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Chrome add-on

Five Tools for Leaving Audio Notes in Google

by Miguel Guhlin June 22, 2021

written by Miguel Guhlin

In a previous blog entry, I shared a popular solution for creating audio annotations to Google Workspace for Education that works well. But recently, while attending an Elementary Technology Conference session, I learned of another. Now allow me to share with you some of these exciting tools to leave voice notes.

Power Tools for Voices Notes

The other day, a colleague gnashed their teeth at the frustration she felt while trying to write in words what she could have explained to me face to face. For many, writing presents an insurmountable obstacle when conveying thoughts.

Speaking ideas aloud is easier. Let’s review some reasons why (source: Linguistic Society):

Speech is inborn, learned during the first two years of life.
Speech is simple, but written language can be complex.
Oral storytelling preceded written stories by many years.

These facts and more suggest that human beings may be more comfortable with speech. Of course, writing also has its advocates. Unlike speech, it can be difficult to connect via the written word without the pitch and timbre of the human voice.

Let’s take a look at some tools that capture our voices in an online space. Since our focus is on Google Workspace for Education, we’ll start with those tools.

google voice note

Become a Mote Certified Educator (#motece) or Mote Ambassador (#MoteAmbassador).
Use this link to get started and get a 60-day unlimited free trial.

Google Voice Note Tool #1: Mote

google voice notes

As you may recall, I included Mote in an earlier blog entry on the power of spoken feedback. There is so much you can do with spoken feedback and its power to enhance student learning. It also comes with a Chrome extension that enables Mote in a variety of Google documents. Those Google documents (thanks to @jessicaradams for her “Welcome Aboard” image) include:

Google Docs and Sheets: Leave a voice introduction to an assignment, offer students audio feedback. Watch video.
Google Slides: You can now embed audio comments into Google Slides using Mote. This is a nice alternative to recording audio, saving it to Drive, then inserting into a Slides doc. Watch video.
Google Forms: Leave explanatory comments for students or have students submit audio comments via the Form that appear as links for you to click and listen later. Wow! Watch video.
Google Classroom: Drop comments in Google Classroom. The neat thing? Students don’t need to have Mote to listen to your Mote-based voice comments. Watch video.
Gmail: Yes, you aren’t limited to text anymore in Gmail. Now you can send voice comments with Mote. Watch their video.

You can learn a lot about Mote in the video below, but also take some time to review these #moteminutes:

And be sure to follow the hashtag #motece. You will find Certified Educators and Ambassadors sharing about how they use the tool. One of my favorite features is that you can translate the text comments that go with a Mote voice comment. That means, you record yourself in your preferred language. Then, you translate the text introduction you’ve typed to whatever language you prefer. In addition, all your Mote voice comments remain accessible for you to reuse. You can access past recordings via the “My Activity” tab in your Mote account.

Finally, Sean Powell (@MrP_RPS) shares five ways to use Mote in the classroom:

Curious about pricing? See the pricing page for more details. Don’t forget to use this link to get started. You will get a 60-day unlimited free trial.

Google Voice Note Tool #2: SpeakPipe

This is another tool you can use to gather voice messages from people visiting your website. Some key points about SpeakPipe:

Create an audio recording via your browser using your microphone.
You can save your recording on the SpeakPipe website, get a link to it, or save it to your device. You can also send it via email or use it on the web.
Respond to messages via voice messages.
All messages are accessible via the account website.

Watch a short video on SpeakPipe:

SpeakPipe is free with certain limits, but can get more expensive. See this page for plans and pricing.

Google Voice Note Tool #3: Talk&Comment

Need something that empowers you to create voice notes inside any service on the web? If so, then Talk&Comment may be the tool for you. It supports creating voice notes in Gmail, Google Classroom, and Google Docs. Even Twitter and Facebook voice comments are possible. It also works with YouTube, Reddit, Slack, and others.

Want to see Talk&Comment voice notes in action? Watch this video:

One of the best features of Talk&Comment is that it’s free for students and educators. Be sure to get the Chrome extension to get started. Cristela Rodriguez (@crayonsandheels) shows how she added Talk&Comment to her Google Classroom:

google voice notes

Google Voice Note Tool #4: Vocaroo

An old favorite, Vocaroo (@vocaroo) set the bar high for browser-based audio recording. Redesigned to work in a post-Flash world, Vocaroo continues to offer simple voice recording. You can share the link to the voice comment, embed it, or save it to your device.

google voice notes

You can generate a QR code to the audio file or share via social media. This makes Vocaroo quite flexible and available at no cost. What’s more, it removes background noise and auto adjusts your volume.

This video provides an overview of Talk&Comment, as well as Vocaroo:

Vocaroo is available at no charge.

Google Voice Note Tool #5: Kaizena

If you haven’t explored Kaizena, then this may be a great place to end up with voice comments. This tool enables you to save voice comments and embed explainer videos. You can use it to track skills and auto-complete rubrics. Given its availability in the Google Workspace Marketplace, your Google Workspace Admin will need to assist you in installing it for all in the domain. Kaizena is free for educators. Be sure to get the Chrome extension.

Watch this video featuring Kaizena:

Google Voices Notes Roundup

Those are a few of the voice commenting tools available to use with Google Workspace. Do you have a favorite or special use scenario you would like to inspire others with? Be sure to post that in the comments.

google voice note

Feature Image Source

Photo by Ben Mullins on Unsplash

June 22, 2021 2 comments

Free Green Screen Solution for Chromebooks

by Miguel Guhlin April 29, 2021

written by Miguel Guhlin

Looking for a new ed tech solution that will rock your world? I think I have something for you today: a free green screen tool that works on Chromebooks and is simple enough for students to master.

Wait, What Is Green Screen?

No doubt, you may be an expert green screen user on iOS devices like iPads and iPhone. The DoInk Green Screen app is one of the best tools out there for quick, painless visual effects. You can load up other heavy duty video tools, such as OBS or Camtasia, but they can be clumsy and may cost you money, like WeVideo does for Chromebook users.

Go Green with Green Screen Fun

What if I told you there was a free image and video solution that Chromebook users could employ?

Going Green on a Chromebook

A fantastic video effects solution that won’t have you reaching for your wallet is Kapwing. Kapwing offers browser-based green screen. You get seven minutes of green screen goodness before having to upgrade. Seven minutes is a LOT of time, especially for most student projects. All you need is an image or video captured with a screen that is green behind it. You can get a green background (ie., green plastic tablecloth) for $0.99 from Dollar Tree store, and you’re set to go.

kapwing

How Does Kapwing’s Tool Work?

Kapwing describes the process in this way:

Kapwing’s Green Screen Video Editor lets you remove the background from any green or bluescreen video for free and online. Use the eyedropper tool to key out any color from the background of the video. Then, overlay the layer on top of other videos and images.

You can upload several types of files, such as:

Video file
YouTube green screen video link
Images and GIFs

Once the files are in Kapwing’s editor, you click their “Effects” tab and select the “Chroma Key” option. You can do any of the following:

Add new backgrounds
Frame your canvas
Trim your video

Kapwing also provides a handy tutorial:

kapwing

Once you’re done, simply save the video.

You can find other great resources for this visual effects technique below:

Kapwing offers Chromebook users a fantastic tool to use for fun and easy special effects.

Feature Image Source

Photo by Unlimited Motion Ltd on Unsplash

April 29, 2021 5 comments

Chromebooks LMS

Enhance the Canvas LMS with Chrome Add-Ons

by Miguel Guhlin February 2, 2021

written by Miguel Guhlin

Whether you consider yourself a Canvas LMS (Learning Management System) expert or a novice, it’s always good to learn more. Today, we’ll focus on great add-ons and extensions for the Chrome browser that can help to close the gaps in the Canvas LMS.

Note: The feature image shown is a view of my Canvas LMS using the Power + Chrome browser add-on. Intended for students, “Power+ makes it easy to know what you have to get done at a glance and see recent grades and announcements on the dashboard.”

Gap #1: HTML Editor

In a previous blog entry, I lamented that Canvas lacked a top-notch HTML editor. While it enjoys a GUI interface, I find myself hunting for more features. One Chrome extension that caught my attention is CanvasTools which describes itself in this way:

CanvasTools is an advanced set of tools. It allows you to customize the way that Instructure’s Canvas looks. You can do advanced things with your Canvas account.

CanvasTools has these features:

Customize your colors
Message students from any tab
Receive a notification when someone messages you
Download Canvas modules offline
Submit files as assignments by right-clicking on them
Add custom elements to your content using the Editor
Search through your pages, courses, groups, and assignments using the Chrome omnibar
Add a Mark All Read button to Conversations
Auto-login to Canvas
Integrates with the Canvas API
Use the editor to add custom buttons, badges, and more to your posts
Set a footer with ease. Use the CanvasTools editor and then copy and paste it by right-clicking in Canvas.

As I played with CanvasTools, I liked the feature that allows you to download an entire module. Unfortunately, that is a premium feature you have to pay for.

The most useful aspect of the tool was the Canvas Editor which allows you to edit views and files via HTML. The Canvas Inbox editor might be a worthwhile improvement, but I didn’t use it much in the time I had it installed. Many of the CanvasTools features appear superfluous to the Canvas LMS built-in tools.

If you want to learn more about Canvas, take a look at our online, self-paced course on the LMS. Earn your Canvas certification as you master the system’s features, best practices, creating a course, and more, all for just $29.

Gap #2: Grading

If you’ve had to do any grading in Canvas, you know what a pain it can be. Even with SpeedGrader, things can be a bit cumbersome. Enter Canvas Betterizer. It offers these improvements to SpeedGrader:

Focus and select the student grade
Hit enter to submit the grade and move on to the next student
Save comments that you type often and pull them from a dropdown box to make grading even faster!
Hit enter when typing a comment to submit it

This particular Chrome extension also works to make the Canvas Inbox work for you. You can see the Canvas Betterizer improvements on SpeedGrader in the screen capture below:

Canvas Betterizer does make grading a little less of a pain with the ability to save and insert comments. Give it a try.

Gap #3: Student View

To access Student View in Canvas, you have to navigate to the course Settings page. Then, you click on STUDENT VIEW on the far right hand side. This can be a pain when designing courses. The Canvas Quick Student View Chrome extension makes the switch easy. As you can see in the screenshot below, the Canvas Quick Student View adds a spectacles icon in the top right-hand corner of your screen.

After you click that spectacles icon, you switch the course to student view. What a time-saver.

I recommend this Chrome extension since it will save you a few clicks. That can make all the difference when you want to view your course in student view.

The next two gaps are ones that students encounter. But luckily, there are two Chrome extensions that can ease the pain of navigation and working late at night.

Gap #4: Course Navigation

Are you a student or instructor needing to navigate many Canvas courses? Then the Canvas+ Chrome extension can make the job easier. This simple tool adds a navigation menu at the top of your screen so you can leap from one course to another. Click your way through your courses without visiting the Dashboard again. For some people, this is a godsend because it makes navigation so much easier and faster.

As you can see from the screenshot above, Canvas+ adds a list of tabs for every enrolled course. This makes jumping from course to course easier. And Canvas+ makes it easy to rearrange the tabs for your convenience. So if you are editing two courses at the same time, you can have those two next to each other in the tabs. Fabulous!

Since my account is enrolled in quite a few courses, my tabs are a bit compressed. Give it a try as a teacher or student if you have fewer than twenty courses to flip through.

Gap #5: Dark Mode for Canvas

If you are working late at night or prefer a dark background on your device, the Dark Mode for Canvas extension may be what you are looking for. You can see what it does in the screenshot below:

This was the only dark mode tool I found that worked for Canvas, although there were others listed.

Bonus Extension: Better Canvas

This all-purpose Canvas enhancement offers several great features, including dark mode setup. Better Canvas offers these features:

Dark mode
Quick view assignment list
GPA calculator
Link preview button
Gradient dashboard cards

You can turn features on or off through the drop-down extension panel.

While no browser extension can make the Canvas LMS perfect, you may find one or two tools that save you time. My top two favorites are the student view and course navigation extensions. Give them a try.

Feature Image Source

Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash

February 2, 2021 0 comment

Chromebooks Google Tips and Tricks

Avoid Hormone Addiction with a Tab Manager

by Miguel Guhlin May 28, 2019

written by Miguel Guhlin

About two minutes after I start working on a project, I end up with a million browser tabs open. It’s gotten so bad that I have to open up extra browser windows and drag them to a second screen to have more tabs open. Have you experienced this challenge? If so, here are a few ways to solve the too-many-tabs problem. What’s more important, it will ease your hormone addiction. No, really.

Are Tabs a Sign of Hormone Addiction?

Did you know your brain releases dopamine as you jump from tab to tab? The more tabs, the more the “feel-good” hormone shows up. Who knew you could get a kick from open browser tabs? Opening tabs, jumping from one to another, gives you a pleasurable feeling. You aren’t being productive, but you might feel as good as if you were. You’re a dopamine demon, a feel-good fanatic, a tab troll.

Want to take the first step and avoid dopamine addiction? Use a tab manager. Before I share the list of tab managers that will save you from the risk of dopamine addiction, you should know this:

Chrome splits every tab, plugin, and extension into its own process. If one thing crashes, it doesn’t bring down the whole web page, or all your tabs at once. This can lead to higher memory (aka RAM) usage, since it has to duplicate some tasks for every tab. (Source: Lifehacker)

Open too many tabs and you will experience what happened to me. Your browser will crash. Yes, you may get some tabs back when you re-open your browser, but maybe not all. Are you a Firefox user like me? You’ll experience similar issues with this browser as well.
tab manager

Image Source: OneTab

The Benefits of Tab Managers

Here’s a quick list of the features of tab managers, with the first one a big one for educators: making a backup of your tabs so you can get back to work. How many times have you come to the end of a work session and realized you didn’t want to close your browser? When you want to avoid closing your laptop lid and fear losing browser tabs, how do you save those?

Benefits of tab managers include the following:

Save your tabs to Google Drive or some other online space. This makes it easy to put a project on hold until later.
End tab tyranny. This happens when you have so many tabs open that you can’t find which one you are looking for. After all, you shouldn’t be using a second large screen to meet your dopamine addiction. Collapse all those tabs into one.
Avoid apocalyptic browser crashes. Too many tabs can result in a browser crash. Save your device’s system resources by merging all those tabs into one and putting tabs into hibernation.
Skip accidental tab closures. When you have too many tabs open, you may click the wrong “x” in the corner of a tab. Wham, there goes your unsaved tab. Safeguard those tabs.
Recover closed tabs. Did you close a tab and it’s gone? Some tab managers let you re-open those closed tabs.

Five Helpful Tab Managers

Ready for my top five list? Each of these works in either Chrome or Firefox, and they have helped me manage my feel-good hormone addiction — and prevented my browser from crashing.

TooMany Tabs: This colorful tab manager makes it easy to hibernate open tabs. Be careful, though: Tabs with data will be lost. Use TooMany Tabs with static pages where you aren’t working on an open document that is not auto-saved. You can see a list of recently closed tabs and re-open them. TooManyTabs makes backing up your tabs to Google Drive easy and cost-free.
OneTab: This Chrome and Firefox-friendly solution puts all of your tabs into a list on a single page. It takes the immediate step of saving your browser system resources. It’s a bit of a feel-good downer, though. Why? It collapses all tabs into one. On the positive side, it makes it easy to export and re-organize your tabs via drag-and-drop functionality.
Tree Style Tabs: These tab managers push your tabs to the left side of the screen, as well as offer tab stasis. My favorite for Firefox is Tree-Tab manager. In Chrome-based browsers, Sidewise Tree-Style Tabs is a good option.
Tabs Outliner: Like other tab managers, you can drag and drop to organize and save your tabs. You can also annotate tabs, assign new names, and more. The entire list with notes can be exported to Google Docs, MS Word, or HTML It offers tree-style tabs, too. This versatile tab manager makes opening and closing tabs a single-click solution. Paid users can auto-save their tabs to Google Drive.

Get started now with one of these solutions and save yourself from dopamine addiction.

Did You Know?

Microsoft Edge is making the transition to being a Chromium-based rendering engine. What this means is that long-time Chrome users can now get this new Chromium-based engine version of Microsoft Edge. Sync your browser bookmarks using your Microsoft account and run Chrome Web Store extensions in MS Edge browser. Get the Chromium-based Microsoft Edge online now. It works great!

May 28, 2019 0 comment

Chromebooks Google Tips and Tricks

Digital Sticky Notes

by Miguel Guhlin September 27, 2018

written by Miguel Guhlin

Spend a lot of time in your web browser? If so, you may find yourself wishing for digital sticky notes that you can slap on a web page. Since I work on a variety of Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides, I find myself trying to remember my next to-do item. While tools like Google Keep and OneNote work great, they don’t connect my notes to a specific web page.

Using actual paper sticky notes seldom works well for the multitude of web pages. The reason why is we travel from browser to browser on different devices. In this blog entry, we will explore several solutions to this common problem.

Problem

“How can I put sticky-notes on a webpage I happen to be visiting so I can remember what I need to do with it?”

Sticky notes can be a boon for students capturing notes on a web page, too. Note-taking has several benefits that go beyond interactive checklists. Now that we’ve clarified the problem, let’s see what Chrome browser extensions or apps work.

Solution #1: Sticky Notes – Just Popped Up!

This Chrome browser extension makes adding digital sticky notes easy and quick. You have a variety of color combinations to choose from for your sticky note. Sticky Notes are “always on top,” but you can hide them for a short time. Click on the stylized “n” on a yellow background. Even if you empty the Chrome browser’s cache or cookies, data is not lost. What’s more, all data is auto-saved. That’s a big deal. One feature I wish Sticky Notes had is the ability to move the note around the web page. As of its current release, the note appears in the top right hand corner of the screen. Another feature that it lacks is having more than one note per web page.

A nice alternative to this extension is Note Anywhere. It allows you to move notes around the screen and saves the notes to a web page. It lacks many features other solutions have, but it does offer adding more than one note to a web page. However, you cannot resize the note. Too bad this first solution lacks these features as well.

Solution #2: Sticky Notes

Similar in name the previous solution, this Sticky Notes has a few different features. This Chrome app (as opposed to a browser extension) makes it easy to save notes. It is designed to be used as a desktop computer app. But, since it saves your notes to Google Drive, you could also use it on a Chromebook to keep track of any needed notes. It features a menu that offers speech-to-text, link embedding, and much more, as you can see from the list below. For example, the text showing in the note below was dictated.

Its feature list includes speech recognition for dictation, Google Drive synchronization, and online note sharing. You can move notes around on the screen, pin a note “always on top,” and choose colors and fonts. A feature many Google Keep users wish for is the ability to format text with bold, underline, and italics. This app enjoys all those. It also handles task or to-do lists as well.

Solution #3: Post It All: Sticky Notes

This powerful solution combines many of the features of solutions one and two. You add sticky notes to your favorite web pages and then notes appear across browsers and devices. The multi-colored notes are easy to add to pages you visit or created in a dashboard. A serious drawback to this extension, however, is that it reloads your open browser tabs. It appears to lack a graphical interface to text formatting options. If you know keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl-B for bold), you can take advantage of those features.

Windows 10 Sticky Notes app

Did You Know?

If you are a Windows 10 user, there is a built-in “Sticky Notes” app. Launch the Win10 Sticky Notes app via Cortana in the bottom left corner of your screen. Look for a space to type or magnifying glass. You can also find it listed under “S” in the Start Menu list of programs. Type Ctrl-N to create a new note or Ctrl-D to delete it. Learn more.

Solution #4: Notematic or Note Board

Need more complex solutions? While these are outside the scope of this blog entry, here are two. The first is Notematic.

A bit more complex at first, Notematic comes with a tutorial. To create notes, you long-press with your left mouse button to create a note. The note allows you to specify a title and then fill in your notes. You can create pin boards to house your non-website attached notes. I do not recommend it for use with younger learners. Older students may find its feature set rich and worthy of exploration. One caveat: To synchronize your notes, you will have to create a Notematic Cloud account. This may be undesirable in a K-12 environment.

A similar, more robust solution is available for Android and iOS apps. Try the cross-platform, cross-browser Note Board. Again, you will need to make an account. Consider Google Keep and/or OneNote as free alternatives to these two options.

Solution #5: Notes for Google Drive

A nifty note-taking solution, this Chrome extension saves your notes to Google Drive. You can open the notes as Google Docs. Some features that set it ahead of the others include bold, italics, and text highlighting, and the ability to add bulleted or numbered lists. This particular extension works independent of a web page, so no assigning notes to a set page. The fixed position of the notes make it less than desirable. The inability to adjust the note window size can cover up valuable screen space. This can block critical content.

What Do You Recommend?

Finding the right digital sticky note solution can be tough. After looking over so many note-taking apps, I have two recommendations. Need to keep it simple? Use Solution #1. It makes adding a single note to a page easy.

Need something a bit more full-featured? Use Web Page Sticky Notes. This is a Chrome extension that allows many, movable digital sticky notes. Web Page Sticky Notes gives power users encryption options for security. You can export/import notes and use Markdown and many more options.

Not sure you like these choices? Spend a few hours exploring the Chrome Web Store “notes” options.

September 27, 2018 6 comments

Digital Literacy

A New Tool for Digital Citizenship

by Lori Gracey September 10, 2018

written by Lori Gracey

I think we can all agree that it is much harder today to know what is true and what isn’t. The amount of fake news, almost true news, and just plain stupid, no-one-cares news has grown unbelievably in the last few years. Couple that with the fact that, regardless of what generation we belong to, we seem to be more willing to believe anything we are told, and you have the recipe for a disaster.

Learning About Fake News

Being a good digital citizen includes being able to tell what is real from what isn’t. You can find ways to help teach students about that in this blog. But there is now another tool that can help as they are learning. And that is SurfSafe.

SurfSafe is a free Chrome add-on that attempts to identify misleading, Photoshop-ed, and fake news throughout the internet. As the company explains,

“At the heart of every fake news story is an image that is likely doctored or taken out of context. SurfSafe uses the news sites you trust, along with face-checking pages and user reports as benchmarks for what images are considered ‘safe.’ It’s simple — just hover over an image and SurfSafe will classify the imge as ‘safe,’ ‘warning,’ or ‘unsafe.’ It will also show you every instance of where the image in question has been seen before. That means that you will be able to see if the context of the image in the article has anything do to with the original instance.”

digital citizenship

How SurfSafe Works to Promote Digital Citizenship

digital citizenship

It works by having you first tell it what news organizations you trust. Then, it uses those sites as a basis for truth as it evaluates content from other web pages. In addition, you can easily report anything that you see that is not correct through a simple check box.

Here’s an example of what that might look like:

digital citizenship

In the Classroom

I would encourage CTOs and Google admins to add the SurfSafe resource to both student and staff browsers. Then, instructional and technology specialists should spend time helping teachers understand how the add-on works, as well as how to best teach students to use it. I envision robust discussions on what news sources are actually reliable today, why the use of fake news and propaganda has grown so much, and how important it is for all of us to rely only on accurate and factual news upon which to base our opinions and actions. SurfSafe provides an excellent tool, as well as a powerful opening to talk about bigger issues we all face.

September 10, 2018 5 comments

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