Adobe Spark is a phenomenal resource for teachers. Spark allows you to quickly and efficiently create a beautiful graphic using a template, your own photos and royalty-free photos. You can also create from scratch to build your own unique images.
Further, Adobe Spark has the capacity to create and edit videos.
Adobe’s privacy policy is not suited to students, so this is not recommended as an application to be used with students.
This edition of Ed Tech Tips, Tricks & Hacks contains nuggets of wisdom on:
Google Sky – it’s like Google Earth, except it’s the sky. A fantastic companion for the grade 6 sky science unit!
Silk is a really cool interactive, generative art site. It does not require a login, but has a camera icon in the top left corner for artists to take a photo of their creations.
Beyond art, this site would offer some fun learning about symmetry in math.
Literacy Center offers a few online games to assist with second language teaching and learning.
Many of the scientific simulations on the PhET site (from the University of Colorado, Boulder) are now able to be utilized on Chromebooks. They are no longer flash-based simulations.
PhET offers simulations from elementary level through to university.
Bomomo is an art site where adults and kids can experiment with art, colours and textures in an animated and engaging way.
CoolMath – an old, familiar math website has recently launnched a set of virtual manipulatives including a nice interface for base-ten blocks. Becuase they are just rolling this content out now, the number of manipulatives is limited to the base ten blocks, a numberline, patterrn blocks and ten frames. However, CoolMath has been a resource for teachers for many years now, and we can likely expect the virtual manipulative resources to continue to grow!
As many of us have discussed, there is genuine growth occurring in the creation of online resources that are accessible from a Chromebook. Today I am excited to bring your attention to the Didax library of free online math manipulatives!
This set of tools includes unifix cubes, number lines, rekenreks, base ten blocks, prime factor tiles, algebra tiles and more!
National Novel Writing Month is a fun, empowering approach to creative writing. The challenge: draft an entire novel in just one month. For 30 wild, exciting, surprising days, you get to lock away your inner editor, let your imagination take over, and just create!
NaNoWriMo only collects first names of student users and birthdates (for the purposes of protection and security) and NEVER asks for last names. Students use a screen (user) name and can upload an avatar to personalize their experience.
This edition of Ed Tech Tips, Tricks & Hacks contains nuggets of wisdom on:
Help Teaching is a website where teachers can create printables for their classroom. The free version will allow you to make a test or quiz of up to 10 questions. There is content for all subjects and all grades on this site.
We Video is a free online video editor. To access it for free, there are a couple of limitations. The application will limit videos to 5:00 in length, which generally speaking is more than enough for any class project. If needed, a student could separate their video into parts and submit it in segments for grading.
The free We Video also limits users to 1GB of storage.
Finally, We Video will put a watermark on videos that were created using their free utility, but the brain tunes that out quickly.
This edition of Ed Tech Tips, Tricks & Hacks contains nuggets of wisdom on:
Inking – writing on top of an image, otherwise known as annotating is possible using a Chromebook. Our amazing Lan-Tech, Bailey has put together this “How-to” slideshow to assist teachers who want to use it, or who have used it in the past but now can’t find it.
This is a pretty handy skill to have for teaching in GSuite.