SymbalooEDU - visual bookmarking tool

SymbalooEDU  is a visual bookmarking tool!   It's all about the tiles and students just click or touch the tile to navigate right where you want them to be online.  With a free account, one can access your bookmarks from anywhere with any device and share online resources with "yourself" other teachers, or your students for unique lessons.  Here is a screen shot of the WEBMIX for our NYS Teacher Centers with a tile/link to our Partner Companies.  Just search "New York State Teacher Centers" in the public webmixes and you can keep this as one of your tabs.  You can search SymbalooEDU for any topic and grab the tiles, like "Math Grade 3". https://www.symbaloo.com

Reducing the File size of a PDF

There are times when a pdf that you have created is too big for things like sharing via e-mail. You can use Preview to reduce the file size so that it is more manageable for the purpose that you need it for. You should note that this will also reduce the quality of the document.


1 -Open your PDF in Preview. If your PDF files are set to open in Preview, then simply double-click the file. If not, secondary/right click on the document and choose to open it in Preview. (If you aren't sure how to use secondary click you can view this video.)
Create a copy of the original file to test this method before applying it to your final PDF. This method can result in a lot of quality loss.

2 - Click File and select export. In the options, click the Quartz Filter menu, and select "Reduce File Size."

3 - Save the file. Select your desired location, then click Save. Your file will be saved in a much-reduced size. This may result in a noticeable drop in quality.

Flubaroo is an Add-On for Google Sheets spreadsheets that will automatically grade student responses to formative assessment submitted through a Google Form.  Flubaroo has the option to email students their results. Since not all schools have email turned on for students, Flubaroo has another option. Flubaroo recently added the feature to create a summary report on a Google Doc that is shared with the student through Google Drive. Click here to view the Flubaroo blog post.

To learn more about this and how to create an assessment in Google Forms, visit Alice Keeler's blog. 

Self Paced Google Training

If you are looking to get some Google Training, but need to do it on your own time I encourage you to check out the LHRIC MLP catalog.  At the bottom of the list you will see listing for self-paced courses in: Google Doc, Google Forms, Google Sheets, Google Slides  as well as Digital Citizenship, Smart Notebook and Wiki.

Just go to www.mylearningplan.com to see what course are offered (plus they are free!)

A playlist of video tech tips

If you aren't reading Richard Byrne's Free Tech for Teachers Blog, be sure to add it to your feed. He recently put together a collection of some of the videos he has made into a YouTube playlist. There are a lot of great videos for a variety of tech tools. Take a look at it and see what new thing you can try. Click on the link below to see a playlist of videos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLtx-qUNKJwDwazAWE7UaLATKaV0gcpNYv&v=W4eKfe-fNYs

Make Groups with just a few clicks

Group Maker is a super simple add on you can use in Google Sheets.  Once you have created the template (by copying and pasting your roster into the document given), you can use it as many times as you want to create groups of any size.  To see more details you can visit:
http://www.alicekeeler.com/teachertech/2015/10/19/group-maker-automatically-make-groups-with-google-sheets/

Creating Google Contact Groups for sharing files

Some of you may frequently be sharing Google Drive files with a number of people (such as your department, grade level or group of students).  One option (there are many) is to create a Google Contact Group.  Once you have this created, any time you are in Google you can type in the group's name and it will populate the field with all of the addresses of the people in the group.  Here is a quick video to show you how to do this.