Noel Erskine, Technology Coordinator Norris Schools

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A great group of tech tools, apps and more to end this week! Free apps, tools and more.

Friday, August 26, 2016


The Molecular Workbench free software (available for Mac, Windows, and Linux) is an incredible modeling tool for secondary science teachers and students to use in conducting computational experiments. (This is installable software, so does not work on a Chromebook.) 

5 Awesome Adobe Apps That Are Completely Free  You will more from me on the Adobe Spark Suite (Web, iOS): Create Beautiful Posts, Articles, or Videos!  These tools are Amazing!  This article also highlights other programs, IOS apps, etc.. thart are free!  


Here’s a nifty trick that combines both Google Sheets and Maps. When you enter addresses into Sheets, you can then display all of the locations right in Maps, creating your own custom map. 

Use Google Drive to Fill Out PDF Forms - If you don’t have the right software, filling out PDF forms on your computer can be a frustrating experience. Luckily, this (free) trick using Google Drive makes filling out PDF forms a breeze.

6 Must-Have Creation Tools for the BYOD Classroom. - This is a good list! (Seesaw is a great tool for the K-8 environment! A ton of great feedback from the K-8 teachers on this one!) Providing opportunities for students to make and create is essential in 21st-century classrooms. Children of all ages should experience the joy of seeing their work shared and celebrated. Check out this list for some great tools to accomplish that! 


8 Tips for Teachers Using Google Cardboard in School and 5 apps for Google Cardboard.  

Another Collection of Some Good Google Drive Add-ons for Teachers ~ Educational Technology and Mobile Learning May 10, 2016
Remove line breaks, Change letter case, Google Sheets Rubric add-on... and more! 


Google Forms:
You can now add images to questions and answers in Google forms!  (They recently added the ability to do quizzes in Google forms.  I still liked using the Flubaroo add-on for doing quizzes with forms since it had a much richer feature set... and it's easy to use too.  But with this new feature, doing a quiz right from Google forms is the way to go if you want to add pictures to the question and/or for feedback.)  This short video (4 min.) will walk you through the process of adding pictures to your questions. 

This video (8 Min.)  will walk you through the process of creating a quiz in Google Forms. 

5 Free Research Tools for the Classroom
Google classroom:
10 things every teacher should be able to do in Google Classroom - Infographic. 

Google Draw:




Google Sheets:


Have you ever had a list of names in a spreadsheet and wanted to separate them by first and last names into two columns? Then this tip is for you!

Google Docs:
An Easy Way to Color Code and Organize Ideas in a Google Doc.  Maybe a great tool for kids and collaborative projects with docs, etc...


eBooks:


Google Chrome Extensions for Education:

We asked educators what their favorite Chrome Extensions were for using in the classroom. Here are the results.



Add Text to Your Image Just By Right-Clicking! Via BetterCloud Monitor | Adding text to images can be cumbersome: You have to find photo editing software, open up a separate program, import your photos…you get the idea. Luckily, there’s an easy solution that lets you add text to any image on the web just by right-clicking, making the process seamless and quick. (I am now using this tool.  It's free, but does have a few premium features as well.) 

IOS Apps:

Microsoft Pix wants to use AI to improve your iPhone photos. Read more about it here.   Link to free app on the itunes store. I have started using this app, and it really does improve your pictures. 

Scan and Learn with the Socratic Homework App - This looks like a cool free app for students. (I have not tried it yet.) Read more about it here. 


A repeat of my recent email to staff on some exciting updates to Google that have a lot of impact for EDU!


Google Classroom:
Google Updates Classroom with New Tools for Students, Parents, and Teachers! 
Parents can now automatically receive summaries of their kids’ work so they can know exactly how they are doing in any given class.

Mobile annotations: Teachers and students can draw on, highlight, and write notes on documents and PDFs in the Classroom mobile app.

Check out the What's new in Classroom Google page to keep current with all of the new bells and whistles. 

Free IOS App - Stage Pro: Interactive Whiteboard and Document Camera Reg. $4.99
Stage Pro: Interactive Whiteboard and Document Camera is free today. (Reg $4.99)

Not sure if it's as good as the Explain Everything App... but it's free to try out. (Contact me for free codes for this app if you have a use for it.

Posted by Noel Erskine at 7:15 AM 0 comments
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Some great tools and tips for the start of the school year.

Thursday, August 11, 2016


Web sites and tools:

My Three Favorite Classroom Timer Tools - via Richard Byrne @rmbyrne

A Literacy Resource You Must See to Believe -  The aim [of The Literacy Shed] is to provide high-quality resources that can be used in stand-alone literacy lessons, can form the basis for a whole literacy unit, or can support literacy units that you already have in place.

Spiral Education promotes strong classroom collaboration for free!  IOS - Android and Chrome app

Help 1-8 students learn more than 1,000 crucial math skills for free - Nice game based learning motivates students to work outside the classroom too! (Over 4 million users and growing.) 

The Write Stuff - Some great tech tools for creativity and writing in the classroom. 





4 Free Digital Storytelling Tools for the Classroom via SimpleK12 
--Blabberize (Talking Avatar)
--Befunky photo apps 
--Animoto 
My Animoto notes: 
Animoto  Is a great site for creating videos from pictures! Sign up for free edu account. First sign up for a free account, then visit this site to apply for the teacher account:
http://animoto.com/education/classroom  (You can easily embed the Animoto, or link to it on your website too!)  First, create a free account, then request the education version to get the pro features for free.)


Soundtrap - allows students to capture audio, edit, collaborate and publish their final podcast, radio show, etc...  Designed for creating and sharing music too!  (Works great on Chromebooks... since it's all through the web.) 


WOW! - I like this tool! Google's new Tour Builder is great for telling a story with maps! https://goo.gl/AzDnMj   Example Tour here. 

Need to manage events and registrations ... This Google Sheet add-on will manage it for you! 

This is my favorite new Chome Extention for Gmail!  --> The New and Improved Gmelius Extension. It adds some great features that I really like! 

Google Docs & Apps:

How to Make Columns in Google Docs -- Great tip via BetterCloud Monitor | If you’ve ever tried to create columns in Google Docs (for example, if you’re making a newsletter), you might have noticed that there’s no built-in feature for it. Don’t worry, though—the workaround is easy. Here’s a simple method for making columns.

Google Templates for Students - Great list from TCEA 

Advanced Tricks for Making Your Google Slides Better with Multimedia

If you ever have a Google Doc that’s tens or hundreds of pages long, it can be difficult to find a specific section of text that someone has asked you to reference. To save time, it can be valuable to provide a direct link to a specific paragraph in your document. (Hint... it's using the bookmark function.)

5 Google Sheets add-ons that supercharge your data! 


Google Apps Education Newsletter for June 2016. 

Chrome Extensions:

WOW- This is a great list.  I personally use every one of these!  The 8 Best Chrome Extensions As Chosen By Teachers

Google Calendar:


Google Drawing:

Google Slides:
Are you looking for tips to make your presentations more engaging and captivating? Check out this episode and learn more about some cool Google Slides advanced features, that will help you improve your presentation design and flow!

Google Sites - It's new and improved! 

Google sites have been updated, and they are great!  (There are some new features.... and a few things I hope they add... ) We are a rapid release domain, so this new feature is available for our users.  You access the new sites here. 

This cheat sheet should help get you started.  (I have also added it to our tech docs in drive.) 

Google Classroom:




CoolCat Teacher's 100+ Google classroom resources. 

Classroom now lets you plan ahead by scheduling announcements, assignments, and questions to post at a later date or a specific time

Just announced from Google -Coming this fall: keep parents and guardians in the loop
Later this year, we’ll launch email notifications from Classroom for guardians so they can stay involved and help to motivate their students. Guardians will be able to sign-up to receive daily or weekly email digests of their student’s progress, upcoming work and class announcements. Administrators will be able to invite guardians directly and set domain-wide policies for guardian linking and notifications.


IOS Apps:

Thanks to free mobile apps, creating flashcards with students has never been easier. IOS & Android - FREE Flashcards by Dictionary.com looks like a winner. 

Play review games or learning games in your classroom?  Turn your iPad into a game style buzzer with this free app - Game Buzzer Free -Which I had this one when I was still in the classroom. ☺

Want to create some excitement with projects?  These apps are great for the K-12 classroom! Animate with avatars, pics and more.  This presentation from the ISTE conference will get you started.  It has Chatterpix Kids (Which is awesome for the young kids... and you hear a lot from teachers that love it!) but it also includes a ton of other ones that look great.  Check it out. 

Google’s new Arts & Culture app brings the world’s art, virtual tours and more to your smartphone Experiencing the world’s art just got a little easier, thanks to Google’s newly launched Arts & Culture application which puts works of art from over a thousand museums across 70 countries into the palm of your hand.  

7 Favorite Apps to Use with Book Creator  - Did you know we have licenses for Book creator for use on our iPads?  It's an amazing tool!
This si a great list!  The Explain Everything app is one that we provide free to teachers!  Need a code... drop me an email. 


Android Apps:

Google makes working on mobile easier with new Android Add-ons for Docs & Sheets! 
Posted by Noel Erskine at 12:16 PM 0 comments
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The NEW Smithsonian Learning Lab - a great new resource for educators.

Friday, June 10, 2016



Today’s museums are making millions of images and recordings freely available, going far beyond yesterday’s traditional field trip. The Smithsonian Learning Lab (http://learninglab.si.edu) is brand new and will officially released later this month!


The Smithsonian Learning Lab is about discovery, creation, and sharing.

The Smithsonian Center for Learning and Digital Access created the Smithsonian Learning Lab to inspire the discovery and creative use of its rich digital materials—more than a million images, recordings, and texts. It is easy to find something of interest because search results display pictures rather than lists. Whether you've found what you were looking for or just discovered something new, it's easy to personalize it. Add your own notes and tags, incorporate discussion questions, and save and share. The Learning Lab makes it simple.

**above description taken from the Learning Lab - About Section. 

Check out the Learning lab here:  http://learninglab.si.edu  <---Be the first to check it out! 

The online portal for educational resources at the Institution can be found here: http://SmithsonianEducation.org,

There is even a live show about this new resource tomorrow on the classroom 2.0 site: http://live.classroom20.com 
Posted by Noel Erskine at 9:23 AM 0 comments
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BAM!!! Free music, awesome Tech tools... and more in this weeks tech list!

Web Tools and Resources:

Smithsonian Kids allows you to explore some of the world’s best museum exhibits This site offers tons of educational resources! Games, ebooks, lessons, animal cams and more! 

YOU have to check out TEDEd - Build a lesson around any TED-Ed Original, TED Talk or YouTube video. Make sure you view all the TED-Ed lessons! 

New 'Coding With Chrome' App Helps Students Learn to Code

Five Fresh, Fun, and FREE Presentation Tools <--- WOW! Great tools! - Some great new one’s in this list! The new free Adobe Spark tool is AMAZING!


Top 10 Places to Find Awesome Things to 3D Print

20 of the best 3D printing software tools-  And most of them are free!

Have your own classroom book library? 
Use this site to manage your classroom library! 
It's free, simple, apps and/or web interfaces, scan barcodes....... and gets great reviews. 

Free Music:

Jana Kramer: Live at Black River Studio (MP3 Digital Album) - Free

Led Zeppelin II: Remastered (MP3 Digital Album Download) - Free

These are not free - but for $1 are a good deal if you like them:

Thanks to slick deals for these!

Free eBooks - Via Zing!


You can create a class - have kids join via a code... and start assigning free books. 


Use Wizer to make creating engaging online worksheets fast and easy! You can even assign them directly to your Google Classroom classes! 

Ready to start?Read: How to make a Wizer worksheet
Watch: Getting started

ClassKick is a great tool for providing teacher feedback and works on any device free! This one looks really cool.  

The above two tools look really great! An educated guess would tell me that they will be free for several years, but may eventually start charging.  If it works as shown, it's probably worth using for the time it will be free. πŸ˜€  And who knows... they may always be free.  (I often miss on my guesses.) 

Google Doc' and apps - Tips and tricks:
How to Create a Word Cloud in Google Docs! -Nice add-on to docs. 

Google Sheets: Have Fun with Fonts 

Google sheets & slides
Posted by Noel Erskine at 7:38 AM 0 comments
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Tech tools, websites, video tools and more in this weeks list... as school winds down!

Sunday, May 22, 2016

Web sites and tools:

Poll your audience/class with Hotseat - Studio by Purdue University.  Free!  Text -Chat -Vote features.  Via the web or apps. 

Take your students on a FREE, fun, fact-filled science field trip—without leaving school! - Sponsored by Purdue University. zipTrips™ at Purdue University  Some great trips!  WOW. 

A nice tip from our very own @WilhelmBecky
Watchkin. This is a nice site for searching and watching YouTube videos. It strips all the ads and comments, and is supposed to be more "family-friendly." Students were searching for videos of world music to include in presentations so I had them search through this site which worked well. There is no guarantee something inappropriate won't still pop up when they search, but my chances are a lot better than sending them directly to YouTube. I like to use it when showing videos of performances in class too. Even when I preview everything, you just never know what ads might come up.

BandLab allows you to create music in your browser or via the free Android and iOS apps: https://www.bandlab.com/ 

Annotating PDF Files on Chromebooks with Kami - Works on the desktop in Chrome too!  (Pst... we have this added to our nsdtitans.org domain, so look for it!) 

New Feature! - Embed charts from Google Sheets in Google Docs and Slides and update them with a single click. (Remember form data goes to a Google sheet... so that's a plus if you are pulling live data from a form spreadsheet!)


Android Apps coming to Chromebooks! - It's official. 

Android apps, coming to a Chromebook near you - With over 1.5 million Android apps... there are a lot more potential apps and uses for the Chromebooks! (If you are looking to buy a personal Chromebook... maybe a touch screen would make sense??) 

A Google Docs Add-on for Grading Writing
  • Improves efficiency when commenting on student writing
  • Integrates with Google Classroom
  • Includes a rubric builder

HippoCampus.org - A top resource for MS & HS teachers!

HippoCampus.org is a free, core academic website that delivers rich multimedia content--videos, animations, and simulations--on general education subjects to middle school and high school teachers and college professors, and their students, free of charge.Teachers project HippoCampus content during classroom learning and assign it for computer labs and homework. Students use the site in the evenings for study and exam prep. Users do not need to register or log in to use the site.

As an open resource for personalized learning, HippoCampus.org was designed as part of a worldwide effort to improve access to quality education for everyone. HippoCampus is powered by The NROC Project, a non-profit, member-driven project focused on new models of digital content development, distribution, and use. NROC makes editorial and digital engineering investments in the content to prepare it for distribution by HippoCampus.

A little YouTube tech fun:

In youtube - Search for Use the force luke ... and see what happens. 

Or try the YouTube leanback - https://www.youtube.com/leanback to put you in TV mode.


Make any website interactive with questions, videos and more -  with DOCENTEDU (Not free, but does offer a free trial.) 

Teachers can add questions, discussions, and insight directly into any website.

When students go to that website, they can respond to those questions and discussions, see that insight, and take their own notes.


iBooks & eBooks:

PBS Announces iBooks for K-8 Teachers  (Free)

Videos:

Really cool!  Take a 360° Journey Through Antarctic Ice and see the penguins!  More videos from National Geo can be found here.  

The teacher's guide to using YouTube in the classroom. 

Google help for you and your students -- right at your fingertips! 

Remember last week we added Synergyse to our Google Apps Domain - Check it out! 
Posted by Noel Erskine at 7:07 PM 0 comments
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Home filtering, Teacher Tech tools, Awesome new Google features, and more....

Thursday, May 5, 2016


We need to encourage parents to filter and monitor student's internet access at home!

We do the best we can here at school... but parent's need to be encouraged to monitor at home. 

Feel free to share my recommendations doc to parents, patrons, and others that may need help. 


Misc. web tools and tech resources for teachers:


How to Add a public DropBox folder to your Google Drive - My doc will walk you through how to set this up.  I just set mine up, because I had someone that needed to send me a file, but Google blocked it.  (EXE file.)  This solution works great.  Nice way to collect files from parents, students, etc...  No sign in, etc... just drop me the file. 

Super list of free online resources to spark student creativity: https://goo.gl/uRB5iJ

Create personalized bingo cards for students with this website: https://bingobaker.com



Google Classroom:

NEW - Now you can schedule lessons in Google Classroom. Google Classroom now allows the busy teacher to schedule announcements, assignments, and questions for a later date.


Google Slides:

This will be NEW Feature -Just released ... pretty cool. Allows audience interaction (Backchannel) - Talk with your audience—not at them—with Slides Q&A





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YouTube:


Google Docs:


12 Free Add-Ons That Take Docs and Sheets to the Next Level 
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