Putting Work Online

Putting Work Online

There’s an old saying: “There is more than one way to skin a cat”.  This is true of putting work online for students.  We are going to look at pen-and-paper type work in this post.

First, there is the .pdf way. A worksheet can be scanned on your school’s copier to .pdf and loaded to Google Drive. Staff and students have access to Kami for annotating on .pdf files. If you choose “Create Kami Assignment” on your classwork tab in Google Classroom, that should force the assignment to open in Kami for all students. If you’re not familiar with Kami, I did a 15 minute crash course blog entry recently.

A screenshot set as the background in a Google Slide is another way to make a paper-and-pen assignment accessible for students to respond to. (Taking a screenshot on a chromebook is easy) and once you’ve got that screenshot, you can set it as a background image and students can apply textboxes over it as needed.

Screencastify Tutorial

Screencastify Tutorial

If you are new to Screencastify and are looking for some help getting started, this tutorial covers the content that we went through in the live Google Meet on Dec. 10, 2020. If you have questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to Michelle.  The link for Canadian Copyright law with respect to reading books aloud and recording the reading cis important to check if you are considering reading to your students in a recording.

Bandwidth – Maximizing and Troubleshooting

Bandwidth – Maximizing and Troubleshooting

As we move toward a week of at-home learning for all students in Alberta at the start of January 2021, we are offering this tutorial to try to help families maximize the capacity of their home internet connection without incurring additional costs to the internet service providers. There are many things that can be done for free to try to improve the Google Meet experience.

This video will give an analogy for the internet and bandwidth and then take you through some ideas to improve your home connection.

Summary

  • Move closer to your router. Try to attain 3 bars.
  • Do a speed test of your download & upload speeds.
  • When possible, download content the night before it is needed (especially video content).
  • Enable offline mode for GSuite (Google Docs, Slides, Sheets).
  • Powercycle your router.
  • Set Google Meet’s layout to “spotlight” (and don’t use blur/change background).
  • Remove household cell phones from the wifi, or turn them off.

 

Google Meet – Walkthrough of the New Features

Google Meet – Walkthrough of the New Features

When Google rushed Meet to market in March, there were many features in the works that weren’t ready yet. The quarantine likely caught them as off-guard as it caught us.  But, now, nine months later, there are many new features in Google Meet. This 18-minute video will take you through each of the new features and demonstrate how to use each.

At 16:20 I show how I created a link on March 16 and am still using the same link almost 9 months later.