Tuesday Tech Tidbit

With a recent iPad system update (iPadOS 16.2), Apple released a new collaborative whiteboard app called Freeform .  According to Apple: Freeform helps users organize and visually lay out content on a flexible canvas, giving them the ability to see, share, and collaborate all in one place without worrying about layouts or page sizes. Freeform offers an unlimited canvas.  Users can continually add content and never worry about running out of space.  Within a Freeform board, users can add sticky notes, photos, videos, audio, shapes, charts, PDFs, and a wide variety of document types. You can use your iPad's camera to add photos and videos to a board.  Freeform magically appears as an app on all iPads that are updated to system 16.2.  Our school iPads are eligible to receive this update.  Please encourage your students to update their iPads so they can engage with Freeform. If an iPad's storage capacity is too tight to allow for a system update, please view my...

Artificial Intelligence is advancing at breakneck speed and is dominating many headlines in today’s news. The implications for AI’s influence on education are profound. Chatbots, such as ChatGPT , allow users to generate a wide variety of texts, including school essays.  The results are pretty impressive.  Images can be conjured using DALL-E by merely suggesting them to your computer. Again, the results are pretty impressive.  I am on a committee that is investigating the implications of AI.  We are learning about the capabilities of AI, how to prepare for it in schools, how to harness its power for good, and everything else that comes with such a transformative technology.  The AI committee is compiling resources for teachers, which include news articles and podcasts.  We will continue to add resources to this document.  If you are interested in keeping up with the latest in AI, here is a link to the live Google Doc: AI Resources for teachers If you ...

We are currently operating in two technology ecosystems:  Google and Apple.  Most of our word processing continues to occur in Google Docs, even though our students are working on iPad hardware.  As you might imagine, Google has made no effort to design a brilliant Google Docs app for the iPad.  The Google Docs app on the iPad is Captain Crappy.  I would rate it a solid D.   Why do we continue to use it then?  Apple makes a full-featured word processor called Pages, which lives on everyone's iPads.  Pages has all the document, text, and multimedia formatting of the major PC word processors.   Fun facts about Apple Pages: Pages allows for collaborative document editing.   Documents are automatically saved in iCloud.   Documents can be viewed and edited on any PC web browser using icloud.com . Documents can easily be submitted to Google Classroom.   Pages takes advantage of Apple's multimedia ecosystem, m...

Does your Gmail inbox look like a tornado touched down? I have some easy suggestions to help you gain control over your inbox and employ a system of organization that will make your digital life much more manageable.   Don't delete emails. Archive them. When you delete emails, they are gone forever. With some messages, you might regret this down the road. The Archive button removes an email from your inbox but does not delete it. Use labels .  Labels allow you to assign a name to your messages.  This makes them easy to locate. Use filters .  Filters allow you to automatically perform certain functions to emails as they arrive in your inbox.  You can mark certain messages as read.  You can automatically archive certain messages so they never appear in your inbox.  In the video below I demonstrate these Gmail features.  Let me know if you have any questions about organizing your Gmail messages.

The Chrome browser on your computer has some handy built-in features to help you organize your daily workflow.  One example is the pinned tab feature.  If you visit certain websites as a regular part of your daily routine, you can pin that website as a tab at the top of your Chrome browser.  I use this feature all the time, as it helps me quickly access websites such as Google Calendar, that I use all the time.   Pinned tabs take up less real estate than a full tab.  You can fit a handful of pinned tabs in the same amount of space that would normally take one tab.   To use pinned tabs, you should first sign into the Chrome browser.  Click on the profile icon in the top-right corner of Chrome to turn on sync and sign in with your school email and password.   The video below demonstrates how to use pinned tabs. 

Slides Timer is a nifty Chrome extension that allows you to easily a timer to a Google slide.  While in presentation mode you can have a timer counting up or counting down from a time that you designate.  Slides Timer also allows you to add the current time to a slide while in presentation mode.  This extension is useful for timing a class activity, displaying a daily agenda, or pacing a presentation. Slides Timer is a free Chrome extension that can be found at the Chrome web store.  It only works in the Chrome web browser.  Once it is installed on your Chrome browser, Slides Timer works quietly in the background without you needed to engage with it.  Here is a link to Slides Timer in the Chrome web store . After you install Slides Timer, insert a text box in a Google slide.  In the text box, type a timer command in closed << >> brackets.  For example, to start a three minute countdown timer, type <<3:00->>.  To start ...

Online OCR is a brilliant online tool that recognizes text in images or PDFs.  In seconds it converts the text into a word processor document that allows you to edit and format the text.  Magic!  If you've ever had a PDF or a hard copy of a document that you wanted to edit, Online OCR is your new best friend.   OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition.   Online OCR allows you to upload an image file or a PDF.  You then decide what kind of output file you want to generate.  Typically one would choose Microsoft Word.  Even if you don't have Microsoft Word on your machine, you can easily upload a Word file to Google Drive, which converts it to an editable Google Doc.   Online OCR even works with other languages.  If you are uploading an image or PDF that contains a foreign language, you can instruct it to maintain that language when converting to text.  (In the video below, I misinterpreted the language feature and...