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App Slam Favorites for Productivity and Personalization


If you didn't get a chance to attend the EdTech Camp on August 17th, you missed a great opportunity to choose from 6 different PD sessions each hour for 4 time slots.  This format provides maximum choice to ensure your Professional Development time is well spent!

The session began with an App Slam.  What is an App Slam?  Conference attendees (in this case the ITS's from each building) spend 2 minutes showing a favorite app or chrome extension they love and explain why!  Below is a list of the apps that were featured, and a brief description of what they do!

Can't remember how to add an extension?  Just follow the link and click 'Add to Chrome'.  For more information about what extensions and apps are, read this post made last year!

For ease, I have placed apps under the following Categories:

  • Use with Students
  • Mindfulness (mind & environment)
  • Productivity
  • Browser Tab & Extension Managers


Use with Students:


Places an ‘Edit with EdPuzzle’ button (Chrome Extension) on every youtube video, quickly adding it to your EdPuzzle account.  Why use EdPuzzle? Ed Puzzle (an app) is a great formative assessment tool that allows you to easily shorten any youtube video, assign the video to students, know which students watched the video, add questions throughout the video, and provide feedback on answers to questions. Watch this video used by Cricket McCaffrey-Clark with her students to get a sense of how they work. EdPuzzle Chem Video


This extension is a grammar and spell check for your email or any other writing you do on the web. (Chrome Extension)

Ask your students a question and see answers presented in a Word Cloud! (Website)


Mindfulness (mind and environment!)

Block ads and other unwanted distractions while using your browser!  (Chrome Extension)

Do you ever need to print out articles on the web?  Use this Chrome Extension to delete ads, photos, and other undesired content on the web, and print only the part of the web page you need!


Productivity:

Save to Google
Quickly save images and websites to Google Drive. (Chrome Extension)

Download any youtube video without adding applications or extensions! (Website)

Quickly split your screen to compare two tabs of your browser side by side, then put them back together! (Chrome Extension)

Ever spend hours trying to re-find that great website that you saw last week? Save entire web pages in your Evernote account.  Save in Notebooks, assign keywords for easy searching. (Chrome Extension)
Recently moved from an extension to the app category, Keep serves as a post-it board that holds to-do and checklists, short notes with images, links, and more. Set up collaborative tasks, differentiate, copy your notes to a Google Doc, or simply share your organizers. (Google App)

This Chrome extension is a great way to increase your knowledge of the Google Suite for Education tools a little at a time, or to simply get on the spot support for a particular task. AI customizes available support to whichever app you are in at the time. (Chrome Extension)

Browser Tab and Extension Managers:
For those of us who love to have lots of tabs open!  Provides ease of management and better browser and battery performance!

One Tab  

Click One Tab to convert all your tabs into a list. Reduce memory and clutter! (Chrome extension)

Session Buddy allows you to quickly return to the tab you are looking for by listing them all in one window. You can also save and organize your tabs for each session by topic to access later. (Chrome extension)
Extensity  
Enable and disable extensions in Google Chrome to keep your browser fast and keep the extensions organized. (Chrome Extension)

Automatically suspends unused tabs to free up system resources.  To use a suspended tab, just click on the center writing on the page!



Brought to you by the CCRSD/CPS Instructional Technology Staff!

Lynne Beattie, K-12 Digital Literacy Administrator
Terry Smolka, CCHS ITS
Kathy Talbot, CMS ITS
John Peachey, Alcott ITS
Genoveva Matheus, Willard ITS
Sue Howard, Thoreau ITS



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