Tuesday Tech Tidbit

Classroomscreen is a website that allows teachers to project a home screen with a variety of widgets that help to organize and manage the flow of their classrooms. Classroomscreen provides 19 widgets that you can customize.  These widgets include: Random name generator (for choosing a name of a student in your class) Timer Poll Text box Drawing box Sound level meter QR code generator Dice Stop watch Clock Group maker You can use Classroomscreen.com for free with no need to register.  You won't be able to save your screens or your widget orientations with the free account, but that's not much of a burden if you ask me.  This resource is extremely easy to use.  To check it out, visit  https://classroomscreen.com .

Gmail has a nifty feature called templates, which allows you to compose and save an email message that you anticipate sending to various recipients over a span of time.  If you find yourself composing similar email messages and sending them to various people, this feature might save you some time. I use Gmail templates to send acknowledgements to students who complete an interest form for the Makerspace club.  I never know when a student will fill out the form.  Nonetheless, I have a template email ready to go so I can send them information about the club. You need to activate Templates in your Gmail settings before this feature shows up. To do this, select the gear icon at the top of Gmail. Then select See All Settings > Advanced > Enable Templates . To save a template, you should first type a draft email message.  Then select the More button at the bottom of a new composition window (the "snowman" button).  You can then open the Templates menu and sav...

Students often ask us in the media center how to print slide show presentations.  Often we discover that the slides have been formatted in a way that makes them look wonky when printing full page.  This is easy to fix ... if the presentation is formatted correctly at the very beginning.   By default, Google presentations are formatted to play in a widescreen format (16:9 ratio).  This size does not correspond to the size of a piece of paper.  Printing a widescreen presentation will squash the slides and will not fill the page.  If you want to make your presentation print-friendly, you must change the page margins before designing your slide show.  Here's how: Changing slide size on desktop computer: Select File > Page setup . Change the page size from widescreen to Custom . Type 11" x 8.5" Changing slide size on iPad: Open Safari. Type the address slides.google.com Start a new presentation. Select  File  >  Page setup . Cha...