Lemon Tech Tidbits

  Rewordify.com is powerful, free, online software that improves reading, learning, and teaching.  This site can be used to take a difficult article or piece of text and simplify it for your students' reading levels. It can effectively teach words or help students build better vocabulary. It saves teachers time by easily creating vocabulary lists and quizzes. It is completely free and is web-based so it can be used on any device. It takes only minutes to set up accounts for teachers and students with no personal identification required.  To see a short demo video, click here .

  This new and completely FREE Whiteboard tool was made by math teachers for math teachers. This collaborative tool was designed to be easily used by teachers and students. There is no need to download an app. All that is needed is to go to the website which is accessible with any browser. The Math Whiteboard includes a keyboard interface made for integrating math notations. It will recognize handwritten equations, has the ability to graph equations, includes a slider for different inputs into problems, and allows drag and drop of PDF assignments.  To use the site, teachers select “Create a Whiteboard Now.” Next, they will click “Copy Link” and share it with students via Google Classroom or email.   Eric Curtis has provided a youtube tutorial over this new web tool. You can access it here .  Go to https://www.mathwhiteboard.com/ and give it a try.

  Google Keep Tutorials I am often asked which tech tool I use the most. My answer is Google Keep. In fact, I use it so much that if it suddenly went away, I would not know how to function as an adult and educator. I highly recommend you do as well. To learn about Google Keep, watch these 18 very short videos by Richard Byrne: https://www.freetech4teachers.com/2023/08/18-google-keep-tutorials-for-teachers.html If you already USE Google Keep, you might still want to take a look as there is most likely something in one of the videos that will be new to you. For example, did you know you could create a comment bank in Google Keep for grading Google Docs assignments? Google Calendar Tutorials      Another tech tool I use to help stay organized during a school year is Google Calendar. If you are new to our district and/or new to Google Calendar or just want to learn more, check out this lists of very short youtube videos from Richard Byrne: https://www.freetech4te...

  There have been many updates this summer but instead of telling you about all of them, I decided to highlight the ones I believe you will either really appreciate or will want to use. Google Classroom Update A new update to Google Classroom is the ability for the teacher to lock submissions on assignment past a certain date. If the submission is closed for a specific assignment, students may still access their assignment-related documents to continue to edit.  The Comments feature has had an update. You can now format the text using bold, italics, underline, and with bullet points. You can also reply to a comment right from your Gmail without having to go to Google Classroom.  Google Doc, Slides, Sheets Updates In Google Docs, Slides, and Sheets, there is now a magnifying glass in the top left-hand side. You can use this to quickly find and use a tool without having to go through the menu bar. If you select the tool, it will automatically do it for you. (this will be ve...

  The blog post b y Matt Miller titled New Google Doc Features You Need to Know is highly recommended for all teachers to read .   In the blog, Matt goes into detail about the new features now available in Google Doc such as smart chips and building blocks. Both of these use a simple method of typing in @ character to access. What I liked the most about this blog was how Matt Miller easily explains what a smart chip is and how it differs from a building block. He then goes into detail about how you can use each one to easily and more efficiently collaborate with others with a Google Doc. For example, did you know you can easily assign a task to another person? Or how about linking a slide presentation to a Google Doc without the need of copy and pasting a url address? In addition, Matt explains a few other features of Google Docs such as the pageless format, inserting an equation and adding a table of contents. 

  If you teach students how to evaluate information found online or are a journalism teacher , you might be interested in signing up for a weekly SIFT Newsletter from Newslit.com (the people behind Checkology).  “The Sift, NLP’s free weekly newsletter for educators — delivered during the school year — explores timely examples of misinformation, addresses media and press freedom topics and discusses social media trends and issues. It also includes links, discussion prompts and activities for use in the classroom.” You can view past weekly newsletters to discover articles of interest that you can incorporate into your own instructions.

  I heard about Autoclassmate.io from a Facebook group and was intrigued. It is a website in which teachers can choose to use one of three different AI tools plus another one that helps you refine a ChatGPT prompt for instructional uses which will be coming soon.  The three different AI tools are an AI Would You Rather question generator , Activation and Engagement Activity generator, and a Lesson Plan and Activity Forecast tool.  I tried all three and my favorite was the Would You Rather question generator. Although I liked the idea of the Activation and Engagement Activity generator, my prompt led it to suggest three activities that all required access to materials and equipment our school does not have access to. The Lesson Plan and Activity Forecast was okay but I prefer using ChatGPT for lesson planning as the prompt needed to generate on Autoclassmate.io required more detail.  The mission behind Autoclassmate.io is to help teachers stay on top of emerging te...