I've had several requests so far this year on how to help students who need the ability to do voice to text on a device. In fact, I had so many requests I thought I would create a brief tutorial on how easy it is to do in Google Docs! So watch the video below to see how a learner or possibly yourself can use Voice Typing.
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1-Click-Timer is a great Chrome extension to have in your educational arsenal. It is a super easy to use timer and works without a hitch! Watch the video above to see how the extension works and to receive some helpful hints & tips. You can download the extension here: 1-Click-Timer.
Nothing is worse than pulling up a YouTube video to show in front of a classroom and then having a very questionable ad starting playing. In fact, I know a few teachers that actually have nightmares about this very situation. This whole situation can be bypassed if you use an adblocker extension, and the one I am demoing here is uBlock Origin. This is a extension that can be added to Google Chrome to stop ads from loading on videos and websites. In the video below you will see me comparing websites side-by-side to show how effective uBlock Origin can be! Google can be our best friend when we are trying to find something. We can search just about anything, and good old Google will find it for us. Unfortunately, sometimes what it finds can be overwhelming, especially for the younger ones out there. Luckily, Google has a really neat Search Tool that will let a student or educator change the reading level of the search results.
Students and/or educators can select a: Basic, Intermediate, or Advanced reading level. This can be beneficial by allowing students to only find websites they can understand and/or read. CLARIFICATION EDIT: There was a great question in the comments about what does Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced means. So after a little searching, I found this blog post, Search by Reading Level - SearchReSearch, that explains how Google determines the reading levels and what they mean. But, the TL:DR version would be "Basic" is elementary level, "Intermediate" is anything above that level up to technical and scholarly articles which would be "Advanced".
As more and more Chromebooks make their way into the classroom, many teachers are finding they have to find new resources to replace their old. Educators find that some of the good old websites simply do not work on newer technology. One of the areas hit pretty heavy is Science. I had a staff member looking for some resources to replace material they had that simply would no longer work on a Chromebook. So here are some great Science interactives & activities that have been tested and approved for Chromebooks.
Molecular Workbench is a amazing website that offers both educational & fun interactives and STEM activities. These are all HTML5 based, which means they can run on pretty much all devices. One of the other really neat features, is that the interactives can be embedded on your website. You can see an example of this below. This site offers some great resources that every Science teacher really needs to know about, especially since it is free! Another science website, which I have covered before, you may enjoy is SpongeLab. You can set up classes and assign interactives, activities, and material directly to students for free. SpongeLab has everything from virtual dissections (frog, trout, worm) to building your very own nuclear power plant. In fact in contains 895 graphics & images, 251 games & simulations, 111 animations & video, 623 linked animations & video, 87 lessons plans, and 17 e-textbooks. Here is one more bonus website, PhET Interactive Simulations from the University of Colorado. They have almost turned all their old downloadable simulations into HTML5 based ones. They have activities ranging from Elementary through College age. Many of us tend to be creatures of habit and have a certain of websites we use constantly throughout the day. In fact, some of us may never leave these websites. Well, time to make your life easier by learning how you can use Google Chrome to automatically open a certain set of websites every time it starts up. One word of warning, on a iMac, Macbook Pro, or Macbook Air, this only works if Google Chrome has been fully closed by using 'Quit.' Even though many of us would not like to admit it, once in a while we could use the font size on websites a tad (or alot) bigger. Using Google Chrome this can be done quickly and without messing up the webpage. Watch the tutorial below to see how you can adjust font sizes for many websites to make your web browsing just a tad easier for not only yourself, but also for students with vision impairments. The Save to Google Drive Chrome extension is a must for any Google Apps user or Chromebook user. This extension lets you save any website image straight to your Google Drive; or why just save the image, you can save the whole website as a image! Save to Google Drive is unbelievably easy to use. All you need to do is install the Save to Google extension, then you can right click a picture and select 'Save Image to Google Drive.' If you want to save an entire website, all one must do is click the Save to Google Drive extension and boom, the website is now copied to your Google Drive! This is one extension that you don't realize how awesome it is until you use it! Announcify is the perfect extension for students with reading disabilities, attention issues, or students reading above their grade level. Announcify will strip out all the ads from a webpage and then read the information to the student! Want to see it in action? Check out the brief demo below. Often while browsing the 'interwebs,' as my Grandmother would call, it we come across a website that is just plain old awesome; yet as we try to find something similar to hit, we hit a stumbling block and fail. Well, no more of that because the Google Similar Page Extension is here to save the day! Using the Google Similar Page Extension yourself and students can find websites similar to the one they are on quickly and efficiently. The bonus part is when you select a similar page, it will open in a new tab which preserves the site you were originally on and allows you to go back to the direct search. Watch the brief tutorial below to see this bad boy in action! |
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