The Tech Savvy Science Teacher

Thursday, April 2, 2015

Tuesday, March 31, 2015

How to temporarily make your Mac dock smaller

The next couple of posts will be a mini-series about quick tips for using your Mac computer. If there is something that you've always wanted to know how to do, now's the time to ask!

If there is ever a time when the Mac dock is getting in your way then this tip is going to going to help you out!

On your dock look for the vertical line separating your dock. It is usually near your documents folder.

When you hover over it, your mouse turns into a line with arrows on each end. You can then click in drag your mouse up or down to enlarge or shrink your dock.

Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Fun Socrative Quizzes

Socrative is a great program that allows you to collect feedback from student. If you don't know about it yet, go on over to this post.

Socrative has created several quizzes that you can import into your account. They are great to use if you want something fun to use to teach kids how to use the app or if you are demonstrating it to other teachers. Some of the topics of the premade quizzes include 80s Trivia, State Facts, Subject Verb Agreement and 2004 Red Sox.

To see the complete list and find out how to import them into your account visit this page.

Tuesday, March 17, 2015

Random Name Picker

Random Name Picker is a great tool on the ClassTools website. Two great features that I love about it is that it doesn't require any log in credentials and will run on an iPad.

Once you are on the site, click on edit/save and edit the list to include your students' names. Once you have done that you can save your spinner. The site will ask you for a password and then create a URL for your personal spinner. Be sure to save that URL or make a bookmark. Now you can access your spinner any time by going to the website and entering your password.

Sunday, March 8, 2015

how to use GradeCam

I've talked about GradeCam before and how much I love it! To help everyone use this great tool I've made some short screencasts on how to use it. If you aren't familiar with GradeCam, I recommend that you check out my previous post about it. In short, GradeCam allows you to print out your own bubble sheets for an assignment and then grade them with any camera on your computer or tablet or a document camera. A great bonus that I love is that students don't need to have a number 2 pencil (one less issue to deal with!).

setting up your class

creating your first assignment

grading your assignment

Do you use GradeCam? Is there something else that you use to grade assignments?

Tuesday, March 3, 2015

Chat comes to Remind

You may have read a previous post of mine on Remind. Today Remind announced a new feature that they are rolling out. CHAT!!!! I am so excited about this as this will finally give my students a chance to respond to the messages that I send out. While some people may not like this feature, the best part is that you can turn it on or off. In addition, if you choose to turn on chat you can pause the chats at any time. I was on a hangout with Remind to preview this new feature and it looks great. I'm really excited for this feature and I hope that you will check it out. You can go to the Remind website and put yourself on the waiting list to get this feature as soon as it is rolled out. You can also read some more about this feature.

Do you think this will be useful in your classroom?