With the year winding down to a close (only 3 full days and 3 half days left to go), I thought it would be nice to reflect on the top ed tech features I used in the classroom this year. Whether for the student's benefit or my own, these ten apps, add-ons, and extensions for Google earned MVP for my first year as a teacher. 1. Grammarly (Extension)Even as a resource room ELA teacher, grammar is still important to me. However, when my students are on a roll with their writing, they often forget about the grammar rules. Even though their ideas are great, their subject-verb agreement, punctuation, and even capitalization can fall to the wayside. Even going back and rereading and editing can cause grammar mistakes to fall through the cracks. By October, as the students were completing their full-length narratives, I had them add the Grammarly extension. While it wasn't compatible in Docs, the students were able to copy and paste their work into Grammarly's "New Document" section and have their work checked. Once they fixed their mistakes they just copied and pasted their edited work back into Docs to turn in. Since my school has Gmail for the students, the students were able to sign up to Grammarly and got a weekly report about how many unique words they used, their biggest area of weakness, and what they need to work on. Plus, for me, it's compatible in social media posts and other websites where spellcheck doesn't apply (including emails). It's really an awesome tool for anyone. 2. Google Dictionary (Extension)I had my students in both resource and ICS settings use this extension. While in the chrome browser, double clicking on any word will cause a pop up to appear with the definition of the word. This extension eliminates the constant "What does this word mean?" instances and avoids the five to ten minutes wasted while kids thumb through the dictionary. I have several students in ICS settings that are more reserved and do not feel comfortable asking questions in front of their peers. If they ask the definition of a common word, they get embarrassed when everyone in the class looks at them and most of the time they don't want either teacher hovering around them for too long while they work on an assignment. This extension allows the student to have a resource at their fingertips to help them understand the text without having a spotlight on them for not knowing all of the words. 3. Draftback (Docs Add-On)Draftback is an add-on for Docs that goes ten steps beyond the traditional "See Revision History" option. Deemed the "archaeology of great writing", this add-on allows you to play back every keystroke, backspace, and letter typed on any Doc during its entire existence. Keep in mind, however, that you must have editing rights through Sharing in order to view the Draftback. I admit, I sometimes I have fun just watching my entire report or worksheet typed back in fast-paced time, but it's also a good tool for the classroom for a few reasons. Student Accountability I often have students collaborate on the same Doc in a group project. This feature allows me to ensure that the students are all on task. While I cannot see who writes what words in the playback, I still can see every letter typed. I can see which groups were on task and focused and which were playing around and being silly. You can scan through the replay to watch the Doc down to each individual second. You can scroll through and see what times and days the Doc was active and what was being typed and erased. It's also great for those "copy and paste from the internet" situations. One second there's nothing and the next second there's a paragraph. It makes it easier for teachers to determine areas of plagiarism, because then they can just copy and paste that text into a google search surrounded by quotes to find where the words came from. Student Progress Have you ever watched one of those time lapse videos? The ones where a girl takes a picture of herself every day for a year and then mashes it into one minute long presentation where the pictures flip quickly so you can really see the progression? Or where someone photographs the daily growth of a plant and you can watch it grow in a few seconds? That's basically what Draftback does for students. After writing a really big essay, students can watch their writing process unfold in front of their eyes. It's interesting to see what they eliminated, where they struggled, and what parts were easier. They love watching their writing progress! 4. Kami (Extension)This might be the the ELA teacher in me coming out again, but Kami is a such an amazing resource. Granted, it took my kids a little awhile to become better acquainted with the extension, but once they did, they loved it. It's technically a document viewer that opens with PDFs (but has capacity to open other files, as well). From there, you can edit, annotate information with text boxes, highlight, strike-through text, add comments, collaborate with others, and even draw images. There are additional awesome features that are only (sadly) available with the paid version, which I couldn't do with my students. However, the free version is just as useful. I'd throw up a poem on Google Classroom as a PDF and my students would open up their own individual file. They would add text boxes to make comments, highlight important words and information, and could even draw our annotation shapes. It was just like writing on a printed version of the poem. Then they could export their annotations and share them with me, or upload them to a Google Classroom post. 5. Voice Typing (Docs Add-On)Voice Typing is a speech-to-text feature that is available within Docs. I had several of my students use it this year in my ICS ELA classes because they could verbalize their ideas eloquently but freeze when they were placed in front of the computer screen. But with this feature, we were able to just record their thoughts as they spoke aloud. Prior to the update, my students were frustrated that the only formatting capability they could do with their voice was adding periods, which meant they had to go back and add all of the punctuation themselves. However, the new update is seriously awesome. There are tons of new formatting voice commands that come within the add-on. This webpage provides access to every command you can complete on Docs using only your voice. They vary from adding tables to adding punctuation and even returning to places of error for correction. I've used this while the students were working in groups and the other voices didn't interfere too badly with my student's commands. After the update, my kids were a lot happier with their results (and so was I). 6. Boomerang for Gmail (Extension)This one is just for the teachers. Although, if someone has a way that this would be useful for students, I'm totally all ears. I'm a person who likes to get everything done upfront. All emails and reminders are typically written in the morning for me. If I get word of a test approaching in an ICS class, I'll quickly draft up an email with resources and links to help students and reminders for the parents. But I hated leaving these emails in "Draft" mode. Boomerang fixes that. It allows me to schedule a later date for the email to be sent. It has other great features, too. For example, if I'm sending out a permission slip in Forms through Gmail, I can choose to Boomerang the email back to the recipients in a specific amount of time, on a certain date, or if they don't reply or open the email. Boomerang also senses dates received in the body of an email. It asks you if you want to "Boomerang" this message before that date and you can set the amount of time before (an hour, a day, etc). So, when I get IEP meeting notifications, I typically boomerang them so I'm notified the day before the meeting is scheduled to occur. 7. Readability (Extension)If you've ever uttered the words "These ads on the side are so annoying" then this extension would be the one for you. Readability eliminates all the excess clutter from webpages and provides the user with a nice, clean and almost ebook-like format. Even when using popular news sites, the sidebars are filled with ads and other junk that the students with either be annoyed or distracted by. ("Oooh Toyota ads", "Old spice deodorant, yay!") With one click of the comfy couch, your webpage becomes almost like a Kindle reader. Gray screen, solid color text, and no background nonsense. It generally even keeps the photos associated with the article, which is great. You can export the format to a Kindle reader, but I've never tried it. Either way, it's less distraction and more focus for the students. 8. Verity Spell (Docs Add-On)For the spellers with extreme difficulty. Let's face it, there comes a time when everyone spells a word so incorrectly that even spell check has no clue what we're talking about. In special education, I deal with students with similar challenges. For most, spell check is sufficient, but for some, Verity Spell is needed. Verity Spell is an add-on specifically created for students with reading and writing difficulties, including dyslexia. It corrects words even as extremely different as "sositch" for "sausage" or "citon" for "kitten." For my students who really struggle with spelling, this add-on has been awesome. It also highlights all the "easily confused words" in a document, such as your homonyms. As students click on each one, it gives them sample sentences for the words to make sure they used the correct one. If I wrote the sentence: "I told them to go over they're" and incorrectly used the word, the add-on would give me sample sentences using "there", "their", and "they're" and "there" and ask which one I meant. I can either correct myself or determine that I was automatically correct the first time. It's good practice for students (especially because I'm so strict about using the correct versions of each word).
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