August 27th - TodaysMeet

Have you ever wondered what your students would say if they could simultaneously have a conversation with each other about the lesson, activity, or movie that they were experiencing? Do you ever want instant feedback from students with questions or comments about your lesson?


This week's tool will allow you to do just that. It's called TodaysMeet and it is a free backchannel (online chatroom that is opening during a certain time period) website that will allow you to set up a private room for anywhere between 2 hours and one year. You can then share the link with students during lesson and watch as they talk about what they are trying to learn. Even better, the learning curve is nearly non-existent for users and creators.


To further extend the collaborative experience, students and staff that are using Twitter can join in the conversation by ending their tweets with a hashtag (#) that you can assign. This allows students to keep the conversation going when they are away from the classroom, or unable to access a computer but still have Twitter on their cellphones or mobile devices. We'll have more information on using Twitter in a later post.

Recently, several teachers, administrators and support staff from the Technology Team used TodaysMeet during our PBIS at our Opening Day Institute with great success. The conversations that ensued gave everyone participating a better understanding of the PBIS process, while keeping them engaged in the topic. Experts using the back channel were able to clarify understanding immediately.

There are numerous educational uses for this type of application. For more ideas on how to use TodaysMeet, check out the video below. As always, if you have questions, we are just a quick email away! If you have comments or questions for all to view, please add them to the "comments" link below the video!

August 19th - Google Squared

Welcome back from a restful summer! We're back again this year to give you the long and short of educational technology and to bring you the tools and the tricks to help you integrate technology into your classroom.

This week's tool is Google Squared. Our students have all used Google for web searches in the past; Google Squared is a new tool that allows Google to organize search results for you in table form. It's perfect for students' brainstorming activities or organizing concepts or important terms from a unit or the semester.

One of the greatest benefits of this tool is that every department can use it! We tried entering in "Fatty Foods" and got a list of things we should probably avoid (but don't!), we also entered in terms like "British Authors," "Elements," "Math Equations," "Spanish Verbs," "Famous Composer," "Types of Loans," and "World War II" and got a grid with our answers.

Another great component of this tool is that you can add columns with different types of of critera that you want your students to search for (click "Add" on the "add columns" part at the top of the grid). If there is a particular result you do not want simply click on the "X" next to that result and it will be deleted from the grid.

Go ahead, check it out and have some fun with it. If you have any questions we are only a quick email away! See you next week!