Looking to increase your email productivity? Want to help your students do the same? Your Gmail account has a built-in assistant for answering and composing emails. Google's “Smart Compose” uses artificial intelligence (AI) to complete words and phrases as you type. Just hit TAB or the right arrow key to accept the suggestions, or simply keep typing if you don’t want to use a particular auto fill text.
Smart Compose can speed up your responses to parents and fellow staff, especially as it “learns” more about how you write. It can also help prompt students to write more professional sounding emails - an important life skill!
Come on by the HOTSpot if you’d like help turning this feature on (or off?), or want to learn more.
We have added a new section to the HOTSpot website where you can check out various classroom resources to use with your students. We will add more of them as they become available, but for now, we have a puzzle, some cameras, and a green screen for video editing. To check out a resource, just click on its name and fill out the form. We will get back to you ASAP so you can start using the resources with your students!
Nothing gets students more amped up than competition and time constraint. GooseChase is an online scavenger hunt tool that allows students to submit written and photo evidence of completed tasks. This is a novel way of taking a normal class activity or unit and creating an epic learning event out of it. It is easy to use, free, and has intuitive features that allow you to monitor their progress quickly. Feel free to investigate the program more and come see the HOTSpot if you need help getting setup.
One of my favorite follows on twitter is Matt Miller. You can subscribe to his blog, and he’s always sending awesome tips and tricks that you can immediately use in your classroom. Last week he sent out a blog post about using sticky notes in Google Slides. He created a template and also included ideas of how you would use this with your students or your own planning! Check out the blog and download your template today.
I am always looking for creative ways to spark ideas for projects, and I recently found a new website called www.talltweets.com that allows you to create a gif out of the slides that you already have. It could be used for anything from making simple directions to a story/comic book that students could produce. It is a fun tool that may allow for some new approaches to a producing unique content.
Asking students to be creative is always a fun way to push their thinking with our content. When limited to tight budgets and web only chromebooks, sometimes creating & editing images can be difficult to do beyond the basics of google drawings. However, there are a couple free, web based options out there that provide similar functionality to photoshop without the software or price tag.
We get a lot of questions in the HOTSpot regarding Mastery Manager, so we thought we would address a few this week. The first tip is pretty basic but important: where do you find the reports option for creating and working with your PDGs? The other tips involve how to use the other functions that are available within an individual assessment. As always stop by if you would like help with Mastery Manager!
There are lots of different ways to open a new Google Docs, Sheets, or Slides document, but Google’s newest method is the .new domain. From any tab type docs.new, sheets.new, or slides.new to open a new Docs, Sheets, or Slides respectively. This is just one more tool for your toolbox that may help you save time and increase your productivity.
