Office for Mac now lets you co-author in real time just like the online version! (Read more at Arstechnica.) To enable this functionality, update your Office apps by opening any of them, go to the Help menu, and choose Check for Updates. After updating, you will be able to open documents and change them with other […]
If you’re in the middle school and have an iPad, creating a screencast where students draw and explain a concept is easy with an app like Explain Everything. At the high school where students have Macbooks, the drawing part isn’t easy – but it can be with a mini-whiteboard! You can create a simple screencast […]
If you don’t have PDF editing software like Adobe Acrobat Pro, you can still easily create fillable forms using Microsoft Word. Avita recently used this feature to create internal forms for the counseling department. Follow these instructions from Microsoft to create your form or watch this video from a guy on YouTube.
Video projects are always fun for students, and visual literacy is an essential skill in today’s media-oriented world. But we don’t have time to teach the entire grammar of filmmaking. Last week, though, all grade 9 Chinese students learned the basics in a lesson called the Four Shot Movie. The four-shot movie is the most […]
At a recent TA PD session we used Pixlr (like Google Docs, but for images) to create color splash images like the one below: The larger point is that Pixlr (http://pixlr.com/editor) is a handy tool to do simple edits like cropping and resizes up to intermediate ones like manipulating color, adding effects, and working with […]
At this week’s after school PD, we learned to use Excel to manipulate text and numbers with formulas and array formulas and look up information/fill in information automatically with VLOOKUP and LOOKUP. For manipulating text and numbers, use these formulas: CONCATENATE, CONCAT, “”&”” – combine two or more cells, strings, or numbers AVERAGE, MEDIAN, MODE, […]
Thanks to Eric, all parents now have a Canvas account linked to their child(ren). This means that parents receive the same email notifications as students when you create an assigment, leave a comment on an assignment, make an announcement, etc. This adds, at no time to cost to the teacher, another way to keep parents […]
It’s worth watching this five-minute video – especially the last half – which explains why your smartphone is like a slot machine. And if supressing notifications is a way to make your smartphone less addicting – literally – this video will help you with how to do that.
The desktop Office apps are more powerful than their Online counterparts, but the current release doesn’t support the real-time co-authoring that helps us collaborate. Luckily, you can opt into the “Fast Insiders” version that enables this key feature. While it’s technically an unsupported release, feedback from users so far is that it’s stable and gets […]
At the end of October, we noticed that many students had very few files in their OneDrive. The percentage of students with fewer than six files in their OneDrive reached as high as 66% for some grade levels. Since OneDrive use is critical for students’ abilities to create and collaborate, the English and Chinese departments […]