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Tech & Learning Live @ Boston: Join the Livestream Experience! Join in for FREE from your home or office. Tech & Learning's live broadcast stream will be direct from  Tech & Learning Live @ Boston  this Friday,  May 1st . Join this preeminent group of education leaders as they tackle some of the most pressing, and promising, issues for today's schools. Watch the sessions as they happen and even participate with a live chat. The schedule includes: 8:00 to 9:10    ET  Opening Keynote w. Jennie Magiera: Beware the Transformation Trap: Making Meaningful Change 9:20 to 10:20 am ET Student Agency: Beyond Genius Hour 10:30 am - 11:30 am ET Seeing Results 2:50 pm - 3:50 pm ET IT and Curriculum: From an Uneasy Partnership to a Fruitful Marriage >> View the entire program  here .  All virtual attendees will receive a digital certificate confirming attendance. .    Keynote Speaker Jennie Magiera Digital Learning Coordinator, Acade...

Updated March 2017 Google Apps for Education and Chromebooks are very popular with education for many reasons, one of which is the ease of management and deployment. The Admin Console allows staff to manage apps, user settings, devices settings and much more. Here are some tips and best practices for settings in the Admin Console. The Admin Console is relatively easy to use, although some settings can be hard to find. Remember to use the help features by clicking on the question marks throughout the console. The icons on the console can be moved and arranged via drag-and-drop so you can put the ones you use most up front. Typically, Users, Device Management, and Apps are the most used.  Below are some of the main tips and settings to consider. Most of them are under Device Management. This is not a complete list, but one to help you get started.  Here is another great article on this from GoGuardian .  Admin Accounts: ("Admin Roles") You can designate users at different ...

PDFs  are one of the most popular document formats, mainly because you can view them easily on any device. Sometimes you need to modify them or convert them to other formats depending on your usage. SmallPDF is a free, online service that gives you the ability to compress, convert, split, merge, modify, (and more) PDF files. It's very easy to use. Select the function you want to perform from the home page and then just drag and drop your files. It's that easy. It supports converting images to PDF and PDF to Office and Office to PDF, along with much more. You can even send them a PDF and they will print it and mail it to an address for you. Here is a list of all of the functions. Compress PDF JPG to PDF PDF to JPG PDF to Word PDF to Excel PDF to PPT Word to PDF Excel to PDF PPT to PDF Merge PDF Split PDF Unlock PDF Send letter Here are some  More Resources for working with PDF Files   (lots here, plus more listed below) PDF Converter - free online PDF conversion Lots...

Technology is a wonderful thing. It lets us connect, explore, learn and create. However, there are some drawbacks and everyone is concerned about their data and what the big tech companies collect about them. I'm a huge user and proponent of Google Apps, but I'm also careful with what I put online anywhere. This infographic shows some of the data and information that Google, Facebook and Apple have and collect about their users. It is a good resource to use when teaching digital literacy and internet safety. The Loss of Privacy from Google Apple and Facebook Compliments of BackgroundChecks.org More resources: 10 Tech Skills Every Student Should Have How to Evaluate Web Resources Internet Safety Resources: Internet Safety Resources - help students stay safe online Discovery Education Web 20.11  - great internet safety resources. Google Good to Know - online safety and data info Google Family Safety Center - help promote safety online. Web safety resource Google Plus now open to ...

It is a challenge to seize children’s attention and not to let it go. Some teachers experience great difficulties in keeping students engaged and involved in the educational process due to objective reasons. Luckily, there exist some tricks to help resourceful teachers, one of them being visual aids. Looking at bright and colorful images, students are more likely to digest the material without boredom and remember it afterwards. But why are visual aids so effective and how to create them? First of all, visual aids are helpful, because they show the data visually. Some facts, connections and outcomes are much easier to understand when they are represented as a picture. For example, some statistics, shown as a diagram will be much more winning than its detailed descriptions in words. Then, as visual images have the sense of modernity, they easily grab children’s attention for some time. Thus, they are useful for highlighting some essential points and setting true accents. And finally, vi...

Here is some info about the Chromebooks and steps to take for issues/errors encountered. NOTE: Java does not work on Chromebooks. Java is a major security hazard and Chromebooks are very secure. Most of the Java based sites are moving to HTML5 which works on Chromebooks. 1. Remember, if this is the first time you are using that Chromebook, you have to click "add user" and add your user account info. 2. In some cases, someone has changed the keyboard settings. Click SHIFT-ALT to set it back to US keyboard. Check to make sure the language wasn't changed: https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/1059490?hl=en 3. If the image on the home screen is rotated: Ctrl-shift-reload/refresh will rotate the entire screen by 90 degrees each time it is pressed. 4. If you need to remove a user from a Chromebook, do not login. At the login screen, click on the upper right corner of that user's login icon and remove the user. https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/1059260?hl=...

Google Classroom is Google's learning management system, allowing teachers and students to share assignments and communicate online. It is easy to use and works great, but there were some features teachers were asking for. Well, Google listened! Google has just announced some new features: 1. Invite another teacher to your class- teachers who co-teach, or want special ed teachers to have access to course work, etc can be invited to join the class as a teacher. Multiple teachers can now work together in the same class. The additional teacher(s) can create assignments and announcements, view and grade student submissions, participate in comments on the class stream, invite students to the class, and receive email notifications related to the class   2. Drafts of assignments and announcements - teachers can now create announcements and assignments as drafts and then post them when ready. This is very useful for future planning and for giving other teaches a chance to review the posti...

Reflector2 is a wireless streaming product that works with iOS, Android and even Chromebooks that allows teachers and students to share their iPads, Android tablets and Chromebooks to the big screen wirelessly, from anywhere in the room. Recording with voice-over lets teachers record their lessons for future use, while multiple security features keep the classroom safe. With even more innovative features, Reflector 2 is an extremely cost-effective alternative to an Apple TV, utilizing the devices already found in most classrooms. It also works with Mac and PC. You can share your mobile device screens to a computer connected to a projector for a powerful presentation tool. It's a great tool for teachers to use in their classroom. It's not free, but the pricing is very competitive.  Take a look at it's Education uses and features.  -

Wonder is a new search tool that goes beyond just searching the internet. Wonder has built a research network of librarians and experienced researchers to help students search the web for high-quality sources, and to encourage curiosity in online learning. You can sign in with Facebook, Twitter, or email and it's free to use. When you search in Wonder, the results are contributed by librarians and other experts, filtering out a lot of the garbage that is online. When you do a search, you get some results, a box to enter more information about what you are searching for, and a list of experts that you can choose to get results from. This is a great resource for students and teachers, filtering out some of the chaff for search results and giving better results. Below is an example search I did for "aircraft design": -

Data backup is even more important than ever these days. Everything is digital now and you need to safeguard and backup your data.  I have my personal data backed up in multiple ways, and even backup my Evernote files with a free service. Our district has a Barracuda backup server as well as off site back up at Barracuda's data centers and we use Backupify to backup our Google Apps data. Below are some more resources on data backup and an infographic from SingleHop with more information and resources on how virtual servers can help keep your data recoverable and secure. Related: Data Backup Resources and Tips Infographic with Data Backup Tips -

I'm a huge fan and user of  Evernote , and lots of people ask me for tips on using it, so I'm starting a series of blog posts on Evernote Tips and Tricks to share some great tips and ideas for using  Evernote . Tip #13 - Clearly Evernote's Web Clipper allows you to clip a "simplified article" when clipping from a website. This feature gets rid of the side bars, ads, etc and just copies the article (occasionally it doesn't work depending on how the site was built, but it works most of the time.) It's a great way to just clip the article and not the distractions, making it easier to read, as well as taking less time to clip and using less storage space. Evernote also has a stand alone browser extension that does basically the same thing, called Clearly . Evernote Clearly is a browser extension that allows you to read online with less distractions. You simply click the extension and it hides all the distractions from blogs and articles, allowing you to read...