As the educational technology specialist in my district I work with teachers to help support the use of technology in the classroom. This may involve aiding teachers with instructional planning, modeling the use of technology, or co-teaching to support the technology. I’m always looking for new ways to expose more teachers to how others in their school are using technology and Holly Clark offers some suggestions from her work as a technology consultant.

When I plan lessons or professional development workshops I try to incorporate instructional strategies to engage students and teachers in the content. I’ve talked before about how helpful the instructional strategies are on the K20 Learn website. Another website that includes great resources to engage students is Facing History.

I’ve always preferred using laptops in the classroom instead of having desktops or using a computer lab with desktops. The laptops allow more flexibility with creating small groups and adapting the classroom for different types of activities. One of the issues with laptops is right clicking on the trackpad. Here is how students (and teachers) can easily right click on a laptop trackpad.

Google Drive is one of the most popular digital tools that educators use. Many K-12 schools use Google’s suite of tools as well as colleges and universities. Michelle Woo at Lifehacker discussed how students are using Google Docs as a chat room to cyberbully each other.

One of my favorite features in Gmail is undo send. Whether I didn’t add something in my message, include someone on the email, or forget to add an email attachment it always allows me to quickly revise the email and send it again. My school uses Office 365 for our email and Outlook also has an undo send feature which is incredibly useful. Rob Woodgate at How-To Geek explains how to enable the undo send feature in Outlook for Office 365.

As I have discussed, the use of podcasts in the classroom has continued to rise in popularity during the past few years. Many podcasts offer a transcript which allows students to read along as they listen. NPR’s Hidden Brain podcast includes many episodes that teachers can use in their classroom and they have now started to provide study guides for some of their episodes.

Have you ever typed too quickly or thought you hit TAB on your keyboard to then look up and see your username and password in the same dialogue box? Now every time you try to login you see your username followed by the password in the autocomplete results of your web browser. Lifehacker has created a useful set of instructions on how to delete these autocomplete results from the web browser.

One of the most important tools in my workflow is Google Drive. With Google Drive it is easy to collaborate and share resources with educators. One of my favorite tricks with Google Drive is modifying the URL to customize how the file is viewed.

There are many student blogging tools for teachers to use but the setup process for some of these tools can be intimidating. Nathan Hall talks about how teachers should consider using Padlet as a class or student blogging tool.

Orginally posted 5/13/2019

Taylor Lorenz at The Atlantic writes about how tweens start to learn about the digital footprint their parents have created for them when they post images on social media.