Comet Tech

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

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!

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...

The referenced document: bit.ly/ccsofflinecb

This past week has been #CSEdWeek! The goal of the week is to bring awareness to schools across the country and the world that Computer Science is a field of study that our students can get into, learn, and easily land in a career. There are a bunch of resources and stats that support that statement. Including the current 600,000 unoccupied Computer Science jobs that are available in the United States with an average starting salary of $75,000. Check out the infographic below to learn more about the stats. Needless to say, Tonya and I tried to get in as many classrooms as we could to talk to the students about Computer Science and allow them to try it out through Hour of Code. The discussion was that this is more than fun and games, but we are working on skills like computational thinking, problem-solving, and critical thinking. The students loved it. We hit all of CIS and parts of CES. We also had a Family Code Night for our K-5 families on Wednesday. We invited students to come in ...

This week, I was working on a Google Classroom tutorial for teachers that are new to Google Classroom. In the process, I was adding Google Drawings into my Google Doc, something that needs one additional trick. In this week's 90 Second Chromebook Tip and Trick, I show how you can annotate a photo in Google Drawings and easily insert into Google Docs. Check it out below!

Sometimes, coming up with things that we can do in classes can be tough, but one thing that is always easy if finding math in real life! Courtney invited me in to come up with a project to help with parallel lines and transversals. As I thought more about it, I thought about how often these pop up in our daily lives. Courtney then challenged the students to take some pictures of these natural occurrences so that we could mark them up. I used the above picture that I took. As you can see, there are multiple parallel lines and multiple transversals. Having students prove their knowledge through labeling them is a real-world application of the math that they are learning. While they are not measuring specific angles, they are viewing the relationships between the angles and developing an understanding. We used ThingLink, a photo annotation tool, to mark the pictures. Here is my example below. As you hover over the embedded image, you will see the labels that have been created and ...

Gifs, or Gifs, or however you pronounce it are popular "moving images" that are light and easy to use across a variety of platforms. While there are Gif creators available, Google Photos allows you to create your own based on your images without compromising who has your pictures. To begin, think of something that you will want to create a Gif of. It could be something like a series of photos, a math problem, or funny reactionary faces to something that happened in class. Be sure to check the Do Not Publish list to ensure that any students are clear to be published. When creating Gifs, you will upload the images to your Google Photos account at photos.google.com . I like to add them to an album. For this purpose, I solved a math equation in Google Drawings and downloaded the images as PNGs. The upload button is on the same line as your image for your Google Account. Click upload and select the images that you would like to use for the creation of the Gif. You can select m...

While I made this video specifically for the students in Edgenuity, I thought that it would be worthwhile to share with all students as they navigate their Chromebooks to different learning activities on the web. One of the biggest things that this encounters is Flash and Flash Objects that have been disabled. It is also useful for turning the microphone on as well.

So, if you took the advice of last week's 90 Second Chromebook Tip & Trick and abandoned your "Search" key in favor of Caps Lock on your Chromebook keyboard, this is still a quick way that you can search Google using this week's Shortcut of the Week.  When you want to quick search Google, simply press "Ctrl + e" to focus on the URL bar at the top of the page and begin your Google Search query. It is extremely easy and fast to do!

Google is heavily invested in artificial intelligence and trying to learn what we are thinking. With additions like the canned responses on the Gmail App to a new release that is coming. Google Drive on Android and iOS has had the ability to try and focus on what files you might need in an area know as "Quick Access." The machine is trying to figure out what files you might be using next. In the coming days, this technology will be added to the Google Drive web view. Now, Google will try to read what file you might be working on based on time of day, location, and other variables. This is helpful if you have to fill out a form for various items at the end of the day. This can be extremely helpful moving forward.

Long for the days when it was easy to type in all caps to scream your point on the internet? With this week's Tip & Trick you can change the "Search" key on your keyboard back to a "Caps Lock" key. Watch: