It’s time for another roundup of tasty educational technology resources and tips that you can use today. (Be sure to check out the first one in this blog series here.)
Be Safe as You Head Back to Campus
This tongue-in-cheek list of “foolproof” safety tips for teachers returning to their campuses in August will definitely get you laughing (and maybe crying a little).
Why You May Not Want to Read Your Unread Email
Want to see just how long it will take to go through all of those unread emails in your inbox? This simple calculator will tell you. (It was very depressing for my inbox!)
India’s Richest Man Launches a Free Zoom Rival
JioMeet, a competitor to Zoom, is now available. It does not cap free calls and can be used with a maximum of 100 users at a time. To ensure that its meetings are secure, calls on JioMeet are password-protected and, like Zoom, it also has a “waiting room” that ensures no unwanted attendees can barge into the calls. The JioMeet app is available now for Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, and even for the Chrome browser.
Another Free Assessment Tool
DOOZY lets you create free multiple choice and short answer quizzes and then share them easily with your students. No account registration is required for either the teacher or the kids, which is great. But that also means that data from the quizzes taken is not saved. You can also modify existing quizzes to save time.
Save the Planet with the Ecosia Search Engine
Ecosia works like all of the other search engines except for one major difference. With their profits, they plant trees around the world, more than one million of them so far. As if that’s not enough reason to use them, they are also completely privacy friendly, which means they don’t sell your data to anyone or use third party trackers. And they have a Chrome extension.
Student-Created Virtual Backgrounds
Challenge your students to create their own virtual backgrounds for online classes. As TCEA member Scott Firenza shares on Twitter, “Not every student wants to turn on the camera to show others their environment. Have them create custom backgrounds: 1. collage about who you are, 2. all about a subject matter, 3. how does “subject matter” play a role in your life.”
Tips for Adding Videos to Google Docs
This great blog from Eric Curts offers four workarounds to providing videos in Google Docs.
Get Students Actively Engaged
Catlin Tucker offers these eight great ideas for engaging students during virtual learning. The ideas can work with any subject matter and for most age groups. Catlin provides excellent examples of each idea.
I hope that you found these tricks and resources useful. Have a great one to share? Please place it in the comments!
