DISD Ed Tech News
March 6, 2017
Adobe Spark - Amazing Storytelling Tool for the Classroom
Adobe Spark is a free product that allows teachers and students to "Communicate with Impact". Spark's free graphic design app helps anyone create impactful social graphics, web stories and animated videos with their simple to use tool.
Spark enables you to tell stories and share ideas quickly and beautifully by creating three types of content:
- Use Page to create a story using text, images, and video. When you're done they will present your story as a responsive web page that can be viewed in any web browser. Turn your words and images into beautiful, magazine-style web stories that will impress readers on any device.
- Use Post to create images optimized for social media; you provide images and text and they'll help with the design. Spark will even help you create the right shape and size image for each social media platform. Students can create amazing posters and memes!
- Use Video to create, well, a video. Add videos from your computer or iOS camera roll, add photos or icons, overlay text, add your voice, background music, and great cinematic effects and they'll help turn your story into an amazing video to share with the world.
You can create individual Pages, Posts, and Videos, or you can use the formats together (including a Post image in a Video, or a Video in a Page, you get the idea).
But is Spark simple enough for students to use? Absolutely, students and teachers the world over are using Spark and sharing their creations. They built Spark with students in mind, and even chose Spark as the name because it's a small thing that can ignite something much larger. With Spark, students can bring their ideas to life and watch them grow.
To help teachers and students use Adobe Spark, they created a handy Adobe Spark Guide for Educators and Classrooms which you are welcome to download, read, and share. The Adobe Spark in the Classroom web page features creations by students and teachers as well as lesson plans using the tool. You can use Adobe Spark online with Macs, PCs and Chromebooks and there are mobile apps for Spark Post, Spark Page and Spark Video available in the iOS App store for mobile use on iPads and iPhones. Teacher's Tech on YouTube has a nice 12 minute tutorial overview on using Adobe Spark in the classroom. Sign up for your free account and start creating!
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Google Apps Tricks from Alice Keeler
1. Bold Comments - In Google Apps when you insert a comment (she uses the keyboard shortcut Control+Alt+M) you can bold the text or italicize it. Use asterisks around your text to *bold* the text. Use the underscore around your text to _italicize_ it.
2. Print Layout - In a Google Text doc you can double click in between pages to switch out of print layout mode. To put it back into print layout mode you'll need to use the View menu.
3. Suggestion Mode - In the toolbar, by default, you are in editing mode. (Dropdown menu in the upper right) You can switch from editing mode to "Suggesting Mode." This allows you to suggest edits rather than just change someone's words. A must for collaboration. It is rude delete someone's words.
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5. Copy Formatting - When drawing shapes, such as in Google Slides, Drawing or inserting a drawing into Google Docs, you can match the formatting of shapes when drawing new shapes. Create a shape. Change the line width and fill color. While the shape is selected, draw additional shapes. The new shape will match the formatting of the selected shape.
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Two Google Extensions That Work Together to Save Time and Effort!
They recently released a new extension that I think it may be a great time saver if you are creating a Google Slides presentation with individual images that you have saved. These could be images that you or students have saved from the web, photos from your phone or devices, etc. The extension, called DriveSlides, allows you to create a Google Slides presentation out of images in a Google Drive folder. Simply open the folder in Google Drive that contains JPG, PNG or GIF images and press the DriveSlides Chrome extension icon to open a Google Slides presentation with your images automatically added. The slides are created in your Google Drive within the same folder as the original images. Now just adjust your background colors, add text, sound or other enhancements and you are set to go!
You may be thinking "OK, but adding all those images to Google Drive is sometimes a pain......". Let's back up and look at another extension that can make that so much easier too. The Save to Google Drive extension is a real time saver as well. This little extension helps you save web content or browser screenshots to your Google Drive with the click of a button. You can click on the new Save to Google Drive icon in your extensions bar of your chrome browser to save the entire webpage to your Drive or right click on an image to see the option to save the image to Google Drive. A window will pop up telling you the image was saved to Drive and if you click the word "Change" you can specify which folder in Drive you want these images dropped into.
Want to get even more techie??? If you've never heard of a website called "If This Then That" (IFTTT.com) you may be interested in checking it out. This free website allows you to create "recipes" of things to bring your devices and apps together to create new experiences. For this example you can set up a "recipe" to automatically back up any new iOS photos to a folder in your Google Drive. (or back up new Android photos to your Google Drive). Set up one of these recipes to back up your photos to Drive without you having to do a thing, THEN use the DriveSlides extension to automatically put your photos into a Google Slides presentation. Try it out and show everyone what an expert you are at "App Smashing"! (App Smashing = the process of using multiple apps to create projects or complete tasks = FUN!)
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Great Websites for Kids
Teachers and students can browse the site by selecting from groupings such as Animals, The Arts, History & Biography, Literature & Languages, Mathematics & Computers, Reference Desk, Sciences and Social Sciences. Users can also search the site by topic.
While browsing the listings I found that they had links to websites where students could research, take virtual field trips to zoos and aquariums, play educational games, and find vetted reading materials to suit their interests. Please visit their site and look around. It could be a valuable tool to aid you in finding quality resources for your classroom.
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Common Sense Media - Another Valuable Tool to Help Choose Quality Resources
Their website states that they've now provided independent media ratings and reviews for almost 20,000 titles, reached millions of families through their own and their partners' platforms, engaged over 50,000 schools with their educational resources, and advocated successfully on behalf of kids, their parents and their teachers.
Common Sense Media contains reviews and listings of EdTech tools for all grade levels and content areas. One of my favorite areas of the site is the Top Picks web page where you can find editorially curated lists of the best edtech tools reviewed by Common Sense Education. You can browser through their full library of Top Picks lists by grade, subject and/or skill. You can save resources you find on the site to the "My Desk" area and share it with students and colleagues. Setting up a teacher account is easy and free.
In addition to "Reviews and Ratings", teachers can also make use of areas of the site that focus on Digital Citizenship, Teaching Strategies, Professional Development and more. There is a library of archived webinars for teachers from edWeb.net on various topics of interest to teachers. If you can't watch them at the time you are on the site you can simply bookmark them to your account to find them easily later.
If finding and evaluating digital resources for your classroom seems overwhelming, take advantage of sites like Common Sense Media and the Great Websites for Kids mentioned in the previous article to help make your life a little easier!
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DISD Instructional Technology
Email: rhonda.artho@dumasisd.org
Website: http://www.dumasisd.org/about-education-instructional-technology
Location: Teacher Training Center, DHS
Phone: 8060356461 1029