One of our brilliant tech EAs alerted me to the existence of Photopea today – https://www.photopea.com/ – The screen actually looks exactly like Photoshop, and while it lacks a few of the “bells and whistles” of photoshop (keyboard shortcuts, for instance), it would certainly be more than any student not enrolled in 30-level CTS courses would need!!
With the old Windows computers, the utility for printing photos grew familiar throughout the years that people actually did this (printed photos at home). But, printing photos at home is no longer something that -people do, and so this feature is disappearing.
If we can make our peace with the fact that printing photos from a Chromebook is going to be different, then 50% of the frustration evaporates.
You can set your smartphone to upload your camera roll into Google Photos automatically (Personally, I do this with my photos; the space in education accounts is unlimited, and the privacy policy of Google as it pertains to education is solid.). If your smartphone loads photos into your Google Photos account, it means they will be in a folder in your Google Drive (called Google Photos). Running them through this handy little website makes printing them a Breeze.
Here is a screencast I did today of this process.
OCR = Optical Character Recognition – it means that the letters on the pdf represent letters to the software as opposed to “dots” (You know you don’t have an OCR scanned document when Kami reads “dot dot dot dot….” through the text to speech feature!)
A quick way to scan a poem, short story or other printed item for use in Kami is by using your smartphone. There are a number of other apps that can handle scanning to .pdf, but many are paid. https://mashtips.com/ocr-scanner-ios-apps/
OCR = Optical Character Recognition – it means that the letters on the pdf represent letters to the software as opposed to “dots” (You know you don’t have an OCR scanned document when Kami reads “dot dot dot dot….” through the text to speech feature!)
A quick way to scan a poem, short story or other printed item for use in Kami is by using your smartphone. There are a number of other apps that can handle scanning to .pdf, but many are paid. https://mashtips.com/ocr-scanner-ios-apps/
Did you know Google has a significant training course for teachers? Did you know that by completing the training you could become a Google Certified Educator?
Have a look at https://teachercenter.withgoogle.com/
Even if you don’t want to become certified, the lessons there are well designed and will expand your capacity to use GSuite in your classroom. You’ll learn things you had no idea Google would allow you to do (I certainly did!) and you’ll be well-informed as to Google’s policies surrounding education, kids and privacy.
There are resources ready for your use here!
Attached is a .pdf file of keyboard shortcuts for your chromebook!!
I have used Kami to annotate (highlight in this instance) the most useful shortcuts for classroom use. For more details on Kami, please visit the Mini Course Listing here on the Ed Tech Framework!