Quizlet's all-digital unconference

Quizlet is a tool that I love to use in my classroom.  I love that I can use it as an in-class activity and students can use it on their own to review.  There is so much that Quizlet can do that it would take a number of blog posts to go through it all.  Luckily for us, Quizlet is holding a free online unconference.  It will be going on over two days - August 9th and 10th and you can join in on any or all of the sessions.  If you can't make the sessions live, all of them will be up on Quizlet's YouTube channel in the future (no date has been listed yet).

Day 1 sessions include:

• Engaging all students with Quizlet
• Personal and Interpersonal Learning with Quizlet Live
• Fun variations on Quizlet LIfe
• Creating Interactive Study Material with Quizlet
• Organizing and Sharing with Quizless Classes
• Quizlet Hacks for Teachers
• How students use Quizlet
• New Quizlet Feature Sneak Peak

Day 2 sessions include:

• Benefits of Quizlet Teacher
• Time-Saving Hacks for Teachers
• Quizlet and Google Classroom
• Leading PD with Quizlet
• Creating ways to use Quizlet
• New Quizlet Feature Sneak Peak

Books for students with visual impairments and physical disabilities

Bookshare is a website that provides students with a visual impairment or physical disability access to a large library of reading materials. There are over 500,000 books available. These books can be listened to or read directly from the browser. Audio versions of the books can be accompanied by printed words that are highlighted as they are spoken or with digital braille. Students and schools can qualify to have access to these books for free.

This video gives an overview of the website and what it can offer.

Finding fellow Teachers to follow on Twitter

I use a variety of social media, but mostly all for different purposes.  For me, I use Twitter to follow what is happening with education, edtech, science and local news.  I am always looking for new people to follow.  Classtools created a page called Teachers on Twitter as a way to connect follow educators on twitter.

The list is automated and updates itself automatically.  It searches for specific hashtags and uses what it finds to add people to a specific list based on what is written in the person's profile.  The image below shows you what hashtags are connected with each teacher group.  If you have any suggestions of other hashtags you can tweet @RusselTarr to make a suggestion.

This post also appeared on my science blog Savvy Secondary Science

G Suite Learning Center

I've talked before about the G Suite Learning Chrome Extension in a prior post. That is a great option is you want help and tutorials about the specific app you are using. If you want more, you can head over to the G Suite Learning Center.  This is your one stop shop for all things G Suite Learning. It starts off with some common questions that you can access as well as some featured content, such as how to switch over to Google from Microsoft. You can search by specific product that you want to use and then a number of tips will show up for you to peruse. It's a great resource for anyone who want to learn more about using G Suite but wants just a short tip at a time.

searching for Creative Commons images

I know we all like to practice good digital citizenship and encourage our students to do the same.  One of the biggest places were people fail is taking images that don't belong to them and aren't licenced to be shared.  Creative Commons is an a way for people to give a copyright license to their work to specify what permissions the public has to share and use their work.  (This blog has a Creative Commons licence).  Creative Commons has come out with CC Search which is a a search tool that allows you and your students to search for images that have a licence that allows you to use the images it finds.

Right now CC search looks for images from 500px, Europeana, Flickr, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Public Library and Rijksmuseum.  While it's not perfect, it's nice to know that you won't be violating any copyright laws by using an image.  If you are looking for other ways to search check out my blog post about using your search engine to find images you can use.

Top 5 Post of June

I hope everyone's June went well.  My school year ends in June so it's the start of summer for me.  I hope you are all having a relaxing summer.

Here are the top five posts of June-

1. Annotate Images and Videos
2. PhET sims can now easily connect to Google Classroom
3. Bill Nye Worksheets
4. PDF to Word
5. Creating a easy Works Cited Page