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Showing posts from September, 2020

Generate Instant Pear Decks

  I’ll keep this short as the video explains most of you. Any new educational technology can be complicated to dig into from scratch as you attempt to align it to learning outcomes.  Well, a new feature that Pear Deck has introduced has taken a giant leap forward to help educators do just that.  Before we jump into the new features, if you are unfamiliar with Pear Deck and why my students and I consider it the #1 EdTech tool that helps their learning, check out the video in the previous blog post.   But if you are more concerned with why you should even dive into Pear Deck or learn about this new AI generation of Pear Deck sessions to a learning target, check out the video below. Like I said, I’m keeping it short so you have time to watch the video. If you have questions, please contact me at mohammam@elmbrookschools.org or the Pear Deck Learning team at support@deck.peardeck.com . Also, check out the amazing Stacey Roshan's video on this update. 

Make it Your Way: Summative Assessments in Flipgrid

  This year, our students have the choice to be in person or virtual. So in my physics classroom, roughly 20% of my population is virtual. This has resulted in me making major changes in terms of labs (not sharing materials for in person and coming up with solutions for virtual students.) But this week is our first unit assessment. One assessment structure I used last year during virtual learning was so effective, I decide to use it again this year. This structure was a bingo choice board in which students submit responses using Flipgrid. What I love about Flipgrid is that it provides such a wide variety of expression options. So when I tell students to create a video using Flipgrid, they have so many options in terms of creation. They can use audio, they can add text, they can capture video, they can upload video, they can upload images, they can add emojis. In addition, they can annotate live over everything. On the Bingo board students choose the content of the video. On Flipgri...

Captioning in Zoom

  Last year when we went 100% virtual virtual learning, my district was using Google Meet. This year, students have the option to attend face to face or virtually. To support those students who have chosen the virtual option, teachers are using the Pro version of Zoom instead of Google Meets. While there are many upsides to this, one major downside is the lack of free live closed captioning in Zoom. Zoom does have the ability to have an individual type in live captions, but we don't have the resources for that. There are also paid services that can be added to create live closed captions. But, I was looking for a free support option. To support those learners who would benefit from these captions, there are two workarounds for this. The first is using the tools generated by Google. I use Google Slides and Pear Deck for all of my presentations. When presenting in Google Slides, you can turn on auto closed captioning in the presentation menu. The audio picked up from the microphone i...