Comet Tech

Check out this week's 90 Second Chromebook Tip & Trick on organizing your Google Waffle.

This week is a site that I stumbled upon. When I was in the classroom, I used as much pop culture references as possible to connect my class material to the subject that we were currently teaching. This was a way that I could hook my students to continuing to learn about the topic at hand, while also consuming media in a lens of full understanding. This goes beyond the Schoolhouse Rock videos that most of our kids have seen.  I cannot tell you the number of times that Family Guy and The Simpsons were brought up in my classes. Enter Classhook . Classhook is a site that collects clips from YouTube and Vimeo that teachers look at and use, and applies it to a database that we can search for by standard or topic. It is incredibly cool. One of the best parts? Your students do not need accounts, only you. Most of the clips are readily available elsewhere, but this site organizes them for busy teachers. The site is continuing to grow, with it just starting recently and growing in popula...

Grasshopper is a relatively new app from Google's Area 120. It is available on both the Android and iOS operating systems. In this app, you complete challenges through writing bits of JavaScript.  I like to compare it to Duolingo, the popular language learning app. It is free and allows you to work on the puzzles at your own pace. This is a step up from the Blockly coding that has been popularized by Hour of Code and Code.org. The best part is, you get nearly instant feedback and multiple tries to master the material. While this will not get you a Silicon Valley coding job by itself, it will definitely start you down a path that allows you to start growing your coding skills.  It is really worth checking out. Learn more at here .

This week, I am highlighting a tool that I have used in the past and have been impressed with. This tool, coggle.it , is a freemium (has paid features) mindmapping tool that you can use in your classroom today. The intuitive design, easy features, and free version make it something that has value right away. Students when participating in the writing process or the brainstorm process need a place to gather their ideas. Coggle, a site that does not require a log in to work on someone else's mind map, is a free tool that let's our students organize their thoughts. I would recommend checking it out!

This week's app highlight of the week is Adobe Spark . Adobe Spark is a multi-faceted tool that can be used for student presentations. When using Adobe Spark, students can create images with text overlays, page flyers, or quick videos. Adobe Spark is a powerful tool that allows for students to create meaningful projects quickly, easily, and most importantly, on their Chromebooks. The best news is, while there are free accounts available for students over the age of 13, in April of this year, schools will be offered free premium accounts with premium features, as well as a change in the policies that allow for students of all ages to use the service. You can read about some of the coming changes here. Adobe Spark is an easy to use tool that allows for lots of creativity in the classroom. Feel free to check it out and ask questions if you have any!

This week, its all about the bookmarks!

Back to back formative assessment tools in the first two posts of the App Highlight section! I guess it goes to show just how important I think formative assessment is! This week, we take a look at Quizizz. Quizizz is like a Kahoot! style formative assessment. While it does offer points for speed, it also offers points for amount correct, so that our students have the opportunity to process at their pace, not at the rapid pace of a Kahoot!. It also provides teachers with the opportunity to put fun memes in the middle of their challenges, as well as provides us, as teachers, with a good way to formatively assess our students.  In my opinion, one of the best practical uses of this is following a segment of direct instruction with the students or following a reading for comprehension activity, regardless of the subject. After student learning occurs, using a Quizizz quiz to assess what was retained and what you may need to cover is a fantastic way to review the mate...

Just after the calendar struck 2018, the Michigan Department of Education (MDE) released a great gift. The MDE approved the updated Technology Competencies for Students. This update, which is set to replace the 2009 Michigan Educational Technology Standards for Students (METS-S), is based largely upon the International Society for Technology in Education's (ISTE) 2016 Standards for Students. While the METS-S focused more on skills with the technology, the updated MITECS focus almost exclusively on the learning and doing with technology. This is moving away from a more tool-specific approach to a more holistic approach to technology integration. Dr. Liz Kolb, one of the keynotes that the Lake Michigan Tech Conference this summer, phrases it perfectly in her new book, Learning First, Technology Second . To paraphrase Dr. Kolb (2017), you don't choose the tool and then find the problem. The MITECS take that approach to technology integration. As students progress through thei...

This is something new that I wanted to start. Each mailing of the newsletter, I will be posting an App Highlight and sharing it with my teachers. The goal is to bring awareness to tools that people may not be as familiar with. Each App Highlight will focus on a website or tool that works with our Chromebook devices and has the potential, when used correctly, to enhance our student learning!  In the first edition of the Comet Tech App Highlight, I want to shed light on a tool that bills itself as "Interactive Formative Assessment." This is not a quiz game like Kahoot! or Quizlet, instead this service allows for you to build assessments for your student that mimic other online tests, like state standardized tests. Edulastic boosts over 25,000 Edulastic Certified Assessment questions and over 66,000 educator created questions. There is also a helpful search feature on the site to help navigate the nearly 100,000 questions. Some of the teacher created questions lack the d...