Tuesday Tech Tidbit

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...

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/

It's happened to all of us.  You discover a web page that you want to share with your students.  It contains great information.  But it is chock full of advertisements and other distracting elements.  Print Friendly is a resource that can clear all the garbage out of that web page so you can then print a clean copy of it.  Print Friendly also allows you to save a clean PDF version of the web page that can be distributed to your students electronically.   Print Friendly is a web page with a simple interface.  You simply paste the URL of the web page you want to clean up.  Print Friendly does its magic and produces a simplified version of the web page that can then be printed or saved as a PDF.  Easy peasy. If you are using the Chrome browser on a PC or Mac, you can install the Print Friendly extension .  With the extension you can access Print Friendly with the click of a mouse, rather than navigating to the website.   Try...