Tuesday Tech Tidbit

Puzzlemaker is a free puzzle generation tool for teachers and students.  It is provided by Discovery Education.  It is a completely web-based and super easy to use.   With Puzzlemaker you (or students) can generate a wide variety of puzzles, including word search, cross-cross, math squares, number blocks, mazes, and more.  Simply provide the requested information about building the puzzle parameters.  Then supply the words, letters or numbers. Voila!   Puzzlemaker will churn out a puzzle that can be printed easily.  You can also create PDFs of the puzzles that can be shared in Google Classroom.  Students can use their styluses to complete PDF puzzles on their iPads.  Puzzlemaker is a great vocabulary builder and math resource.  (And it’s fun to use!) https://puzzlemaker.discoveryeducation.com/

For your next presentation project, I encourage you to consider having your students create their very own ebook.  Creating ebooks is very easy on the iPad.  Students use the Pages app to create the book.  E-books can contain all kinds of multimedia, including videos and voice-overs.  The resulting ebooks are easy to share with others.  They open in the Books app on your iPad.  Students feel like accomplished authors, and the results are stunning. Please reach out to me if you would plan an ebook project with your students.  I would love to demonstrate to your students how to create an ebook, and I can lend technical support throughout the project.   This video demonstrates how to create and share an ebook.

If you haven't used Google Keep , then get ready to have your life changed. Google Keep is a simple note-taking app included in the Google Workplace suite. You can jot down virtual sticky notes that can then be categorized and labelled. I use Google Keep to store my thousands of passwords.  Every time I create a new account with something online, I add the login information into my note called Passwords .  You can also generate checklists in Google Keep.  As you complete tasks, you can check them off your list. Notes in Google Keep can be color coded.  They can also be tagged with labels that you create. For example, I have a label called Professional Development.  Anytime I add a related note to my collection, I tag it so it can easily be located in the future. Google Keep also offers collaboration. You can share a note with someone and give them editing privileges.  All contributors can add content to the note, check things off the list, add images, etc. ...

We've all wanted to play a specific section of a YouTube video to our class.  Time is wasted while you navigate to the section.  Wouldn't it be great if you could automatically jump to a predetermined starting or ending point when playing a YouTube video?  Spoiler alert.  You can. I will demonstrate here how generated custom starting and ending points when inserting a YouTube video into a Google slide.  This technique is useful when playing slides to your classes, but it will also help with  resource sharing in Google Classroom.  The video below demonstrates how to start and end videos at fixed points in Google slides.