Individualized Educational Technology Tools for Literature

A blog post titled "My Students' Top Ten Essential Digital Reading Tools List" by Sara Kajder was recently shared among our Reading and Language Arts teachers. It includes some great ideas for using technology to learn about literature. As I read through the list, I realized that we often get caught up in new tools without thinking about how we can accomplish the same learning goal using the tools that teachers and students are already using. Because I like to simplify things, I created an alternative list individualized for our school.

What about your school? What tools are you already using that you could use to accomplish the same thing?

Moving from Microsoft Office to Google Drive

As I help teachers learn Google Apps and use Drive with students, I have found that many people are confused about what happens when they put their Microsoft Office documents in Drive. To help them conceptually understand what's going on, I made the following infographic. Feel free to edit and share it with people you work with if you find it useful. I imagine that Google Drive will get better and better at dealing with Office docs and this graphic won't be necessary anymore! But until then...

PDF file   |   original Pages file

Updates
Thank you Susan Reeves for your suggestion. Files have been updated.
Robie Jayawardhana extended this infographic to include Google Drive desktop version.
Volodymyr Volodin traslated this into Russian. Pages file - GDoc file

SAS Middle School Laptop Program BootCamp

Here's one reason why I haven't blogged lately. Over the past two days, we launched our Middle School Laptop Program in grade 7 with a BootCamp, thanks to +Patrick Green and many other people at SAS. Here's the story of the past two days...