Summer PD Inclusive Practices

Kicking off the week and day with a Summer PD workshop on a Special Education and Inclusive Practices with my Nashoba colleagues.

I have curated some resources and a presentation for day 3 of the workshop that I will present on Special Education and Technology here along with a Link  to the presentation.




Some additional new announcements from Google this week at ISTE.
4 new tools link here http://goo.gl/iFm6sw  (see link and below for details from Google)

1. Accelerate the feedback loop: Quizzes in Google Forms 
Getting feedback early helps students learn and teachers teach. Starting today, Quizzes in Google Forms will allow teachers to auto-grade multiple choice and checkbox questions — so teachers can spend less time grading and more time teaching. 
2. Google Cast for Education, a free Chrome app that allows students and teachers to share their screens wirelessly from everywhere in the classroom. Cast for Education carries video and audio across complex school networks, has built-in controls for teachers and works with Google Classroom so it’s easy to invite your students. And because the app runs on the teacher’s existing computer, it doesn’t require new hardware. Teachers run the Cast for Education app, and students can share their screens with the existing Cast feature in Chrome. Check out the Cast for Education video.

3. A collection of creative apps on Chromebooks that schools can purchase as a bundle.
Explain Everything, Soundtrap and WeVideo are creative apps that help students demonstrate their understanding of curriculum through their own unique voice.

4. Bring curriculum to life: introducing the Expeditions app 
Since we launched the beta Expeditions Pioneer Program in September of 2015, more than one million students across 11 countries have taken one of our virtual reality trips. Today, we’re making Expeditions available to everyone. To get started, all teachers need to do is download the Expeditions app onto a set of devices. With more than 200 Expeditions to choose from, students can journey far and wide, learning from immersive new experiences. Our content offering has also grown and now includes Expeditions made by established educational content providers including Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Pearson is beginning work on Expeditions content as well. The app is available today for Android and will be available for iPhones and iPads soon.

Wrapping up another school year!

Looking forward taking time off this summer.  I plan to teach a few GAFE Classes this summer, present at a SPED in school workshop that will count towards recertification. I plan to showcase GAFE and Web 2.0 tools to help all students achieve.

I will continue to use twitter this summer to stay up to date new features in classroom for the fall and Google's announcement with changes coming to Google Sites.  According to to Google the new Google Sites, "you can build beautiful, functional pages to aggregate and distribute content across your enterprise, optimized for every screen. A new intuitive drag-and-drop design experience supports real-time collaboration by multiple editors, just like in Docs, and offers easy access to all your content from Calendar, Docs, Drive, Maps and more. The new Sites also includes themes and layouts designed to scale and flex to any screen size, so they’re as useful when you access them on the 30-inch monitor at your desk or your smartphone on your commute."

And thanks to many educators that have the beta version, I am able to follow their progress on twitter and and their blogs.

I am hoping to incorporate many of the new features if released into my summer classes, especially with Project Based Learning resources.