Everything you need to know about photos in sheets

Looking to insert an image in Google Sheets?  Alice Keeler’s post here shows you everything you need to know- from inserting to resizing.

EDPuzzle

EdPuzzle is an easy (and free) way to create and share video lessons with your students.  I like the question aspect where you can have the video stop and check for comprehension.  If you need directions, please see the blog post and video here from Richard Byrne (Free Technology for Teachers).

History via text

Classtools has a variety of free and creative ways for students to demonstrate their understanding.  Richard Byrne recently posted about SMS Text Generator from Classtools. Here you could have your students create imaginary text messages.

Forcing a copy

Ever want to share a Google document (or slides, or presentation) but want to make share the user makes a copy?  Here are easy step-by-step directions from Kasey Bell on how to make this happen.

STEM Lessons

Who knew this was National Robotics Week?  Looking to celebrate? Explore this curated list of STEM lessons from TeachersFirst.

Spotlight On Strategies: Change It Up! Now Screening

Welcome to our special SOS Top Ten series, Change It Up!  

For years you’ve told us the best part of the Spotlight on Strategies  is

their adaptability across grade levels and content areas. In this series,

we share examples and ideas of those adaptations.  For the complete blog post,

please click here.

McREL and Discovery Education

From Discovery Education

SOS Top Ten: Become Interested in Learning

(McREL International Phase 1)

DID YOU KNOW: Spotlight on Strategies instructional ideas are aligned to

McREL International’s six-phase model for learning?

This model arranges strategies for teaching and learning into a larger process

for helping new knowledge travel through the phases of memory in our students.

In this Top Ten series, we showcase SOS instructional strategy alignment to each of the six phases of the McREL model, helping educators choose the appropriate classroom tactics for aiding the acquisition and recall of information.  Please click here for the rest of the blog post.

Earth Day Resources

If you are looking for Earth Day resources, check out the curated list from TeachersFirst.

Learning about money

TeachersFirst has a large collection of financial literacy resources for April. Please click here to see their curated collection. They cover basic banking, budgeting and investing.

Creating special Google Calendars

If you ever saw my Google calendar, you would notice that it is not just one, but rather a series of calendars.  One for booked classes, another for Sayreville University, and the list goes on and on. The nice feature is you can merge all the calendars together or view by itself.  Need step by step directions for adding Google calendars? Just see Alice Keeler’s blog post here.

Autism Awareness

April is Autism Awareness month and TeachersFirst has collected a series of Autism resources (for students, educators, and parents) on their featured site here.

Silence is Golden (with a twist)

DE adding a twist on a favorite SOS

Strategy: Silence is Golden

Big idea: Focus student attention on imagery to engage them in visual

analysis and discussion, leading to deeper connections and understanding

of the material they are learning.

Materials: Video segment with strong imagery, paper, and pencil/pen

---

In any subject…

…ask students to create their own narration, using key vocabulary and

concepts learned during a unit of study.

…smash this strategy with strategies such as Sketchnotes , Sticky Back , or

Tweet Tweet . Watch the video segment without sound and then ask

students to write a summary using sketchnotes, sticky notes, or 280-character

tweets.

In science…

…Lindsay Murdock used Silence is Golden in a Discovery Education Studio Board

she created to “give students the opportunity to develop comprehension,

collaborate with their peers, and, ultimately, narrate their own version of the

chain of events that gets an apple from its start on a farm all the way to their table.

In social studies…

…Courtney Toomey used Silence is Golden in a Discovery Education Studio Board

designed to engage students in a 6th grade special education social studies l

esson focused on Mesopotamia.

…Sharman Asendorf shared that using Silence is Golden gave her young

learners an opportunity to engage in content-related dialogue and collaborative

conversation because they used what they saw to talk about the American flag.

Up your Twitter game

Alice Keeler has suggestions for folks who do tweet (use TweetDeck to organize) as well as those who do not (use email). Please see her entire post here.

Teaching and Technology

Fran Maye (a former Sayreville colleague) shared site -his weekly blog post are interesting and cover a wide diversity of educational topics (I really enjoyed the Project Based Learning ones).  While he has a weekly newsletter, it is blocked here at school.

Using private comments (instead of docs)

Alice Keeler has an interesting suggestion to use private comments (rather than having to open a document) to provide feedback on a 3 part writing assignment.  Please click here to see her post (along with the step by step directions).

Matt Miller- Using tech to make learning come alive!

Matt Milled (in his blog post here) demonstrates several quick tech integration projects in his recent speech at a California conference. (Matt is the author of Ditch That Textbook- we have copies in the TRC library).  From Google Earth to Google drawing and Slides- there is something for everyone.  The best thing is- Matt shares several of his templates so there is no need to start from scratch!

Measurement in Google Earth

Richard Byrne recently posted a short video demonstrating how easy it is to measure in Google Earth.  Pick your unit of measurement and let the fun begin!

On TeachersFirst this week

From the sinking of the Titanic to Dr. King's life to the Civil War- all are prominent events in April and are included in this week’s TeachersFirst featured sites.  Please click here to see the sites, reviews, and links.

Inside of a leaf (up close!)

Image wandering among the chloroplasts or really seeing cytoplasmic streaming?

Or how about close-ups of ants in their world?  Check out WonderScience

(produced by Microscopist Danielle Parsons).  Don’t be alarmed by the length of the

videos (I had to fast forward the plant cells), consider showing just a minute or

so to your students. There are a variety of topics (ants to gems and more)!

Vocabulary in 15 seconds

The New York Times recently published the winners of their Vocabulary videos.  Students were challenged to create a 15-second video to define one of the NYT words of the day.  The results are here.    Maybe this could be a project for your students (and you could show some of these as examples).  While some are high tech, others are not. And how would this work in a foreign language class? I bet paper slides would work as well. Let me know if you would like to try it!