Terry's Tech Tips

Most of us end up on YouTube at least once a day for a variety of reasons, including the rich educational content YouTube hosts. Hopefully, one of these 3 tips will make your experience more enjoyable! Tip #1 Autoplay Do you hate it when the next YouTube video automatically begins playing?  I do!  Did you know you can control that?  Look on the top right, and move the slider to the left, so AutoPlay is off! Tip #2 Looping Have you ever wanted to loop a video - keep it playing indefinitely?  I just learned you can do that on YouTube!  While a video is playing, right-click (hold the Control Key and Click ).  A submenu appears, and the top option is to loop the video!  So simple! Tip #3 Closed Captions Closed Captions provide great support for all the students in your room, not just those who are hard of hearing.   To enable Closed Captions, simply click a ' c ' while the video is playing.  It is really that...

As an educator, you spend a lot of time finding 'just right' resources for your students.  Cultivating your curation skills means finding the right content for your students and being able to access it easily! If you are like me,  you sometimes can't find a resource when you need it,  and have spent precious time trying (and sometimes failing) to find it again! YouTube has been with us for a long time now.  As teachers, we are used to searching YouTube for great content to educate and engage our students. I have been familiar with the Playlist feature YouTube provides, and have used it a time or two to create playlists for students to watch.  For some reason, I never thought about using this feature to help organize my curated videos for various courses!  While preparing for my Google Educator exam this summer, the benefits were a blinding glimpse of the obvious! Navigate to YouTube using your @concordcarlise.org Google account.  (You can ...

Inquiry-based learning:  Inquiry-based learning  (noun) is a form of  active learning  that starts by posing questions, problems or scenarios—rather than simply presenting established facts or portraying a smooth path to knowledge. The process is often assisted by a  facilitator .  Inquirers will identify and research issues and questions to develop their knowledge or solutions. Inquiry-based learning includes  problem-based learning and is generally used in small-scale investigations and projects, as well as  research .   Source:   Wikipedia Based on research results ("Make it Stick' By Peter Brown and many others!),  Inquiry-based learning provides the following benefits: increased student engagement    better retention/understanding of the material What does Inquiry-based learning look like? If you are interested in exploring this pedagogy, I think one of the easiest ways to understan...

Storms the past two weeks have really impacted our schedule!  This blog post should interest you if you want to gain more time in class for important student learning! Buy Back Class Time: Do you have a process that indirectly impacts student learning but takes precious class time to show students?   (Installing an app, extension, or using a website specific to your class?)  Do you have a particularly difficult topic requiring extra support or explanation?    Consider recording your screen while modeling the process or explaining the topic using a Chrome extension called Screencastify !  (Note that QuickTime Player also has screen recording options.) Once you have created your video, you can assign it as homework, saving class time you would have spent modeling the process or clarifying the difficult concept to your students. Using my laptop, I made the screen recording below demonstrating how to add the Screencastify extension to Chrome.   T...

I love highlighting some of the phenomenal things teachers are doing at CCHS.  I'm labeling these posts ' Spotlight ' posts.  Hopefully, you  find it beneficial to get a glimpse into another teacher's classroom,  and maybe find some inspiration!     Today's Spotlight Post features Andy Fall, who joined CCHS in the 2016-2017 school year teaching Chemistry.  As Andy began teaching last year, his students requested he repeat explanations of particularly difficult content they were learning.  He began having students video him using his cell phone.  Videos range from 2 to 5 minutes long.  Andy posts the video on his youtube channel for students to refer to when doing homework/projects at home or in Directed Studies.  Here is an example of a video on the Ideal Gas Law that Andy had already worked through with his class.  Students requested he re-teach so they could video the explanation (this time...