For the Teachers

Here is an awesome resource that aligns with the common core and is broken up by students' RIT scores. I don't know if some of you have already seen it, but there are tons of great things on this site. If you click "Common Core Curriculum Ladders", then on your particular subject, there are activities broken up based on student RIT scores. There is also a lot of good ideas under "Instructional Strategies: New Ideas and Old Favorites."

http://www.fortheteachers.org/

Google Tidbit: Research Features

Friday's Google Tidbit: Research Features

Do you or teachers in your school use Google Search to find information and then use Google Docs to type the information for a research paper?  Why not flip the process?  Type the paper and search within it.  Here's how:

When you are in your document and get to a word that you want more information about, right click and use Research from the menu to look up the word in Google.

Once you have clicked on Research, the Research panel will be open, which contains basic information at the top and Google search results at the bottom.

If you select a page from the Web Results, you will have 3 options:  Preview, Insert Link or Cite.

If you select Cite, 2 things will happen: (1) a small footnote number will be placed in your document wherever your cursor is and (2) a Citation will be placed at the end of your document.

Sample Number: 

Sample Bibliography Citation:

If you want to adjust the format of your citation to MLA, APA or Chicago, you can do that by selecting your default format.  Simply click the drop-down arrow below the search bar. Use the drop-down menus to choose from MLA, APA, or Chicago citation formatting, and customize other settings (like image filtering preferences for images or language settings for the dictionary). Your selected citation format is applicable to citations for web results, images, quotations and article citations.

HAPPY RESEARCHING!

THANKS TO KELLY SIEGERT FOR SHARING THIS TIDBIT SHE PICKED UP AT NCTIES

There's an App for That!!

Here is a list of apps worth checking out. I will update this list as people send them to me or I find them!

Reading 

Collins Big Cat Stories

Cambugs

Reading Monster

Reading Raven

WWF

Math 

Native Numbers

Writing 

Jumbled Sentences

Misc.

Air Sketch

 We Want Apps

Daily 5 Padlet

Created with Padlet

Google Safe Search

Friday's Google Tidbit: SafeSearch

Recently there has been a lot of discussion about Google Images in our office, so we wanted to share just a few things with you that we hope you will share with your teachers.  These tips can help to keep everyone safe and help make using the internet at school a positive learning experience.

Google has a SafeSearch feature that works great with images.  SafeSearch is automatically applied if the student is using a Chromebook, but for other devices (desktop, laptop or iPad), the student will have to turn the safe search feature on.  While this will not deter the student who is intentionally looking for inappropriate images, it will help with those who stumble upon these images by mistake. 

Directions for turning on SafeSearch on a computer:

1. Go to Google's image search: http://images.google.com (or just click images from the home screen)
2. Once on the image search, type in something safe (like apples) just to get to the search results page. From there, you will see in the top right corner the option to turn on SafeSearch. It actually says Filter explicit results.  Choosing to filter actually turns on Safe Search.

Once you have chosen SafeSearch, you will see this: 

Directions for turning on SafeSearch on an iPad:

1. Go to Google, search for something, and you will see a little wrench in the top right corner of the search results page.  Tap it, and you will see SafeSearch in the dropdown menu.
2. If you select SafeSearch, you will see there are 3 settings: Off, Moderate, and Strict. If you set it to Strict your iPad will have SafeSearch turned on - this setting should be remembered on the device.

Note: If you are in the Chrome app, logged into your Google account, and turn this feature on, the setting will be remembered.  For other browsers, this not the case.