google apps for education

METT Episode #42 - Pass the Baton, with Theresa Hoover

There's a new episode of Music Ed Tech Talk out!

Theresa Hoover returns to talk about career changing, COVID practices worth bringing into this school year, productivity apps, and empowering student creativity!

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Show Notes:

App of the Week:
Robby - Instapaper / Readwise Theresa - Kumospace

Album of the Week:
Robby - Turbo Theresa - Cory Wong

Tech Tip of the Week:
Robby - Safari Tab Groups, Sync Safari and Chrome bookmarks with a Windows PC Theresa - Chrome Reading List / Favicons Favorite Bar

Where to Find Us:
Robby - Twitter | Blog | Book
Theresa - Twitter | Website

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Control Alt Achieve covers 40 Google for Education Updates for Summer 2021

Google made some big education announcements last week, including a bunch of education features across their apps.

Control Alt Achieve has a great overview of them. Click below to read more.

Control Alt Achieve: 40 Google for Education Updates for Summer 2021:

Summer is a nice time to take a break and relax, but Google has instead been busy working on new updates and features for schools.

On June 22nd Google hosted their "Anywhere School 2021" event (http://goo.gle/tas21) where they covered loads of announcements concerning 40 updates for Google Classroom, Google Meet, Chrome and Chromebooks, and Google Workspace tools in general.

In case you missed it, or are just trying to review through everything that was shared, see below for a list of all 40 updates that were shared at the event.

On the one hand, many of these features looks great (especially the education streaming feature with YouTube/Google Meet). On the other hand, it is easy to see that some of these features are born out of the needs of virtual/hybrid learning and may not be as useful as schools potentially return to in-person instruction this fall.

That said, it looks like there is plenty in store for Google Classroom users, no matter what teaching environment you may find yourself in this fall.

🔗 Using Jamboard in the Music Classroom

UPDATE: Listen to Theresa’s appearance on my podcast and subscribe below…

Theresa Hoover Ducassoux is a band director in Virginia doing awesome work ensuring that her students are engaged and empowered in her band classes, online and in person. She is especially savvy with a lot of the web-based tech tools that are popular in education right now.

Her post, which I have linked and quoted below, explains some ways you might use Google's Jamboard app in the music classroom to engage students.

Getting Started with Google Jamboard - Off the Beaten Path:

Jamboard is one of the newer and lesser-known G Suite tools, but it’s one that I love and am excited to use this school year! Jamboard is a collaborative whiteboard that be accessed by an app or web browser. The simplicity of the tool makes it great for education. Jamboard is a great way to have all students in your class share their voices.

Jamboard is indeed excellent. I used it for a number of things last spring. One way we used it was to communicate and share what we had been up to in our free time when school started online.

CleanShot 2020-08-06 at 11.18.02@2x.png

I used this Jamboard our first day of online learning to ask students how they had been spending their extra time at home. Each section of the band had a page of the digital whiteboard to edit.

Another way we used it was as an adjudication tool for providing ourselves feedback on our virtual ensemble video progress. You can see a brief snippet of that process in the middle of my How to Make a Virtual Band video, below.

Go and check out Theresa's post, and all of her fine work at Off The Beaten Path Music. Spoiler: She is my podcast guest this week. Jamboard is just one of the many awesome tools and online teaching strategies we talk about. I learned a ton from her. That episode should be published tomorrow. Stay tuned!