Google Docs: New Fonts & Templates

Google Docs is making the transition to Google Drive and with that they have recently announce some improved features for Docs users. Most notably is the addition of  60 new templates and 450 new fonts.

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Google Search Education

Searching for information and making sense of it is a process that involves critical thinking. Google has many tools to help students sift through the overwhelming abundance of web content, but those tools are often not utilized by students and teachers. 

Google recently announced the launch of Search Education. With it comes the promise of bringing educators the tools they need to help students become savvy searchers and independent learners. The site for educators includes lesson plans that are tied to A Google a Day, a daily puzzle designed to develop complex search skills. The lessons are aligned with NETS and Common Core Standards, connected to content area subjects and differentiated on 3 levels. In addition to lesson plans, Google offers live trainings and archived videos of past trainings to provided educators with the background knowledge

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Cool Tools to Curate Content

Content curation is one way to find and share useful knowledge efficiently. There are plenty of user friendly push-button digital tools to help you collect, organize and store web content in flexible ways to allow for shared resources that are accessible online.

Educators can use content  curation tools to streamline instruction by providing students with easy online access to a variety of resources to meet the needs of diverse learners.

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Digital Notes: Combine Readability & Google Docs

One of my favorite tools to share with students and teachers is Readability. This handy bookmarklet tool scrubs webpages clean of distractions by eliminating the ads and creating a more readable version of digital text. By itself, it's a really useful tool for students, but when combined with Google Docs, it can be part of an effective and efficient method for taking digital notes.

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SlideRocket Sample: Cool Tools for Vocabulary

As someone who creates and shares presentations frequently, I'm excited to add SlideRocket to my tech toolkit of cloud-based presentation tools. It's slick, collaborative and available for free with a Gmail or Google Apps for Educators account. A refreshing change from Google Presentation, SlideRocket is feature-rich and fast. Here are a few of my favorite features:

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Promoting Visual Literacy

Visual literacy is a 21st Century Skill that requires students to interpret, use and create media in ways to encourage critical  thinking, decision-making, communication and learning.  With easy access to copyright-friendly digital images and a growing number of web 2.0 resources for manipulating them, it's certainly worth offering students the option of conveying a message visually.  Let's take a closer look at one way to design effective learning experiences to promote visual literacy.

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Mentor Mob Playlist Sample: Maximize Instructional Time

Mentor Mob is a cool tool to help users create digital playlists of related content. I like this curation tool because it's visual, user-friendly and can be embedded into a blog, wiki or website. All you need is a theme, some websites to highlight and the ability to write  short and concise titles to guide users through each step of your playlist.

I understand the idea behind Menor Mob is to create mixes of web content, but I was in need of a new tool for organizing some of my own content so that is what I used to create my first playlist.

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EasyBib: One Click Access to Google Docs & More

EasyBib is a free and popular tool for creating citations. By using this tool, students no longer need to learn to format citations, which means they can focus on the reason for creating the citations and the importance of giving credit to the author.  EasyBib has some really great features worth exploring.

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Great Ways to Use Google Docs - Presented Visually

These days a good way to capture the attention of an audience is to present information visually. For this reason, I created a glog of popular ways to use Google Docs for Learning to share with the teachers at our middle school. Just look at the glog, find something that interests you, and click on a link to see snippets of samples implemented by our teachers. Looking for more information or about any of these topics? View my Google Docs for Learning page on this blog.

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Use Glogster & Screencasts to Maximize Student Presentations

If you're a classroom teacher using technology to helps students uncover knowledge and create something original, you are certainly making good use of technology as a tool for learning. Unfortunately; however, you may be struggling with time management issues if you're still engaging students in traditional methods of presenting what they've learned by standing in front of the class. I'd like to suggest an alternate, more efficient presentation method to maximize instructional time and take advantage of an additional opportunity for engaged student learning.

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Design Your Digital Classroom

I have just returned from the Illinois Computing Educators Conference where I had the opportunity to facilitate a full day session titled Design Your Digital Classroom. This session wasn't about the ratio of students to machines, nor was it a prescription for using one type of technology.  The focus was on how to use technology as a tool for learning to support all learners in the 24/7 classroom. The participants were dedicated, innovative educators from across the state of Illinois, each bringing their own expertise and needs to the group. Each leaving excited about something that worked for them. Differentiated instruction and flexible learning paths work for everyone!

Here are the resources I put together for this day.

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Digital Differentiation

This Digital Differentiation model is my original example of weaving a web of flexible tools together for teaching and learning. The model was designed in February, 2012. To keep the model relevant, it is frequently updated as new tools and trends emerge. 

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