Lemon Tech Tidbits

  Eric Curtis has put together an easy to follow poster for students and teachers on how to use a Chromebook touchpad easily like a mouse complete with “right-clicks” and scrolling features. In addition, he has gifs that go step by step to make everything crystal clear. This would be great for students to learn and practice. If you would like a copy of the poster or to see the GIFS, check out his blog post here.  

  Everyone should know the images found in a Google Image search are often copyright. Students and teachers should get in a habit of ONLY using images that are copyright free or in the public domain to avoid plagiarism or unfair usage. There are many sites out there to help you find free images to use (love pixabay ). A new one I just found out about is called CocoMaterial. CocoMaterial is an open source collection of over 2,452 hand-drawn clipart images free to use. In addition, you can slightly edit the images by changing the size, color of outline, and fill color. The hand-drawn images are fun and simple in nature. Check it out to see if there are a few you can see yourself using in your class designs or presentations.

  MightyOwl was started by the same people behind the popular elementary site BrainPop.  The site is full of engaging videos for teachers to use. Each video includes a summary and key ideas for the teacher to use. You can search for videos by grade (K-7), subject (math, ELA, science), or by the standards addressed.  The MightyOwl videos are now integrated into Flipgrid as well! You can have students watch the videos in Flipgrid through Flipgrid Discovery and then respond back with their own video analysis or answer questions in video format.  Check it out now by going to mightyowl.com . Sign up is free.

  Novel Effect is an app that you can install onto your computer or phone to provide sound effects while reading aloud a book. It follows your voice and provides music and sound effects to make reading the book more engaging to students and making classroom read-alouds the best part of the day. It is one of those apps that many educators are already using and exclaiming how much they enjoy it.  There is a cost associated with this app but it is pretty minimal at less than $4.00 a month. There are subscriptions available for entire schools as well as for parents.  Besides the ability to have sound effects enhance the reading of the book, Novel Effect has FREE resources that can be downloaded for many of the books in their library. For more information, please visit: https://noveleffect.com/

  Google has recently been spending a lot of time updating all of their products to work easier and more efficiently together to help increase productivity in the workplace. One of those places is a revamped Gmail. If you open up Gmail and look on the left-hand side, you could see Chat and Spaces already enabled. If not, go to settings (the gear), click on See All Settings, and then click on Chat and Meet to turn it on.  So what is Chat? Chat is a communication tool that allows you to chat with another person or a group of people back and forth. Think of it as an instant messaging feature.  What is Spaces? Spaces goes with Chat. If you have a group chat, you can turn it into Spaces which is a place where you can share files and assign tasks to each other. If you need to get together in a live event, you can easily open up a Google Meet (like Zoom) too.  For more information on Gmail Spaces, read this blog post from TCEA. There is also this video but it does seem to be more for

  Recently, I attended the KLA conference in Wichita full of amazing presenters. In each session, there were pieces that I will be “taking” back and using in my own library programs. So to say the blog post titled “Steal Like A Teacher” from Matt Miller caught my attention is a little understatement. Matt does a wonderful job of showing some of the top tech tools teachers use throughout their instructional year. In each of these tools, there is a way in which another teacher can borrow, or steal, someone else’s ideas. Some of the areas he covers includes Kahoot, Flip (formerly Flipgrid), Pear Deck, and EdPuzzle to name a few.  To save time and to check out some of these cool tech tools to find your own hidden treasures, read this blog post by Matt Miller.