CMTC!

The Christa McAuliffe Technology Conference was informative, useful and inspiring. I was thrilled to be attending the sessions where I was able to take away such valuable, ready to use, and encouraging ideas. My biggest takeaways were about the Google extensions and Google classroom.  

Take away 1:  Google Classroom- lots of awesome opportunities that have already been discussed on this blog, but as a little refresher here are some cool perks. “Share to Classroom” option will put the same screen on all of the student’s computer that are in your “class.” This will help focus the class and will deter any confusion of how to get to a certain website. I am excited to use Google classroom because it works seamlessly with all of Google’s products that we already like such as Google forms and email. I am eager to learn more about Google classroom and how it can work in my classroom, but this conference gave me great confidence that this can be a great virtual “home base” for my students. There is a lot more with Google Classroom, but my biggest take away is that it is the format that I want to use GC to begin my Blended Learning adventure!

Take away 2: Cool research tool! goo.gl/fcuvGC is a document that explains step by step how to easily create a work cited page. I had no idea this was a tool that Google docs had and as long as the source is reliable, I think this can be a great tool for students to use. Chelsea and I were pretty wowed by this easy to use feature.

Take away 3: Google Chrome Extensions are super cool. If we are able to have access to them this document: http://ow.ly/Vn9Oz is an exceptional resource. My favorite extension is Read and Write. This extension is free for teachers but has a fee after 30 days for students. This extension encompasses great tools from a variety of extensions all in one. I feel like this extension can be extremely helpful for our ELL students to be able to participate completing the same assignments as our native English speaking students. Reading levels can be altered, dictionaries, picture dictionaries, were my favorite but there is so much you can do with it! On the list there are many separate extensions that do most of these features, it’s just simple and convenient to have it all on one extension.