Teachers… you’ve almost made it. For most of you, this is the last week before the holiday break. Usually, this week is filled with holiday parties, concerts, watching movies, and more. It’s often hard to keep kids focused on academics this week. 

Instead of watching the same old movie with your class, how about doing a digital BreakoutEdu?

While BreakoutEdu offers a paid platform, they do have some free breakout challenges that don’t require a subscription. As part of this, there are some great holiday breakouts for all age groups. read more

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Chrome’s bookmarks toolbar is a great way to navigate to your favorite sites quickly and easily.  However, this prime real estate is very limited and once you fill it up the overflow is put into the expandable “Other Bookmarks” folder soon to be forgotten. 

One of the easiest ways to maximize this space is to create a favicon for the items you’ve bookmarked.  Not only will this give you more room for bookmarks but it will also improve the appearance of your bookmarks bar. 

Let’s create a custom bookmarks toolbar using favicons!  read more

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A chill is in the air… houses are decorated… holiday music playing… that means one of my favorite times of year is coming!

Not the holiday season… the fourth annual Ditch That Textbook Digital Summit is coming December 21st!

The Ditch That Textbook Digital Summit is a FREE online conference for teachers founded by Matt Miller, educator and author.  Digital Summit offers you nine great speakers — one new video interview released per day. It brings together some of the brightest minds in education to discuss technology, pedagogy and more. Teachers can generate FREE certificates for professional development credits. read more

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Whenever I think of counting, I think of The Count from Sesame Street. He loves to count. And, he counts everything. When storing data in a Sheet, you may want to count how many students answered “True” to a question or how many parents indicated they are available to chaperone a field trip. Rather than counting each row manually, use the CountIf function:

For example:

=CountIf(J2:J100,”True”)

Click here to view a brief video on this cool Sheets feature!

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For those of us who did not grow up with digital cameras/photos, at some point in time, you may have wanted to remove someone from a photo. Perhaps, an ex-boyfriend/girlfriend or former BFF. It may have looked something like this:

And, if you are wise enough to recall that, you will know that pictures of relationships were often patched back together with this tool …

Today, Google Slides cropping tool will help you hide a portion of an image without destroying the hidden area. You will be able to access the area of the image you cropped and restore the entire picture. Here is an example: read more

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