Tiger Tech Bits & Bytes News
~ March 2016 Issue ~
Welcome to the March issue . . .
I hope you will find something in this newsletter that you can use in your classroom, or just use yourself.
Enjoy your Easter weekend and Spring break!
Sincerely,
Carmen Nolting
Table of Contents
- Desmos Graphing Calculator
- Draw Island
- One Tab extension
- Printliminator extension
- Share To Classroom extension
Desmos Graphing Calculator
The Desmos calculator performs all of the functions you would expect to see in a graphing calculator with a couple of extras that you don't find in typical graphing calculators. Desmos allows you to share your equations and graphs. Desmos graphs your equations as you type them and redraws them as you alter your equations. You can plot functions, create tables, add sliders, animate your graphs, and more! Go to www.desmos.com to learn more.
Below is a link to Desmos' YouTube channel.
Draw Island
Looking for an online draw app? Then you might take a look at DrawIsland.com! With DrawIsland, you can create drawings and simple gif animations. There are four different canvas sizes available for drawing and two different sizes that are included for creating gif animations. You can select a drawing tool to draw free hand or select pre-defined shapes to use in your images. Click the save button to download your drawing as a .png or .gif animation to your computer.
You could use DrawIsland in your classroom to allow students to create drawings through this site as responses to literature then share the finished products on an interactive whiteboard, projector, or your class website. You could have a group of students create a drawing, then another group can use that as a story prompt. You could use this site with students to create a drawing of the setting of a story as it is being read aloud. Students could create an online book of images and captions about any topic using saved images.
DrawIsland is a pretty SIMPLE tool. There is a pencil and line tool, along with a Text button for drawing/writing. There are rectangle, rounded rectangles, and a circle, both outlines and filled shapes available. A paint bucket, eraser, delete, undo/redo and save buttons are also available on the tool palette on the left. On the right are your tool options, such as color picker and thickness of lines. Saved images can be reopened in DrawIsland for more editing/drawing!
In DrawIsland, you can not move shapes/text or recolor your background.
One Tab Extension
OneTab is an extension that you can use when you find yourself with too many tabs. Just click the OneTab extension to convert all of your tabs into a list. When you need to access the tabs again, you can either restore them individually or all at once. To restore a website individually without removing it from your OneTab list, you should hold CTRL on your keyboard while clicking it on your OneTab list!
According to OneTab.com, when your tabs are in the OneTab list, you will save up to 95% of memory because you will have reduced the number of tabs open in Google Chrome. If you click on the 'share as a web page' that will allow you to upload your list of tabs into a web page in order to share them with others. What a wonderful way to share a list of resources with students! (Tabs are never shared unless you specifically use the 'share as a web page' button.)The OneTab extension can be found in the Chrome Web Store.
See a "how-to" OneTab in the video below!
Printliminator Extension
To use Printliminator, simply click the extension icon and then click the parts on the website you do not want to print! A red outline will appear around the items "selected". If you click when the red outline appears, that item will be removed from the site! When you have the site "cleaned up", then print! If you decide not to print, simple reload the page and all the parts will be returned!
Printliminator is available in the Chrome Web Store!
Share to Classroom Extension
Last month, I shared the Crafty Text extension as a way to get kids on "the same page". Here is a great way to do the same thing, without students having to type the URL, if you are a Google Classroom user.
This extension allows you to push webpages to any of your Classroom classes, so they open instantly on your students' computers. You can get your students on the right page, quickly, every time. You can also post announcements, create assignments, or save webpages to post to Classroom later.
This extension works when students are in Google Classroom, no matter where they are! Students can also push web pages directly to your teacher as well!
Once you find a webpage you would like to share, then you as the teacher click the extension for Share to Classroom. You will then see a drop down list of all your classes and you can choose the class you want to share the link with. You can also create assignments, ask a question, or make an announcement from this link!
Share to Classroom requires a Google Apps for Education account with Google Classroom and the students need to have this extension in their accounts as well.Tiger Tech Department
Aaron Whitfield ~ James Turner
Email: whitfieldn@mcr2.k12.mo.us
Website: mcr2.k12.mo.us
Location: 913 West Newton Street, Versailles, MO, United States
Phone: 573-378-4231