Great Google posts this week #20

WEEK 14 – Collaborative Editing With Google Drive Well, at long last, here we are … the final week of the Try-a-Tool-a-Week challenge! It’s been a lot of fun. Over 700 teachers signed up to receive weekly emails offering quick-start

If you can access it in your school, YouTube has a ton of useful educational content. Here are ten tools that can make using YouTube in your classroom a better experience for everyone.

When my high school students ask a question no one in the class knows (including myself), they can put it up on the Google Board. Students can bring back a written answer to one of the questions of their choice each week for extra credit, or whatever incentive you choose. They get really excited when a question comes up that they can put on the board and find out the answer to later...

If you are having students take notes in a Google Doc, in particular if those notes require diagrams, consider providing the students with a Google Doc that contains graphic organizers. I am not ad...

The video in this post describes how documents and folders can be linked to a Symbaloo webmix, the importance of groups, how images can be used to visually enhance Symbaloo tiles, and how to share the link or embed the webmix in a Learning Management System (LMS) or in a document. 

Active reading strategies are just as critical with digital reading as with their paper-based counterpart. However, until recently, it has been a bit cumbersome to highlight, add notes, and draw on documents - particularly in a BYOD environment with Macbooks, Windows laptops, and Chromebooks. However, by using the DocHub Chrome app, this capability is now possible on any device.

Students and teachers can login to the DocHub app (or DocHub.com) using their Google account. From there, it is possible to upload any PDF, text document, or Microsoft Office file from Drive, the web, or even your computer/Chromebook download folder. Once a document had been uploaded, students can highlight, draw, insert text boxes, and even incorporate sticky notes. These annotated PDFs can then be sent to Drive or even shared with a link. Unlike some other web-based annotation tools, all of the annotations remain with the PDF after it has been sent to Drive though the sticky notes only appear when shared with a link.

Too much time can easily be wasted trying to format documents that have already been put together by someone else. If you use Google Docs, here are 24 time-saving templates that'll let you get on with using the documents, rather than struggling with putting them together in the first place. The templates below have been split…

Try these 10 coolest Google search tricks. 

By adding a table of contents, page numbers and headers to your online syllabi, you can create a dynamic and easy to use standard for both teachers and students. Since it is hosted on Drive, rather than printed on paper, a syllabus can be changed or updated at any time to keep up with a constantly evolving schedule. This video shows you how

Carrying on with a key theme from Education on Air, we continue our series of blog posts about student empowerment. Twenty thousand educators from around the world will share ideas for engaging students when they gather at ISTE, one of the largest education technology conferences in the world. If you’re coming to Philadelphia, stop by and see us in the Expo Hall at #1808. You can check out any of over 50 short sessions that will share more ways to engage and inspire students. 

» |I have spent most of educational technology career supporting secondary students. Projects and Presentations are always a plenty… but what I noticed is typically students have great presentations and poor content or great content and poor presentations.So… being Type A, a perfectionist, and someone that relies on visuals to communicate… I went a googling in order to create a comprehensive guide (and yes, I also staged a few Lego Minifigure pics in my back yard for emphasis too.)