Category: Blog

This is a sponsored post. All opinions, however, are my own.

One of my favorite things about hosting the Educational Duct Tape podcast is how often my guests surprise me with tech tools that I’ve never heard of. One of my favorite surprises came 2 years ago (almost to the day!) when my friend Angela Wojtecki told me about Boomwriter. As with every EduDuctTape episode, I asked Angela a “teacher question” that could be answered with educational technology. The question that I asked Angela, a school librarian, was “How can we have our students create ebooks?”

She gave me 4 options, but the one that delighted me with its fresh take on the process was Boomwriter. While the tool has multiple ways that it can be used to enhance students’ experiences with writing, the one that stands out to me is their collaborative book writing activity.  Imagine each of your students writing drafts for every chapter of a collaborative book, getting teacher feedback, revising reading their classmates’ chapters anonymously, and then voting to select the ones that become a part of the final text! The writing skills involved in this process are innumerable!

A few months ago, when my 4th-grade daughter told me that they were using it in her class, I could barely contain my excitement. (She marveled at me already knowing what it was 😊)

But that excitement was nothing compared to when I told her and her brothers about The Boomwriter Writing Bee. She was giddy about the competition and her big brother was impressed by the two authors who are involved (more on that below). Little bro was disappointed to be too young to participate this year, but he’ll have his chance soon enough!

So, what’s The Writing Bee? Continue reading The 2021 Boomwriter Writing Bee!

If you’re anything like me, you need more when you’re teaching, especially if it’s remote, hybrid, or concurrent teaching. More coffee. More time. More money in your paycheck. More aspirin. More screen space.

Well, I can’t help with the first 4, but I can help you with the last one.

Did you know that you can present Google Slides without using your entire screen?

This is super helpful in a handful of scenarios.

One of those scenarios is when you want to share Slides in Zoom, Google Meet, or any other videoconferencing solution, but don’t want to “lose” an entire screen just to your presentation. If you share just that presentation window and not your entire screen, you’ll be able to use your screen for 2 purposes! This is especially helpful if you only have one screen. In that situation, if you run your slides fullscreen, then you can’t see your students or the chat!  Use this tip to let you do both on the same screen!

What if you want to present two things and one is a presentation? If your presentation is fullscreen, you’ll have to toggle back and forth. Use this tip to present them side-by-side!

Check out this EduGIF to see how it works. Underneath the EduGIF, you can find a link to a “pausable” version and the step-by-step instructions.

Continue reading Present Google Slides in a Partial Screen

This is a sponsored post. All opinions, however, are my own.

Versatile.
Practical.
Powerful.
Convenient.
FREE.

If you use any of those words in the description of an educational technology tool, my ears immediately perk up. And, when Wakelet came out a few years ago, my ears were up and alert. But when they announced Wakelet Spaces in August 2020, the first word in that list–versatile–really came to the forefront for me. So, I’d like to share **19** ways that I think that you could use Wakelet Spaces in your school or class!

First, though, some background on what Wakelet Spaces are. At the time of the announcement, Wakelet was already a phenomenal tool for curation, organization, sharing, and more. It was even a great tool for collaboration, as you could collaborate with other Wakelet users within a Collection. The additional power of Spaces kicked that collaboration, curation, organization, and sharing up a notch: now you can organize multiple Collections into one Space. This is where that word from earlier–versatile–really comes into play though: Spaces can be created collaboratively and can be shared with anyone to view.

Before we get into my list of 19 ways to use Wakelet Spaces in your school or class, let me give you a quick peek into what creating a Space, collaborating in a Space, and sharing a Space looks like. Check out the #EduGIF below:

Now that you see how easy it is, let’s talk about some ways that you could potentially use them: Continue reading 19 Ways to use Wakelet Spaces in Your School or Class!