Master the Chrome Tabs: Pin, Reopen, & Mute

When using Google Chrome, it can be very easy to end up with 347 tabs open at once! Luckily, Chrome has a few really cool features that can help you manage those tabs with ease!

1. Pinning

• Pin the tabs that you need open all day! Attendance, email, curriculum...whatever you need open all day, pin them! Pinning will make the tab stick to the far left, reduce the size of the tab (more space for more tabs), and remove the X. You must unpin a tab to close it. No more accidental closures!

2. Reopening

• Fortunately, if you do accidentally close a tab that isn’t pinned, HAVE NO FEAR. CTRL + SHIFT +T will open recently closed tabs!

3. Muting

• Often times, one of the websites you have open will autoplay a video or advertisement with sound. With a ton of tabs open, finding the one where the sound is coming from can be frustrating. Look along your tabs for the volume icon. Need to turn off the sound quickly? Just mute the tab! Right Click → Mute!

ClassFlow, a More Student-Centered Alternative to ActivInspire

By Ryan Gibson

Promethean boards have been in use in our district for over a decade and continue to be powerful tools for teaching and learning in our classrooms, allowing teachers to deliver effective and engaging synchronous instruction. While ActivInspire flipcharts have traditionally been used to present content to all students at the same time, Promethean’s new lesson delivery system, ClassFlow, allows for each student to engage with the content on his/her own device. With the increase in student and classroom devices, teachers can now utilize ClassFlow to provide asynchronous instruction to students, allowing them to work at their own pace.

ClassFlow is a cloud-based application from Promethean that enables teachers to create lessons and deliver interactive content across multiple devices. It features many of the same lesson building capabilities of ActivInspire, plus much more in the way of resource integration, student engagement, and classroom management. Most importantly, ClassFlow facilitates and encourages student-centered teaching and learning. Interactive activities and assessments such as drag-and-drop, matching, polls, checks for understanding, and more can be distributed to and completed by students on individual devices from any place, at any time, and at any pace. Lesson content in ClassFlow can be differentiated by building and sending personalized slides to individual students, helping to discreetly ensure that each student receives the support that they need to succeed. Best of all, ActivInspire flipcharts can be converted to ClassFlow lessons. This means that students can now view and interact with Flipcharts individually, and teachers do not have to abandon content that they have created and found success with in the past.

ClassFlow can be accessed through https://classflow.com. Fort Worth teachers can log in with their Google or Microsoft account. To learn more about using ClassFlow in your classroom, including video tutorials, go to the Promethean support page for the application. Also, be sure to check out my session at the Fort Worth Technology Conference on January 25th, entitled “ACTIVate Student Engagement with ClassFlow”.