Did you know Google Translate cannot only be used to translate your emails, documents, and random text?! Google can actually translate an entire webpage for you! Now you cannot say that THAT is not cool! Why is it so cool? Well, if you work with students and parents who prefer another language you can use Google Translate to send them a translated link of websites that you share with students or even to make a translated copy of your own website for them! Now how cool is that?! Check out how easy it is to do to! It literally takes less than a minute to do it! I'd even venture to say it takes seconds. Check it out in the video below!
Ok, confession, for loving technology I am often a late adopter of what are those "fad" type technologies. Twitter was one of them especially considering who and what was being tweeted on the news media outlets. I'll be perfectly honest and say were it not because my job required me to create a Twitter account, I never would have. My favorite Twitter quote was often "Tweet, tweet, twit...Twitter is for twits". Ok, so there is my disclaimer on Twitter.
That being said, since I need to use it for work purposes, I've been exploring and it can actually be a pretty useful tool if you make it one. You control what you "need" to see. That means the following: 1. Begin with the end in mind - My twitter account will only be used professionally 2. Only follow people that will help your professional growth 3. Use it to network with like-minded colleagues and associates 4. Tweet informative things you find on your Google searches (this includes RT - aka Re-Tweeting) 5. Get familiar with the # (hashtags) - they can really be your friend 6. Create great lists so you can organize your feed If you're one of those that hates the thought of having a Twitter account, but feeling the pressure to get one professionally, the list above will greatly reduce your adversity to the thought. After initially creating my account it was easy to just feel bombarded and overwhelmed by all the tweets. That's when I started on #2 above and started deleting people that were just clogging up valuable screen real-estate. #5 & #6 are also great tools to prevent Twit...I mean tweet burnout. If you stick to these simple guidelines, your Twitter acceptance will go much smoother - I promise! To see my list and people I follow, click on the little Tweety bird above and check me out on Twitter! I love learning, but I often run into issues of scheduling, costs, boredom, etc. So, aside from lots of reading, I find the below sites really great at picking up new skills or enhancing existing ones! A lot of these places even offer courses from top universities ---- and it's all FREE! Some of the sites do have some paid classes, but I have found they often do send out codes for anywhere up to 90% off certain courses and the selection is still pretty great. Happy learning!!
Udemy Coursera Open Learn Open Education Database I found the blog below with an extensive list of links broken down by subject. BLOG
Introducing Google Apps For Education. What are they and who are they for? If you haven't already used them, they are pretty cool and make collaborating and sharing so much easier. Gone are the days of deleting old files to make space for new content. Gone are the days of searching for the latest and greatest revised version of a shared document. Gone are the days of attaching files to email only to be told the file is too large. With Google Drive you no longer have to worry about any of these things! It comes with UNLIMITED space...you got that?! UNLIMITED! That is not all though, when sharing in Drive you can choose who has editing and read-only rights and you can collaborate on a document simultaneously! How awesome is that?! Drive has built in features to create any document that you could create with Microsoft Office:
Word = Docs, Excel = Sheets, Powerpoint = Slides, InfoPath = Forms If you haven't tried it yet, you don't know what you're missing. Check out online training at the Technology Training & Development website under Google: http://www.nisd.net/technology/training/. Let me know if you want additional help with getting your Drive in gear! |
AuthorI am the TSS for Henderson & Scarborough Elementary Schools. I love technology and excited for all the new things happening at NISD! Archives
November 2014
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