info: HERE (ages 13+ only)
Quick Links in Google Classroom (Week of 12/02)
This feature is in BETA so not everyone will have access to it, but this feature allows you to create shortcuts to frequently used links in Google Classroom. These make it easier for students to access different links right on your Stream!
Email Notificatoins for New Responses on Google Forms (Week of 11/08)
If you previously received notifications for Google form responses through an extension, it may no longer be working correctly. Google now has the option directly in the form settings. Simply click the "Responses" tab at the top of the form, followed by the three dots, and then check the first option to "Get email notifications for new responses". If you are collaborating on a shared form, each collborator will need to adjust this setting individually
Brisk Teaching - Create Presentation from YouTube Video (Week of 10/21)
We've talked about Brisk Teaching before, but here's yet another great feature. If you have a YouTube video with great information, with just one click, you can turn it into a Google Slides Presentation, a Google Docs handout, and more! For more information about Brisk Teaching and its MANY tools, click HERE
Chromebook Shortcuts
Here's a link to a one page guide to Chromebook shortcuts: LINK
GimKit Updates (Week of 9/30)
Reports now have their own home in GimKit! That’s right, no more hunting for the report you need by searching your hosted games. Just click “Reports” in your dashboard to view all of your Reports across Live Games and Assignments! You can also track student progress by using "classes" in GimKit. For more info click here!
Student Recorded Video (Week of 9/23)
Some of you might have used Flip as tool for students to record video answers and verbal responses. Flip is no longer available, however the school subscribes to Screencastify which offers Screencastify Submit and through Record on Google Slides
Google Classroom Guardian Summaries (Week of 9/16)
You may see that a guardian has been invited to or is "in" your Google Classroom. This means they can receive email summaries about their student’s work in class but does not give them access to the Google Classroom. Please do not remove them. Email summaries do not include grades. A new feature may allow them to see the Classwork page in Google Classroom, but will not allow them to actually BE in the classroom.
If you do not want your class or club to be included in guardian summaries, you can turn it off in the class settings for each individual Classroom. For more information, check out this LINK
NB Tech Subscriptions (Week of 9/09)
Just a reminder that the district pays for many subscriptions to great Tech Tools like Screencastify, Edpuzzle, and Formative. Flocabulary has seen a change in the login, so if you plan to use that, be sure to check the spreadsheet. To see the current status of the school's subscriptions or to see how to sign in/log in, check out this spreadsheet.