Merry Christmas!

I hope you have a wonderful and safe holiday season. Enjoy your time with family and friends and relax.

Enjoy a few of my favorite Christmas carols.

The Most Dangerous Writing App

Need students to practice typing for a certain amount of time? Want to improve your own writing and thought process? Want a challenge? The Most Dangerous Writing App site allows you to set a time frame to start and finish your writing. If you complete the time you are rewarded with a text file of your work. If you pause (for around 5 seconds as far as I can tell) all of your work is lost. 

Looks like you can set the timer for 3, 5, 10, 20, 30, or 60 minutes or 75, 150, 250, 500, 1667 words. In regular mode you see your text as you type. However, there is also a hardcore mode. This blurs your text after it is typed. All you will see is a giant letter of the key you just pressed. 

I tried the three minutes and it was hard to put a congruent thought for that long with my mind thinking I need to type something so I don't lose all of my work. I could see this as keyboarding a challenge where students are transcribing from another text. But I could also see this for the unmotivated writer who needs to work under a deadline. 

Check out the site and give it a try.

 http://www.themostdangerouswritingapp.com/

Google Education On Air: It Takes a Teacher

https://educationonair.withgoogle.com/live/2016-dec?tab=americas

Recently, Google produced their Education on Air event. Linked above are all of the On Demand sessions you can view for free. Get great tips, tricks, and ideas from around the globe. The link takes you to the Americas sessions, but make sure to check out the Austraila and the United Kingdom tabs as well. 

New Year's Resolution

A bit early to talk about resolutions, but I already have one. Write on my blog more than I have this semester. I am setting a goal of once a week. Hopefully, I can do that.

Most of the resources I have been sharing have been on my Twitter feeds. Please feel free to follow me at either location or both.

https://twitter.com/scottfirenza - My personal Twitter account. I mainly post about EdTech, but you will also see my personal life creep in. Disney, Vacations, the Dallas Cowboys, Food, and more... If any of that interests you, please follow

https://twitter.com/lisdtechdeploy - My more Professional twitter feed branded under my district, Lubbock ISD. All technology resources for education and the classroom. Lots of Google, Chromebooks, iOS apps, Internet resources, and more. 

Lubbock ISD Summer Leadership Institute

Had a great time presenting at our district's Summer Leadership Institute. Here are links to my presentations.

Sharing is Caring... For Leaders - 
I shared out resources for our campus and district leaders to help improve their online communication with their stakeholders (students, parents, community). I shared Blogger, Google Sites, Adobe Spark, Microsoft Sway, Twitter, Canva, the Microsoft Selfie App, Vocoroo, Tricider, and Watchkin. Check out the slide deck for links and training resources.

10 Imperatives for Technology in the Classroom -  - Outline
This was a little bit different session that just sharing resource after resource. It was more of theory behind using technology and changing your mindset of what has traditionally been done in the classroom.
I did share some resources on Augmented Reality and dropped a lot of big names in #EdTech.

TCEA Chromebook Academy

I have the opportunity to present today at the TCEA Chromebook Academy. I've been asked to present my Give your Classroom a Voice with Blogger session. A really fun and easy to use tool to give your classroom a voice.

Check out my resources: http://scottfirenza.blogspot.com/p/blogger.html 

If you are at the academy come by the Transformation room at 2:00 PM.

How to Give a Bad Presentation

How to Give a Bad Presentation

It sounds like a terrible topic, but I found three videos which will hopefully help you as you prepare for your next presentation. As I prepare for three presentations I have coming up in the next couple of weeks, I watched these videos reminding myself to not be like these presenters (anymore). Hopefully, I don't. Enjoy!

Keyboard Shortcuts

A couple of reasons for this post.
1. Share some of my favorite keyboard commands.
2. Play with the new gif creator in SnagIt's latest version.


CTRL + SHIFT + T
Have you ever closed a browser tab on accident and wished you had not? Use the ctrl+shift+T keyboard command to retrieve the last tab you opened. Works on Windows and Chromebook. Mac users try the command key instead of the control key.

press the three keys together to bring back the closed tab

 

SPACE Bar
When surfing, long pages are hard to scroll through using the scroll wheel on the mouse or the elevator on the sides of the page. Press your spacebar to help with this. Pressing the spacebar will scroll down a  page. Hold down the Shift key while pressing the spacebar to scroll back up a page. Works with most browsers.

Spacebar scroll down. Shift + Spacebar scrolls up

 

CTRL + Enter 

Isn't typing the entire URL a pain. Who has time to type the extra 15 keystrokes for  http://www. and the .com? With CTRL + Enter you don't have to. It will enter that info for you. Works with most browsers. Good if you know the short url.

ctrl+enter adds the www and the .com to urls.

But what about .net and .org?

ctrl +  shift + enter will autocomplete the .org

shift + enter will autocomplete the .net

And for a bonus! Add the Alt key to any of those combinations and the browser will autocomplete your URL in a new tab.

ctrl+alt+enter

shift+alt+enter

ctrl+shift+alt+enter

EdTechTeam South Plains Summit

EdTechTeam South Plains Summit Featuring Google for Education In Partnership With Lubbock ISD

 June 1st and 2nd Lubbock ISD will be hosting a technology summit featuring Google for Education. This event is produced by the help of the EdTechTeam

I will be presenting two sessions at the summit that I am pretty excited about (albeit a bit nervous as I have never presented either of these before).

• Creativity with Google Drawing - June 1st, 10:00 am
  
• Give your Classroom a Voice with Blogger - June 1st, 1:30 pm

My resources can be found at https://goo.gl/ZXEKfF

I use both of these products and have attended many sessions on how to and why to use the products. I hope I can convey that message to my participants.

Still time to sign up for the Conference or the Pre-Conference 

https://tx.gafesummit.com/southplains

$329 for one person for the two day conference

$199 for one person for the one day pre-conference on May 31st.