Reeve EdTech Tips

One of the most important things a teacher can do over the summer is to backup his or her digital files. Depending on your school and its data system, your files might or might not be automatically backed up by your IT department. Regardless, it is never a bad idea to create your own occasional backups, so you have access and control when you need it. The instructions below will take you through backing up any documents you may have stored on your Windows laptop or desktop. [Another post will cover similar procedures for Mac computers.] Here are the basic steps we will follow:    Find your files    Create a backup of your files (zipped, for easy moving)    Copy the backup to someplace safe. Step 1. Research: where are your files? Before we start clicking and copying we should do a little thinking. There are a lot of places you can store files on a computer, and it is a good idea to think through these places before you begin. You will want...

Taking Your Google Data With You Before You Graduate:   Google Takeout Students who use Google Apps in school can amass a large number of docs, presentations, etc, representing a huge amount of academic work. Because these docs are stored in the cloud, you could lose them when your school deactivates your account after you graduate.  Fear not! Google Takeout lets you download and save all of the Google Drive and Gmail data that your created when you were in school. Go to https://www.google.com/settings/takeout . If prompted, sign in with your school Google Account. . Scroll down and turn OFF the data that you do NOT need to save. This is up to you. You know best which services you used and need to archive. NOTE: There are limits to the number of times you can archive your data, so choose wisely the first time. Click Next . Leave “File type” and “Delivery method” unchanged and click “ Create archive .” When archiving is done, you will see a screen like...

To celebrate the holiday season, I'm sending  12   Days  of easy classroom tech ideas you can use right away!   Day   12 : HHS Social Media I picked the  easiest one  for our last  day  before the break!  We're working on increasing  our school's social media presence , to better  communicate with parents  and the community. Many parents check social media at least daily, and it is a great way to send out "non-essential" notices and photos. We are using social media to help develop a  positive, friendly presence  online. If you use  Facebook ,  Twitter ,  Google+ , or  Instagram , please consider taking a moment to "Like" or "Follow" HHS! It only takes seconds! You can participate in different ways: Candy Cane  level:  Like or follow  us! Reindeer  level:  Like , s hare, or re-tweet  one of our posts! Elf  level: S end me photos or n...

To celebrate the holiday season, I'll be sending out  12   Days  of easy classroom tech ideas you can use right away!  Day  11: Google Slides Not everyone knows that Google has its own version of PowerPoint called Slides. You access it through your Google Drive just like a Google Doc, but it lets you make and develop presentations. It also has all of the collaboration tools and sharing of a normal Google Doc. Students' "presentation  day " with Google Slides is easier. All the student has to do is share the Slides presentation with you and you can project it normally. No fussy USB drives or emailing large files that don't have the videos properly embedded. Slides is also really good at converting existing PowerPoint files into Google Slides format. This means you can upload your existing PowerPoint lessons and easily share them with your students. If you already knew about Slides but haven't looked at it in a while, look again. Google has...

To celebrate the holiday season, I'll be sending out  12   Days  of easy classroom tech ideas you can use right away!   Weekend Edition! Day  10: Google Drawing A little used feature of the Google Apps system is  Google Drawings . I think this is because of its name: it  seems to imply free-hand drawing  on a computer, which may seem of limited use to most teachers. A Barely-Educational Example  (Keep reading for better examples!) However, free-hand is the  least  useful tool in Google Drawings. Where it really shines is in  free-layout text and shape drawing .  Google Drawings is  perfect for making concept maps and graphic organizers . You can make an organizer and share it with your students, or they make make their own.   Maybe these examples I whipped up might seem more educational: Concept Map about Fine Arts [Ironically, the ...

To celebrate the holiday season, I'll be sending out  12   Days  of easy classroom tech ideas you can use right away!   Day  9: Suggestions in Google Docs Have you noticed the  new way to edit/comment in Google Docs ? It's called  Suggesting mode , and it's perfect for teachers. Suggesting mode allows you to  type corrections  into a student's document, but have those changes  highlighted to make them obvious . For example, in the picture below, you can see where I removed "HPS" and inserted "Holliston Public Schools." It  automatically marked my changes  in green, and  automatically created a comment  on the right to show the student what I did. When the student  reopens  the document, she  sees the changes  in green as well as the comment box  on the side. It makes my suggestions  really obvious , and she can accept the suggestion (to make th...

To celebrate the holiday season, I'll be posting 12 Days of easy classroom tech ideas you can use right away! Day 8: Google Charts in Google Docs This is a simple one that used to bug me. Google Sheets is a nice, easy-to-use spreadsheet system that lets students make graphs. Google Docs is a nice, simple word processor that lets students type reports. But until recently, i t used to be surprisingly difficult to get achart into a Google Doc. Enter the "Charts" add-on for Google Docs. Charts lets you, within a Google Doc, access data in a Google Spreadsheet and create a chart/graph right in the doc . This is very nice for a variety of assignments that rely on data analysis . For me, this simple addition is a game changer for science lab reports . Before the "Charts" add-on, lab reports with graphs were impractical; now, they suddenly seem like the best option , especially now that best-fit trendlines can be included (see " 12 Days of Techmas...