Hi and welcome back to a new episode of Tech Tuesday!
It’s definitely been a minute since my last episode in December. With the holidays, my birthday and the end of the semester, which also is the end of classes in my district and the beginning of new classes, January always is a crazy month! It’s a fitting time for a break, but now I’m ready to jump back into the world of educational technology.
Today’s episode is featuring some new additions to our favorite technology tools. From Canvas to Flipgrid, these companies have been busy continuing to add updates. I’m including updates from as back as October because you may not be aware of some of these. So let’s jump in and check them out!
Let’s start with Zoom that has 4 significant updates. The first is instead of sharing your screen to present direct instruction, you can share your PowerPoint or downloaded Google Slide presentations as your background in Zoom. Downloaded Google Slides will convert to PowerPoint files.
The benefit of using this feature is that students can both see the content you are teaching and see you outside of a small square off to the side of the screen. The idea is that students will connect more with you and the content at the same time. To do this, click the Share Screen button located in your meeting controls, then click on Advanced.
Click Slides as Virtual Background, then browse, and select the PowerPoint presentation file you want students to see. Click Open and voila! Your presentation is now your background.
Another addition is that you can customize your waiting room. My district is moving towards concurrent and hybrid teaching within the next month and I can see this feature as being important to share items with students who are remaining in a virtual environment. This screen can show students a welcoming message or two or three things that they need to do while they are waiting for class to proceed, such as opening Canvas and viewing the day’s agenda or gathering supplies for the lesson.
Here’s how to set this up: in your Zoom account go to settings, and find the waiting room option. Make sure this is turned on. Next, click on Customize Waiting Room. On this window, you can change the title, add an image or Bitmoji, or add a message to students. To change the title at the top, click the pencil icon and add your name or a welcome message.
You can also add an image to the waiting room that you create from Google Slides, Google Drawings or Canva and may include a Bitmoji or other information for students. Click the logo button and upload the image you created.
Finally, you can add more text or information in the description area of the waiting room. Once you have the waiting room set up the way you want, click close.
The next significant addition is that you can use the closed captioning feature! I know in my building, we were leery of turning this on at first because it didn’t seem to work exactly the way as expected. But then I attended one of the Zoom sessions at VSTE in December and was very impressed by how well it worked. One of our teachers has been testing this out in their ESOL class and she prefers it over the Closed Captioning in Google Slides now. So I think it’s safe to say the updates Zoom has made makes this a great feature to use.
To set this up, in your Zoom account go to settings and scroll down to the In Meeting (Advanced) features until you find Closed Captioning. Toggle this to on and check the box underneath the toggle, which is labeled Enable live transcription service to show transcript on the side panel in-meeting. Then in a Zoom session with students, click on the CC button located on your meeting controls. A new window will open. Under Live Transcript, click on enable auto-transcription.
The last update is about breakout rooms. Students can manually choose their own breakout rooms, rather than you assigning them. This is great for group work or if you want to split up work allowing students who want to work together to go to one room, students who want to work individually go to another, and those who need help from you go to a third room or whatever setup you need for your classes!
Check out this template from Esther Park that visually shows these examples for how students can select a room to join. You could also follow @TeachMrOGrady’s idea on Twitter where you could create a breakout room for every student and let them work individually.
When someone needs help, they can call you in or you could set up a document like Google Slides where students are working on individual slides. If you view the slides in grid view, you will see thumbnails of all the slides. If someone needs help, they turn the background to red and it will stand out among the other slides making it easy for you to view.
Here’s how to set this up: when you go to set up breakout rooms, decide how many rooms you will need. Then click on let participants choose room. You can then rename the rooms and click on open all rooms.
On the participant side, students will see breakout rooms listed in the meeting controls. Students will click this button and then see a list of rooms to choose from. Then they can click join and say yes to be taken to the room. Students can change rooms following the same steps.
Let’s talk about Flipgrid next. Students can now respond with AUDIO only as an option! It’s called Mic Only mode and works as responses for students who don’t want to show their face OR it could be used to create a podcast! I really like that idea!
Here’s another. This year I added time stamps to Tech Tuesday so that you can jump to various parts of the episode and watch what’s most important to you. Flipgrid has added the same option! Type in the text comment area and type the time and it turns it into a clickable link!!
Up next is PearDeck. I hope everyone has heard about this new feature, but if you haven’t, Pear Deck premium now allows for co-teachers to have access to the teacher dashboard! Teachers who are invited to the Shared Teacher Dashboard have all the same controls as the host teacher to manage the lesson.
Here’s how to set this up: from the Teacher Dashboard menu, click the 3 dots and select invite a coteacher. A new window will open with a link to the session. Copy and paste this link into an email or a chat window. You can do this at any point during a live session, as well as add as many co-teachers to a session as you wish.
We use WeVideo a lot in my district and I am SO happy to finally be able to allow students to work on a video at the same time! Have students choose one person from the group to create a collaborative project. On the dashboard, select projects and click on the blue “+” button. Add the name of your project in the title box. Then click collaborative and click next. Click invite with link and click next and then next again and skip the next step. Copy the link on this page and send it to the group members. Then click either Create Video to start or finish to come back to it later.
Okay – let’s get to Google. I have several updates for Google Docs. First, you can now have multiple page orientations mixing both portrait and landscape within a single document! This is beneficial if you want to have a better fit for wider tables, charts and graphics. You can change either the orientation of a selection of text or change the orientation for a single section or multiple sections.
If you want to change a selection of text, highlight the text or image that you want to change the orientation for, then right click on the text or image. Select Change page to landscape or Change page to portrait. Now, you see some pages are portrait and the page where I highlighted the text is landscape. If you want to change a single section or multiple sections, click where you want to create multiple sections. Go to Insert>Break>Section break.
To change the orientation of a section, click File>Page setup. Set Apply to, This Section, if you would like to apply the page orientation to the selected section only. Or you can do the same thing by selecting Format>Page orientation. Use This Section Forward if you would like to apply the page orientation to this and all subsequent sections. Select the orientation to apply and then click OK.
The next update in regards to Google Docs has to do with the two new icons just off to the side of a Doc. This is where you can add comments OR add suggested edits. This has long been one of my favorite tools in Google Docs, but isn’t widely used. So I’m very happy to see it in a prominent place and I hope more people use it!
This last update is a really cool feature in Google Docs. Everyone should know that I am a big fan of forcing students to make a copy of Google files. But you can also force a copy and include pre-loaded comments that can act as guiding questions for students. Or you can use the comments to provide additional resources, links, voice recordings from you, and other assistance for your students. (I am SO excited about voice recordings!!!)
So forcing a copy with the comments included is actually a hack of the update. The actual update is that when you make a normal, regular old copy of a document, there’s a new checkbox labeled copy comments and suggestions.
So let’s say, you’re in a meeting and you want a copy of the meeting notes that you can edit without messing with the original. Some people in the meeting added comments off to the side, so when you go to make a copy of that document, you can click this checkbox and the comments will appear on your new document. Okay, here’s another scenario. You make a Google Doc that you want each student in your classes to have a copy of AND you want all the comments you’ve added to the document to be copied as well. Now, here’s where the hack comes in.
When you force a copy of a document you change the end of the share link from edit all the way through to sharing (edit?usp=sharing) to copy. But if you want the comments – you need to add quite a bit more. You now need to change the share link and delete everything from edit and over to the right to (edit?usp=sharing) to copy?copyComments=true. It’s a mouthful, but well worth it! Check out Eric Curts’ blog post that talks about this new feature in more detail and how you can add those voice recordings I’m so excited about!
Google Sites also has some nice updates as it now lets you customize the text size, color, font, and spacing. Click on the text as normal and in the toolbar you will see the new features.
Jamboard has fast become a teacher favorite and it seems like Google is adding more abilities to this product every week! The first update is that you can now add images as backgrounds just like you can in Google Slides! This is such a game changer! Go to Set Background and then click the image icon and upload your image.
Wow, what a jam packed episode! Which update so far has been or will be the most useful for you?
Ms Priester EDU 