Post #7 - Tech Tool Spotlight - PearDeck, iPad Tip of the Week, Teacher MacBooks, PDPs, AV Installs, Document Cameras, & Zoom

 


Today seemed like an abrupt end to fall. Hope you are safely home and ready for the weekend. Lots of Tech Updates this week. Please let me know if you have any questions or need assistance. 

Tech Tool Spotlight: Pear Deck

This year, we have Pear Deck premium districtwide access for all teachers, administrators, staff, and students for the 20-21 school year. Go to Pear Deck, Teacher Login, and sign in with Google. You should see “You’re on a Premium account, you rule” when you click your Chrome Profile pic on the top right.


Next, install the Pear Deck for Google Slides Add-on


Helpful Info:

WIT Site - Wayland Instructional Technology - Pear Deck Resources

Get Started with Pear Deck Slides

Remote Learning for Pear Deck

Take a look at the Teaching Resources Tab on the Pear Deck site. It is full of great information about how you can use this tool with your students.



iPad Tip of the Week - Close Safari Tabs!! I have seen students have over 100 Safari tabs open. This will quickly drain your iPad's battery as well as decrease its performance. Watch this video on how to quickly close all 100 tabs in 3 steps! 

This TIP also works on iPhones! 😁


Teacher MacBook Computes: The laptops have been ordered and are expected to arrive before Thanksgiving. Here is the list of people who will be getting a new laptop. Please begin your backup process now. The easiest way is to organize your information into folders and upload the folders to your google drive, where you essentially have unlimited storage.

Note: The new laptops will not have Microsoft Office installed.  You will, however, have accounts on office365.com to access the online version of Word, Powerpoint, Excel at no cost to students and teachers. You can also now edit and work with Office documents in Google Docs or convert them to Google Docs. You should have received an email from Microsoft with your Office 365 login information. 

PDPs: Did you submit your Wayland Individual Learning Plan (ILP) - Remote Learning 2020 to document all of the work you did learning so many new tools? If not, do so now. The form can be found on our WIT - PD site. Please follow the link on the ILP to submit your documentation for PDPs.

AV Installs: We are moving forward with the next round of AV upgrades. Alyssa, Ally, Lise, and Heather will be getting an interactive flat panel set up over the December break. 



Document Cameras - Ipevo document cameras have shipped! We expect to receive close to 20 at the Happy Hollow. These document cameras have both an HDMI and USB connection. As soon as they arrive and are tagged, we will distribute them. You can download the Visualizer software from the Chrome store, see this link. You can use these with Zoom and connect directly to your laptop. It can be very helpful for assisting in remote teaching and learning.


Zoom UPDATE: Zoom has released several updates over the past week. Please take a few minutes to update Zoom.

Zoom Attendance: Did you know that Zoom takes attendance. After your class, go to zoom.us, find reports on the left side, click it, click Usage, then Usage again. Scroll over to users, click on the # and then check off "show unique users" It gives a report of who was there and for how long.