Educational Technology

Here is a very good Google Forms resource we discovered through @Google For Education . This is basically a presentation comprising 52 slides each of these slides features a Google Forms tip shared  by a teacher or educator on Twitter. Teachers are asked to use #GoogleForms handle to share their own experiences using Forms in their instruction and the folks in Google for Education collect and organize these resources into presentations such as the one below. The educational strength of these tips is that they come from fellow teachers who have already tried them out in their own context and you will only have to re-appropriate them to suit your own teaching needs. The slides contain dozens of creative ideas and hands-on activities that will help you make the best of Google  Forms in your teaching. For instance, you will get to know how to: create a digital reading log for your students, create and distribute quizzes to your class, view Forms responses in 4 different ways, cus...

Quick Capture is a great Chrome extension you can use to take screenshots of your current page. We have been experimenting with it for awhile now and we found it way better than the other tools we have been using (Lightshot and Monosnap). One particular feature we like the most about this app is full-page screen capture. With a single click, Quick Capture generates a screenshot of the whole page. It also offers a wide variety of tools to annotate and edit your screenshots. You can add text, shapes, arrows, edit using a pencil or brush, crop specific parts, add emojis and many more. Once your screenshot is ready you can save it to your Google Drive, your local hard drive, send it to Slack or save it to Quick Capture.You can save your captures to Quick Capture either as a guest without having to sign up in which case your captures are stored for 10 days only or you can sign in with Facebook or Google and save your screenshots with a free storage for 30 days. For us, we download our captu...

A few months ago, Google made it possible for third party developers to create and share add-ons to be used on Google Slides after it was exclusive to only Docs and Sheets. Since then  Slides add-on store has witnessed the addition of a number of interesting extensions. We have through the collections there and curated for you the titles below. These are add-ons you can use to create visually engaging slides. From pre-made templates to design interactive presentations to the ability to easily access and insert HD images in your slides, the add-ons below are worth trying out. Check them and share with us your feedback. Related:   8 important Google Sheets Add-ons for Teachers   7 Must-have Google Docs Add-ons for Teachers             1- Pear Deck Provides you access to a wide variety of pre-made templates to create interactive presentations. You can add formative assessments and questions to your slides and track your students performance live...

When it comes to accessibility features Chrome web browser does not actually offer much. Chromebook, in contrast, comes with a bunch of interesting accessibility features that you can easily turn on. This guide from Chromebook Help shows you how to access and turn on accessibility features. As for Chrome web browser, to empower it with assistive technology to help students with learning disabilities, we need to install third party extensions which you can find in Chrome Web Store. We have spent hours checking the options it has there and came up with the collection below. These are add-ons to help students with LDs learn and perform better. This is a work in progress and we will be adding more to the list in the future. If you have other suggestions to add, please share with us through email or via our Facebook page. 1- Snap and Read Universal ‘Snap&Read Extension for Chrome™ reads both accessible and inaccessible text aloud from websites, Flash websites, images, Google Docs, eBoo...

Here is a collection of some good web tools you can try out in your instruction. Some of these tools have been curated from Producthunt . The purpose is to provide  you with innovative educational technology that can potentially add value to your teaching and professional development.  We invite you to check them out and share with us your feedback in our Facebook page. 1- Listly ‘This is a free tool to turn web data into Excel. All you need is just one-click. It automatically extracts clean data and arranges them into rows and columns.’ 2- Whiteboard As its name indicates, this is a whiteboard tool that allows you to draw, write and brainstorm and share ideas with others. It supports real-time collaboration and works across different platforms. It doesn’t require a sign up or software download. 3- Legends of Learning ‘ an online game platform that hosts more than 1000 short curriculum based science games. We built these games off of a research project we conducted with Vander...

Annotating is a key reading skill that enables you to actively and critically engage with text. Besides using it to comment on and capture your thoughts as you read, annotation can also be used as an instructional tool with your students. For instance, you can use it for formative assessment purposes, for comprehension checks, to collect students feedback and many more. In yesterday’s post, we talked more in detail about some of the ways you can implement the power of annotation in your teaching and learning and we also featured a number of practical web tools that allow you to annotate web pages. In today’s post, we are sharing with you some of our favourite iPad apps you and your students can use to view, edit, highlight, sign, and convert PDF documents. We are only featuring the popular apps we are familiar with, we might have missed other important apps in this regard, if so please share with us in our Facebook page. 1- Adobe Acrobat Reader A powerful app that lets you view, annot...

In today’s post I want to bring your attention to this awesome free educational resource from Apple called Apple Teacher Learning Centre . This is an online platform designed specifically for teachers implementing Apple products in their instruction. It provides a wide variety of resources, materials, lesson ideas and projects to help teachers make the best of Apple technology in education. However, you can benefit from this website even though you are not an Apple user as several of the learning activities, lesson tips and project ideas can be applied through the use of apps that are not necessarily Apple’s. To start using Apple Teacher Learning Centre, you need to sign up using your Apple login credentials. Fill in your information including the school subject you teach and hit ‘Sign up’. Once logged in, you select the collection you want to browse: iPad or iMac. Each selection features a number of resources, guides, and study materials for using iPad, Mac or Apple apps in your class...