Bloom into EdTech: The Blog

Have you had the experience of losing a student during a Google Meet and not having the ability to rejoin? Even if you didn’t remove them from the Meet, from time-to-time a student may lose connectivity and not be able to rejoin. We have also been experiencing this phenomenon even after resetting the Google Meet link in Google Classroom and reinventing everyone back in. Some students are still not lucky enough to rejoin!? A work around to this is having the lost student access Google Meet itself https://meet.google.com/ and providing them with the code to your Meet. As of this post, simply sending the students the direct link did not work. If you are in the midst of your Google Meet you can easily access this code in the bottom left hand corner: You can share the link to Google Meet ( https://meet.google.com ) and the code to your Google Classroom’s Stream, GoGuardian, etc. Once your student is at Google Meet, have them enter the code that you have given them: This so far has been su...

                 So, we have Webquests , HyperDocs , Choice Boards , Playlists , Interactive Games in Google Slides all utilizing Google Docs, Forms, and Slides as a way to present information and encourage choice and voice for student learning. If you follow my blog, you know that my realm of education has expanded as I have been an art teacher, a computer teacher, an assistant principal, a technology integration specialist, and am now a staff development specialist. I spent the last few months (like many in my position) assisting teachers on how to teach and what tools to teach with during our stint with distant learning. During this time, I facilitated numerous online courses, workshops, webinars for teachers and admin on various technologies and instructional practices for distance learning that include, but not limited to, creating mutli-modal ways to deliver content in which students have choice.  This brainchild of mine...

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?

Hello! Just a really quick and simple post that I wanted to share. I created the above Google Login Cards for the students at my school from Google Slides. Grab a copy for yourself and edit the information to fit your class needs!  Grab your copy here!

If you haven't noticed by now, I am a huge fan of project-based learning; and anyway you can incorporate an easy-to-use app that is applicable across the board- I. Am. In! Toontastic from Google is one of those tools! And best part of it all it is free! Use this 3D story-based app to have you or your students draw, animate and narrate their way to the top of the class. Equipped with an idea lab to help your students begin the journey or have them create a 3 or 5 part guided story or 5 part science report. Did I mention this was free? I love how the creators at Google prompt their users throughout the story but explaining the different elements in a fun and exciting way. Personally, my children have been glued to my cell phone creating stories on how much I need to go on vacation... I was even able to download it to keep for a future reference! Anyway, any great story always should start with good planning. The last thing you want (or need) is having your students come u...

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?

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...

G o o g l e . Who doesn't love the ability that Google gives us to share, collaborate and create? My school has been a GAFE (Google Apps for Education) school for about four years now. We have had our share of trials and speculation as we began our journey, but it is now almost second nature to open a Chromebook and have students take notes, write stories, create presentations, or respond to peers using Classroom, Docs, Slides, and Forms. The below tutorials are an example of a project that I do with my 4th-grade students, entitled: I Love NY. In this project, students need to research a city/town within NYS to vacation. They are to research the history, discover what there is to do in their selected town/city, and create a spreadsheet for the associated costs. The end result is a beautiful brochure that will persuade you to visit their selected town. You can find the entire project here . Otherwise, if you are more interested in how to take a Google Slide and turn it into a...

 If you're like me- you're busy. I am a teacher, an educational technology coach, and a student services coordinator. I play three very distinct roles. I am a run-on sentence. I am also trying diligently this year to be a paper clip; as I am a slinky by nature. (Please note. If you are scratching your head and questioning my sanity as of now, read this . It was presented to me at an in-service I attended about personality traits.) I found the Doc Appender add-on to benefit me in all three of my roles. Please, allow me to explain how..... First. What is Doc Appender?  Doc Appender is a simple "add-on" used in Google Forms. Once set up- it is a powerful tool to generate individualized reports. The set up can be daunting, but once you create each individual Google Doc, this tool is very dynamic and easy to use. I truly wish that the set up was backward. For example, once you select to use the Doc Appender add-on for the form, the Google Docs automatically gen...

If you haven't heard the hype by now- GAFE, Google Apps For Education, has been continuously changing and shaping the way we use technology in our schools by giving us the ability like never before to communicate and collaborate with one another. Whether you share a Doc with a student at the Chromebook next to you or a world away; Google has opened the compatibility playing field and raised the bar, IMHO, on the future of educational technology. I am personally a huge advocate for this reform- and have found using Google Drive is as easy and convenient as using your ball point pen (that is, if you still use those things!} As a teacher, I use many facets of GAFE for my own classroom use. For example, I use Docs to create digital worksheets; I use Slides for presentations; I use Forms for tests and polls and Sheets to pull the information from them. I could go on.... The third through eighth grade students in my school all have their own GAFE login which allows them the ability to us...