Every educator should have a PLN – that’s a Personal Learning Network. Each person should develop their own network of leaders, educators, and resources to assist you with questions, ideas, and support. In this Tip, I am going to share with you some ways to develop your own PLN.

A PLN doesn’t have to be something fancy… it’s just developing links with other local and non-local educators to share ideas and best practices and to call upon for teaching advice. Educators that you follow on Twitter and blogs that you read are part of your PLN. (You do use Twitter, right? If not, next week’s Tech Tip will get you started!). read more

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This is the second in a series of articles on Curating your Digital Life. In the first article we looked at curation of bookmarks.

If you are like me, your Google Drive started out with a few documents but much like its older cousin (The My Documents folder in Windows) a lot of stuff has been dumped in there and it is really in need of some organization. Fortunately, Google has provided us with the means of organizing Google Drive so that we can make our lives a bit easier.

The first of these is the star feature. Starred documents appear in the Starred section in the sidebar of Google Drive. read more

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Before I get to the new features, I want to point out a change to functionality with regard to announcements and the stream. To add an announcement, you used to hit the plus sign at the bottom. Well, the plus sign is gone and now there is a box at the top to enter your announcement.

New announcement screen

Starting to type in that box will bring up the familiar Announcements screen. Also, if you’ll note that icon on the far right… that is the new way to reuse posts.

Now on to the new features!

One of the biggest complaints I’ve heard about the new Google Classroom was that the About page was missing. Many teachers used the About page to add resources like video files, documents, audio files, and other digital handouts such as a syllabus or class rules. With the new Google Classroom, the About page was gone and teachers had to resort to kludgy workarounds to mimic this feature. No more. read more

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Have you ever wanted to capture just the text from an image? Or, perhaps, do you want to copy the text from an image with the capability of editing to format the text? If so, Google Drive’s optical character recognition feature is here to assist.

First, you will want to save the image with text to Google Drive. You can do this a couple of ways:

  1. Click and drag the image to Drive. Or,
  2. Right-click/Control-click on an image. Select either “Save Image As” and drag file to Drive or “Save to Google Drive…Save Image to Google Drive” an image will automatically be saved to Drive. Save to Google Drive is a Chrome extension. I highly recommend using this extension to save articles and images to Drive quickly.

Once the image is in Drive, right-click/control-click on the image and select “Open with… Google Docs”.

The picture will appear at the top of the Google Doc. Below the image, the text from the image will appear. You will be able to edit and format the text. read more

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