Two Resources to Help Make Virtual & Hybrid Learning More Equitable & Effective
This is a guest post from Dr. Beth Holland (@brholland), Research & Measurement Partner at The Learning Accelerator (TLA) – a national nonprofit. As the school year ramps up again, teachers and leaders have to confront the same challenge that has been plaguing schools since the start of the pandemic: how to develop more effective, […]
Six Reasons to Try Tract for Remote & Hybrid Learning
Disclosure: Tract is an advertiser on FreeTech4Teachers.com As we head into winter (in the northern hemisphere) there may be more opportunities to try new approaches to online and hybrid learning. One of those new approaches to try is using Tract. Tract is a service that I wish I had access to last year when my […]
Five Ways to Get Students to be More Active in Remote Learning
This is a guest post from Hali Larkins (@HaliLarkins), communications intern at The Learning Accelerator and Master’s student at Columbia Teachers’ College. In remote environments, sustaining engagement is a challenging task even for adults, but with school continuing to take place virtually, the question of “How to motivate and keep students engaged in remote learning?” […]
Three Ways Teachers Can Improve Remote Learning
This is a guest post from Hali Larkins (@HaliLarkins), communications intern at The Learning Accelerator and Master’s student at Columbia Teachers’ College. Right now, many students are still trying to navigate major changes to their environments, learning formats, and wellbeing —all factors that can impact their ability to do well in remote learning. Teachers can […]
Two New Helpful Features in Google Meet
Since the summer Google has been teasing us with announcements of new features “coming soon” to Google Meet. Some of those features are finally starting to arrive. Two of them that I recently got access to are background blurring and meeting controls. With background blurring enabled everything behind me is blurred. With the meeting controls […]
7 New Google Meet Features for Teachers
In a move that clearly is an attempt to match the functionality of Zoom and Microsoft Teams, Google has announced some new features that will soon be coming to Google Meet for G Suite for Education users. All of the new features that were announced address the many concerns about Google Meet that teachers have […]
Quickly Create Online Whiteboards for Your Students
In this week’s Practical Ed Tech Tip of the Week I mentioned a new service called Whiteboard.fi. A few weeks ago I learned about it from Alice Keeler and Larry Ferlazzo. Last week I was able to give it a real try. Whiteboard.fi lets you create an online room in which each of your students […]
The Week in Review – It Was a Rough One
Good morning from Maine where the ground is once again blanketed with six inches of heavy, wet snow. We had a big storm on Thursday night that knocked out the power to more than a third of the homes, including mine, in my county. So in the midst of remote learning we had a snow […]
The Arduino Design Project I’m Doing With Students Who Don’t Have Materials at Home
Like a lot of other schools, mine closed without much more than a few hours notice. We went home on a Friday afternoon and Sunday evening we were told that we were not going back. My 9th grade computer science principles students were really starting to hit their stride with the various Arduino projects they […]
A Student View of Joining a Zoom Meeting on an Android Phone
A few days ago I got an email from a reader asking me what it looks like when a student tries to join a Zoom meeting on an Android phone. It was a good question because it is important to have an understanding of what a student experiences when he or she tries to use […]
A Solution to Zoom “Not Responding” on Windows 10
On Friday morning I started having problems with every Zoom meeting that I tried to launch or join on my Windows 10 computer resulting in the annoying “application not responding” message. I didn’t have the same problem on my Mac. Based on the response to a Tweet that I posted, I wasn’t the only one […]