Bloom into EdTech: The Blog

As part of an effort to incorporate more mind breaks into my day, I have been creating and editing the following Google Slide document that I would like to share with you. I have a feeling that I will continuously be adding so please check back.  You can grab your free copy by clicking here. Upon opening the document, you will notice that there are many slides that have pre-made themes for you to use with your students. You can easily delete any slide you wish not to use in the template by clicking on the unwanted slide on the left hand side and going to Edit in the menu then Delete :   Furthermore, you can edit any of the following tables to meet your needs. You and/or your students can type and change the format of the font or color within each editable table.  The document is completely editable. Please feel free to use the created backgrounds to create a  Learning Menus, HyperDocs, Choice Boards, Play Lists based on your needs. You can easily customize th...

I am an educator, a student, a mother. Parenting. In this quarantine. Navigating both the supportive role of education, but also as the recipient of children who are learning in crisis mode. I made this for my children. For your children. Please, stay healthy and safe. Download your Free Printable here. Special thanks to all the people who made and released these awesome resources for free: Presentation template by SlidesCarnival Photographs by Unsplash  & Pixabay

If you are an avid lover of Google Keep like myself, then you are really going to appreciate the fact that Google has embedded this note-taking app into their GSuite products! You can access Keep right from the "Tools Menu" of your Google Doc.... and easily embed your Google Keep notes and images.  Keep is now also available as part of the GSuite products and can now be found in the Google Apps menu. This feature would be great to use with your students- especially if they are on a field-trip and they are using handheld devices to take notes and images about what they have learned using the Keep app. Later, they can document their adventure in a Google Doc! Install the Google Keep extension and use as part of a students research project to bookmark various Websites and have them easily refer to Websites as they are typing their report! What else could you use this tool for in the classroom?

Omigoodness- no way! The moment that I have been waiting for: you can now insert videos from your Google Drive into Google Slides!!! Why is this so exciting?  For starters, say your students spent hours creating a "how to video" or they created a video just in general, and they do not have the ability to have a YouTube Channel, this is a great way to embed their videos into Google Slides! For educators or trainers like myself this is also a great way to share information with your faculty and staff. I often create videos that specifically pertain to my fellow educators at my school. Inserting videos from Google Drive into Google Slides would be a fabulous way for me to create a library of my "in-house" videos for an easy one-stop location. How would you use this new feature?

I am so excited to announce that I have been officially accepted as a Google Certified Trainer! I was even going to write a speech for this moment, but there no words that will scream how excited I actually am! {I am just kidding about the speech part....maybe.} How did I get started? How did I end up here? I sat down a few months ago and generated a five year plan for myself. I posed the question: Who do I want to be com e? Since then, I generated a list of items I want to accomplish to become the person that I envision to be five years from now. Among the list of accomplishments are: developing my leadership skills continue to educate myself and grow in the field of emerging media obtain a series of certifications to valid my love for educational technology The list above is of course only a snippet of what I desire. Since I sat down and envisioned myself 5 years from now, I went back to college and enrolled in the Educational Leadership Master's program ...

If you haven't heard by now, there is a new feature in Google Classroom that I have been longing for: assigning individual assignments! {You can read all about the new update features here. } Released in January 2017, you can now assign students in your classrooms different assignments as well as questions. I have been using this feature for over a week to give it a test run- and it is everything that I have been waiting for! Some examples of how I use it: My fourth graders are currently working with a school in India on a project about pollution. The teacher in the school in India initiated the project by creating Padlets  that discussed the causes and effects of pollution in India and shared it with us via two blog posts to look over and comment on. I did not want all the students to gravitate to the blog post that contained the padlet with more videos and less text articles. Using Google Classroom's new feature, I simply divided the two posts strategically as t...

About a week ago (postponed due to weather), I presented an after school training for the parents of the children of whom I teach. I like to do that now and then as I feel that there is great value in keeping our parents (valued stakeholders) current with what their awesome sons and daughters are doing in their classrooms. Especially with technology. I feel like it bridges the gap between home and school. I also feel like it eases their minds in case they need to help their children on an assignment. Only if I could help explain math.... Anyway, below is a presentation that I provided my parents. Feel free to grab it for yourself and make adjustments. I also provided them with "training" Google usernames- so they could experience GSuite for Education themselves. I can attest that they had a lot of fun experiencing GDocs and the features of sharing and commenting.  {Maybe a little too much for that matter!} The parent participants even experienced what it was like to t...

Below is a lesson that I conduct with my third graders each year to help them understand how to use Google Docs more efficiently. It's all about sharing caring and commenting, because that's what thrid graders do best! G O O G L E  Docs Understanding Google Docs Objectives: How is Google Docs like Microsoft Word? What is a benefit of using Google Docs? How can you use Google Docs? How can you use Google Docs in a group project by sharing? How do we make comments, share, insert images, word count and spell check? Assignment 1:  Opening,   Comment i ng  and sharing-  because it's caring! Open a new Google Doc and title it: Assignment 1 Teachers, discuss with your students that you will be having a "round robin" writing experiment with Google Docs. Instruct them to write an intro paragraph for a story (we are more focused on the process and not the product here). This story can be about anything! You will be given 5 minutes. If you finish th...

Well, I did it! I finally took the plunge and completed my Google Trainer Application. I am very anxious and yet excited to see the outcome of my application. I am uncertain of what was required in the past, however the application is very straightforward. I had a very hard time keeping my video to the 3-minute limit, because as you know, I am a run-on sentence. Anyhow, here is an example of my video: If you are interested, you can find my Google Slide Game: Code Name  here.   I very much look forward to a reply. Happy holidays!

So much pressure is placed in education on using technology. However, in many classrooms it is the teacher utilizing the technology for presentation of their notes, and the students are the ones who are handwriting them down in journals and notebooks. In my opinion, using digital tools in the classroom as a form of note taking is a tremendous stride in the right direction. There are many tools that can assist students with note taking; G Suite , Evernote, Notability, etc. are just a few of the examples. Today’s big push appears the interactive notebooks. An interactive notebook is a paper notebook that allows students to place notes and teachers can create activities within the sheets of paper (Interactive-notebooks-home, N.D.). I could easily see this transition to students using either Google Slides in conjunction with Google Draw or Evernote to create an interactive notebook and replace its paper counterpart. Some advantages of incorporating digital notes into your...