PPS Instructional Technology

Computers are everywhere, changing every industry on the planet. It is up to us as educators to help prepare our students to meet the technology challenges of the future. If you've heard about the Hour of Code before, you might know it made history. More than 100 million students have tried an Hour of Code. The Hour of Code 2017  is happening again this year, during Computer Science Education Week, December 4-10. What will your class do? You may be saying to yourself...I don't know anything about computer science, how can I teach my kids this? Good news? There are so many wonderful opportunities out there that are student directed, that you do not need to know ANYTHING about computer science in order to give your students this opportunity. Below are some excellent resources for getting your kids excited about CS! Hour of Code : The Hour of Code site from Code.org has many wonderful projects to get student started, including Minecraft , Star Wars , ​and Muana ! My current fa...

Need to print this tip?  Click here for a printable version . Although the need to print student documents has significantly decreased, there are still times when you want to print multiple student docs at one time.  For example, maybe you assigned a writing assignment in Google Classroom that you want to print for their writing folders.  You could go into each document individually and print it, but this can be a time consuming process.  Instead try using the app PDF Mergy to combine the documents into one PDF.  Then you only need to print one document.  WARNING: Just because you can print lots of docs at once, doesn't mean you should!  Please use this tip with caution and save paper whenever possible! To get started, you will need to go to the Chrome Web Store and add the app PDF Mergy . Once you have the app added to chrome, you are ready to go. Find the documents you want to print.   Here are some tips to finding the documents....

View Post as a Google Doc Okay, so, you're using YouTube videos in your classroom and you’re wishing for a couple features… I wish there was a way to remove all the suggested videos and other distractions so my students could concentrate. I wish my students could watch a couple of videos in sequence in a self-paced manner. I wish I could show just a portion of a video, starting at one point and stopping at another. Wishes answered! Solution #1 Here are a couple of solutions for this first wish. Visit our tech tip on YouTube: A Gift and a Curse , and scroll down to option number two. Or...Embed your YouTube video into a Google Slide from the menu, Insert > Video. Yep, that’s right! Put your YouTube, or Google Drive Video, into a Google Slide and the only distraction in the room will be that one bee that gets in the classroom that causes students to run and scream. Aahhh! And, embedding your video in Google Slides leads us to… Solution #2 Th...

Hey, teachers! You and your students might be feeling a little Google Classroom Overload with all those pesky, old classes just hanging around. Well, no fear! There's a way to clean those up! I have a couple of classes from the 2016-2017 that have A LOT of really useful information in them. I don't want to delete them (Oh, the horror!), but I do want to get them out of the way as I am using my Google Classroom every day. So... what do I do? I ARCHIVE them! Here's how... Locate the Google Classroom Tiles that you would like to archive Click on the menu (verticle dots) at the upper-right of a tile (1) Click Archive (2) Confirm that you would like to archive this class. (Once archived students will no longer see that class either. Whew!) (Optional) Delete Old Classrooms (Or just to access archived classrooms) Deleting old classrooms has some benefit, but you must also be careful. When you archive a Class, you can still access that...