Tech Help & Troubleshooting
…or in 2020, things that may help you navigate remote learning.
Quick Fixes
To try to assist you with operating your Chromebook as seamlessly as possible, we have assembled a list of common questions along with the solutions.
Additionally, there are some mini courses available to you to increase your tech skills!
Google Meet
To improve the quality of online learning, Google Meet has had many excellent updates that allow for better control and improved teaching and learning. These updates include the tiling of meet guests up to 49 (remove the Grid View extension you installed in the spring. It is no longer being supported or updated and it causes a host of issues now).
New features include
- Teachers can turn the chat on or off
- Breakout rooms
- Tiling of participants up to 49
- Ambient noise cancellation (this is awesome!)
- Background blur/change background
- Q & A – different than the chat, it allows students to ask questions of you that you can respond to when it is convenient in the teaching process.
- Polls
- Jamboard (it’s a whiteboard for teaching with!!!)
- Remove participants (after second removal, they will not ever be permitted back into that same link again.)
- Turn on captions (can also translate into other languages for ELL learners)
The link for Google Meet that Google Classroom generates is glitchy. We recommend that teachers go to meet.google.com and choose “Join or Start a Meeting”. Don’t give it a nickname (those can be glitchy too). Copy-paste the meet address from the address bar of your Chrome browser. Paste that wherever your students will be retrieving the link from. Meet links generated in that manner can be repeatedly used for months. (Michelle has used the same link since March 2020 – the link can be found in the signature line of her emails and on her staff profile on the district website.
Jamboard
Jamboard is a relative newcomer to the GSuite pool of tools for teachers; it’s a whiteboard for instructional purposes. It functions in the same manner as any of the other Google Tools (slides, docs etc.). It can be found in your waffle; look for the yellow icon that resembles the letter J. To assist you with getting started, here is a brief screencast video.
Kami
Originally developed as a .pdf reader, Kami has grown into a powerful annotation tool. All teachers in CESD have a license to use Kami, and if you’ve not tried it yet, it is a worthwhile use of your time. We do have modules built for using Kami on the CESD Hub, but here is a crash course in Kami. This video covers the same content I go through when working with teachers in a face-to-face environment.