Does anybody really know what time it is?

Working with Google Calendar today an older Chicago song with the lyric "Does anybody really know what time it is?" is on an infinite loop in my head. With Google Calendar, everyone can stay on the same page. With it teachers can keep track and share assignment due dates, send invitations to parents and peers to collaboration sessions and be notified when planned events have changed. GAFE has another feature not available for the general public, appointments. After feedback from educators, this feature was brought back from Google's chopping block because of its usefulness in an educational setting. If you have yet to work with calendar I would highly recommend it.

Record your screen in Chrome.

Today we learned how to make a screencast.  The original intent was to use Screen-Cast-O-Matic but due to the fluid nature of the internet, their Google authenitcation piece was not up to Google's current policies and was not coopertive.  This led us to explore other alterntives such as Chrome's ScreenCastify.  This worked well. There are a few things to keep in mind while using it.  As soon as the extension is loaded it will be ready to go.  Any setup prompts can be ignored at this point. It may begin recording willy-nilly so just click stop and delete recording; it should behave after that.  When you want to record, pay attention to the setting that asks which view you'd like to use.  Most often you will want to choose to record the entire screen.  When you are through you are given the choice to save it to your drive and/or YouTube.

Storybird for Chrome

Below is a story I created with the help of Storybird. Storybird does things a little differently in that they provide the illustrations while you provide the story. I recently rediscovered Storybird while I was helping a fellow teacher find quick literacy resources to share. It is worth a look.

Google Unplugged

Today was a challenge. The Google server was intermittent and a challenge. We quickly became experts at chrome's offline capabilites.

Learning is not linear just because they start with the same letter.

We learn when we encounter a change in our environment.