Happy Holiday/Technology Quiz

The Technology Wreath

Can you name the three parts of a computer used in The Technology Wreath?  
If you can, post what you know in a comment below!  Happy Holidays

Technology in Teaching in Three Village

Check out the link below for a great website on everything technology in The Three Village School District. This website is complements of our own Deidre Rubenstrunk! The site has information about Chromebooks, Clever, G. Suite, Microsoft and Google, Resources for teachers and more.  You have to click and check it out.


https://sites.google.com/3villagecsd.org/3vit/home

Assistive Technology Tools - Helpful Links

Below are live links to more information.

Things Teachers Think about during Staff Meetings

NewsELA

Google Dictionary

SpeakIt!

Voice Typing in Google Docs

Google Voice Typing Quick Reference

Read and Write

Libby

Extensity

   

Read and Write Quick Reference

Surprise!

KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS FOR MICROSOFT WORD 2016

Check Out What MESTRACT Has To Offer

Mid East Suffolk Teacher Center
MESTRACT provides opportunities to the educational community for professional development, technology training and resources to support student achievement.  

MESTRACT is an approved CTLE Provider!

Registration for Fall 2018 Courses and Workshops Now Open! (They are listed in My Learning Plan)

iPad and Chromebook Loan Applications Now Open!

Click here to go to the MESTRACT website

SkyView - Learn About the Universe on this free Augmented Reality App

This is a really neat free augmented reality (AR) app for your phone, iPad or tablet. With this app you can scan the sky to find planets, stars and constellations, galaxies, and even satellites flying over head!  When you scan the object a short blurb appears down below explaining what you see.

Some of its features include:

• Simple: Point your device at the sky to identify galaxies, stars, constellations, planets, and satellites (including the ISS and Hubble) passing overhead at your location.
• Augmented Reality (AR): Use your camera to spot objects in the sky, day or night.
• Social: Capture and share beautiful images with friends and family on social networks.
• Mobile: WiFi is NOT required (does not require a data signal or GPS to function). Take it camping, boating, or even flying!
• Supports Space NavigatorTM binoculars, spotting scope, and telescopes.
• Available for both Android and Apple devices.

Check out the short video about SkyView:

https://youtu.be/v4LDp6te5Bw

Check out the links below for more information!

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.t11.skyviewfree&hl=en_US

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/skyview-lite/id413936865?mt=8

https://tinyurl.com/y7tpev5k

https://www.freetech4teachers.com/2017/12/skyview-augmented-reality-app-to-help.html#.WxALTvUh1EY

5 Google Search Tools and Strategies to Cut Through the Clutter

We use search engines each day to help us search for information. Our biggest hurdle is the amount of information we need to sort through to find exactly what we want.  Knowing how to effectively and efficiently search is part of being informationally literate.  Teaching students to locate, evaluate and effectively use this information should be part of the instructional practices in every school.

Google’s search Tools, allow the user to manipulate a search within Google’s  main search engine. Learning how to implement these search skills is an important technique we can teach our students to help them cut through the clutter of the web. In this post, we will focus on search commands that tell Google you don’t want to search through the entire internet but are interested in something more specific and more refined.

Click the direct link below to the post @ edtechteacher.org for the great searching tips.

http://edtechteacher.org/5-google-search-tools-and-strategies-to-cut-through-the-clutter

Websites All Educators Should Know About

We must think differently about the kinds and types of assessments we give our students.

Here are some websites of which you should be aware that we know our students are using regularly. The first is called GradeSaver.com, which contains everything from textbook answers to college essays – here is the link - http://www.gradesaver.com/textbooks .  Sites like these, including CliffNotes.com, SparkNotes.com, and a multitude of language translators are also being accessed regularly.  Some are blocked by the filter and others are not. Please just know that at any given moment, students can access these sites using their cell phones. As you may also have seen this week, photos of the grade 5 NYS ELA exam wound up on a Suffolk County “Moms” Facebook page and circulated rapidly. While the intent was either for cheating or discrediting the test, this type of “cheating” or sharing is rampant. This highlights, whether we like it or not, how we must think differently about the kinds and types of assessments we give our students in an ever increasing, technology-based society.

-  © Kerrin Welch-Pollera - 4/19/2018

Chrome Extensions for Struggling Students and Special Needs

Technology can be a powerful tool to assist students with special needs or any sort of learning challenge. In particular the Chrome web browser allows users to install a wide variety of web extensions that provide tools that can help all learners, regardless of ability level.

In this blog post we will take a look at over 30 Chrome web extensions that can assist students in five main categories:

• Text to Speech
• Readability
• Reading Comprehension
• Focus
• Navigation

To read more of this post follow the link below from the blog - Control Alt Achieve - Transforming Education with Technology

http://www.controlaltachieve.com/2016/10/special-needs-extensions.html

Don’t Give Away Historic Details About Yourself!

Author - Brian Krebs

Social media sites are littered with seemingly innocuous little quizzes, games and surveys urging people to reminisce about specific topics, such as “What was your first job,” or “What was your first car?” The problem with participating in these informal surveys is that in doing so you may be inadvertently giving away the answers to “secret questions” that can be used to unlock access to a host of your online identities and accounts.

Click the link below to see the rest of this article by: © 2018 Krebs on Security. Powered by WordPress.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/04/dont-give-away-historic-details-about-yourself/?

Google is shutting down its goo.gl URL shortening service!

The company wants you to use the more app-centric Firebase Dynamic Links.

URL shorteners can be both useful and fun. Google's take on the tech launched in 2009, and added a third-party API, the ability to create QR codes and the power to link right to iOS and Android apps. Even Keanu Reeves has a URL shortener named in his honor. Unfortunately, Google is replacing its own service, goo.gl, with Firebase Dynamic Links (FDL) as of April 13th. These new smart URLs let you send folks to any location within iOS, Android or web apps.

You won't be able to create new goo.gl short links after the 13th, but existing users can manage them via the goo.gl console for the next year. After that, all the links will still work, but you won't be able to access the console itself after March 30th, 2019. Google suggests creating FDLs from now on, or using other shortening services like Bitly and Ow.ly or tinyurl.

This information taken from https://www.engadget.com

Three Cool Chrome Extensions!

I was checking out another blog called edtechteacher and thought you might be interested in three Google Chrome Extensions they mentioned!  

Screencastify

 

Screencastify is a Chrome extension that allows students and teachers to create screencasts directly in the Chrome browser.  A screencast is a recording of the user’s screen with the user narrating the actions they are completing on the screen.  

EquatIO

EquatIO is a new tool from Texthelp that provides teachers and students new and better ways to integrate math and science into their Google environments. EquatIO gives students and teachers an ability to make mathtype  digital, so students are able to better make their math reasoning visible using Google Chrome.

Share to Classroom
  

Share to Classroom is an extremely helpful tool for teachers using Google Classroom with their students. The extension connects with the teacher and students’ classes in Google Classroom. From a teacher perspective, the Share to Classroom extension allows teachers to share information from websites directly to their classes in Google Classroom. For example, when a teacher comes across a webpage that they want to add as an assignment, question, or announcement, teachers can use the extension to share these resources directly to a class.

These reviews and video links were taken from the edtechteacher blog.  The link to their blog is: http://edtechteacher.org/blog/

Scanning At The Tips of Your Fingers With CamScanner

https://camscanner-pdf-creator.en.uptodown.com/android

Donna Alaimo just tipped me off to CamScanner - a free PDF Creator that lets you convert any printed document to a PDF file.

The only thing you have to do is take a photo of the document in question, using the photo tool that is part of CamScanner - PDF Creator. Of course, the photo needs to be somewhat centered and well-lit. The app will then process the photo in question, and in a matter of seconds it will have converted it to a PDF document. 

Once you have the PDF document saved to your device's memory, you can work with it just like you would with any other file of this type. In addition, before saving the document, you can apply different filters to it to see if it looks better; depending on the quality of light in the photo, you might be able to obtain better results with a filter.  You can Find the app on the Google or Apple Store.  For more information about how to use the app follow the following link. https://www.camscanner.com/

Verizon streamed Super Bowl LII in Virtual Reality over 5G

The Virtual Sky Box!

A crowd of more than 67,000 people watched the Philadelphia Eagles trounce the New England Patriots last Sunday at U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis, while around 103 million viewers across the country did the same on their television sets. At the same time, a small group of Verizon employees in New York City were viewing the game in a different way: through VR. And they were able to do so entirely over a 5G connection.

It was all part of an ambitious 5G stress test that Verizon quietly ran during Super Bowl LII, and according to the company, it was a success. "This latest demonstration at Super Bowl LII and in New York City is another example of how we're pushing 5G to exploit never-before-imagined use cases and applications," said Sanyogita Shamsunder, Verizon's executive director of 5G ecosystems and innovation.

To read more of the article from engadget.com by Nicole Lee click the link below.


https://www.engadget.com/2018/02/10/verizon-streamed-super-bowl-lii-in-vr-over-5g/

Super Bowl 52: How the NFL and US Bank Stadium are ready to make digital history

At Super Bowl LII, the Patriots vs. Eagles contest could break a record for the largest data usage ever during an event, as fans stream live video and upload massive quantities of photos to social apps.

It's not just the brutally cold weather that could make history in Minneapolis during Super Bowl 52 on Sunday. The NFL expects football fans to surpass all previous data usage during the big game, with key moments such as the kickoff between the Philadelphia Eagles and the New England Patriots, and Justin Timberlake's halftime show to result in huge amounts of photo and video uploads to social media. 

Click the link below to see the full story from TechRepublic's Smart Cities newsletter. - By Teena Maddox | February 1, 2018, 9:24 AM PST

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/super-bowl-52-how-the-nfl-and-us-bank-stadium-are-ready-to-make-digital-history



      

My Fellow Americans

A great activity with the State of the Union happening next Tuesday.  If you are a math teacher you can buddy up with an English and Social Studies to share the results. 

The link below brings you to a great interdisciplinary lesson dealing with math, social studies and English. Students should know how to substitute values into an expression or equation to evaluate the result. Much of the work in this lesson revolves around examining how those values affect the result.

"Once a year, the President of the United States stands in front of Congress and the American people to deliver the State of the Union Address. Throughout history, there have been some amazing speeches, and some less-than-amazing ones. But have the annual addresses gotten…dumber?

In this lesson, students examine the Flesch-Kincaid formula for determining the grade level of a piece of writing (which has been used to make the claim above). Then, they apply it to presidential addresses over time and decide whether claims of declining intelligence are fair."

Click here to go to Mathalicious for the full activity!  -
http://www.mathalicious.com/lessons/my-fellow-americans

Google Extensions vs Web Apps vs Add-ons

This is a great blog post by Eric Curts from June 2016.  Even though it's from a year and a half ago, it really is a nice break down of the differences between Google Extensions, Add-ons, and Web Apps.  Click the link below to get to his full blog post. 

http://www.controlaltachieve.com/2016/06/extensions-webapps-addons.html

Learn About Brain Pop!

BrainPOP Overview
Wednesday, January 10 at 3:30 pm ET
Ideal For: Grades 3+
Happy New Year! In our first 2018 webinar, we’ll explore the breadth of our content and features, including the full suite of creation tools that give students multiple opportunities to “show what they know,” BrainPOP-style. From movie making to concept mapping, you’ll leave this webinar full of ideas you can work into your everyday curriculum.
Pre-register & Join • Password: moby


BrainPOP Basic Training
Wednesday, January 17 at 4:00 pm ET
Ideal For: Grades 3+
You asked and we delivered! We’re thrilled to introduce the automated course "Basic Training," designed to show you the value of BrainPOP … by using BrainPOP itself. This webinar gives you a course overview, highlighting the ways it helps all teachers - whether you’re a newbie or veteran  - get the most out of their subscription.
Pre-register & Join • Password: moby

Can't make it? We archive all webinars within a few days, so you can tune in at your convenience. 

Questions or comments? Let us know!