Of all the tools listed here, this is the one I’ve heard the most buzz about this year, and it’s easy to see why: Parlay has done a beautiful job of pulling together a thoughtful suite of tools for conducting class discussions.

Start by choosing a discussion topic from their library: These contain readings and videos to give background information so that students come to the discussion well-prepared. Then students submit written responses to the prompt and respond to one another in writing. Finally, the class can conduct a live roundtable discussion, using Parlay to track and facilitate their participation. When the discussion is over, the teacher gets a report to see who participated and how.

For anyone who uses Harkness, Socratic Seminar, or any kind of whole-class discussion as part of their instruction, Parlay seems like it would supplement that work really nicely.

Parlay Class Discussions Tool

It actually took me a little while to understand this tool. Not that it was difficult (it’s actually really easy), but I’ve never seen anything like it, so I had to have it explained to me twice. Once I understood it, I got pretty excited about its potential as an educational tool.

So iorad is kind of like a screencasting tool: It allows you to create interactive online tutorials that demonstrate how to do things on a screen. Suppose you wanted to create a video showing students how to use a piece of technology. Using iorad, you could make something that feels like a screencast video, except the video stops every once in a while to ask the user to click on various parts of the screen to follow your prompts, and it won’t continue unless the user does that. This makes the end product a lot more interactive for the user; this will potentially make the learning stick better.

I would love to see what teachers and students could create with iorad. It would be excellent for flipped learning, for teaching classroom or tech procedures, or for student-made instructional videos.

iorad Screencasting tool

Here’s how it works: Students send pictures of their work in progress to the teacher, along with questions they need help with. The teacher views the work, types in comments that are anchored to specific locations on the photos, then sends it back to students, starting a feedback loop that allows for iteration and improvement.

What makes this tool unique is the mechanism that allows students to point directly to places on their work that they need help with, then get assistance that can also target specific spots on the assignment. We’ve been able to do that with writing assignments through tools like the commenting feature in Google Docs, but it hasn’t been quite as available in other subject areas.

Although I’m not quite sure how teachers will manage work/life balance with this tool in play, it definitely offers more opportunities for specific, immediate feedback than anything I’ve seen before.

Teacher feedback on student work tool

• Screen recording is becoming more in demand, particularly with Distance Learning or virtual instruction, or Flipped classrooms.
• The biggest issue is the question: What do I use?
• There are both free versions and paid versions, so here are some of the top screen recording and some training tutorials to go along with them.
• Internally, we have Teams available, and those recordings automatically get uploaded into Streams in Office 365, making it easy to share with students (Parents have to log in using the students' credentials to see Stream recordings).
• However, some users, depending on their comfort level, may just find it easier to use other screen recording platforms instead. Streams will allow you to still upload any videos to it manually if they go that route; it's just an extra step.
• Click to see some of the most popular options

• Translated conversations across devices, for one-on-one chats and for larger group interactions.
• TRANSLATOR APP FEATURES - Have real-time, translated conversations with captions, translate menus and street signs without an internet connection, and translate web pages and app content with one tap.
• TRANSLATOR IN THE CLASSROOM - Microsoft Translator helps bridge communication gaps by supporting accessible classroom learning with live captioning, cross-language understanding, and even multilingual casual conversations to help with student integration.

Microsoft Translator -  https://translator.microsoft.com/ How this works 1. Start Click on "Start conversation", log in and enter your name and language. 2. Share Share the conversation code with other participants, who can join using the Translator app or website 3. Speak Speak or type in your language to communicate with other participants in the conversation. Other participants will see your messages in their own language. Additinal info links Demo of real world uses - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/translator/education/#lectures-presentations App Functionality - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/translator/apps/ Languages Supported - https://aka.ms/translatorapplanguages FAQ's - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/translator/help/live-feature/

• In Office, the Microsoft Learning Tools is a set of features available in Word designed to help you improve reading skills no matter your age or ability.
• The idea with these tools is to remove distractions and offer proven techniques to improve reading fluency and comprehension. For example, using Learning Tools, you can add spacing to reduce visual crowding. You can change the color of the background to make it easier to see the letters. It's also possible to break down words into syllables and highlight part of the speech, and you can use the narration feature to hear the text aloud and see the words highlighted to follow along.
• In this Windows 10 guide, we'll walk you through the steps to get started with the Learning Tools available with Microsoft Word to improve your reading skills when using an Office 365 subscription or Office 2019.

Text to speech option using existing Office365 platforms –

àBelieve it or not, everyone already has this…… and its free

Try Immersive Reader.  Its free in Office365 and already built in.

It supports

• OneNote -
• Word
• Outlook
• Edge
• MS Teams

And also has an app Office Lens for iOS

I list this under the “Cool technology” category you didn’t know you already had….   J

• OneNote introduction to immersive Reader - Learning Tools
• Learning Tools in Word - Learning Tools in Word
  • Intro to using a screen reader - Screen reader support for Word
  • Do things quickly with tell me - Word help & learning
  • Keyboard shortcuts - Word help & learning
  • Learning tools in Word - Use Immersive Reader in Word
  • Intro to make documents accessible - Intro to making documents accessible

Learning Tools for OneNote requires a download- Learning Tools Setup

Learning Tolls for OneNote has the ability to be deployed by IT admins - MS Article Link

Learning Tools features available in Microsoft products

Check languages supported by Learning Tools.

Office 365/Office suite –

• This is good for the occasional document needing converting, but not for daily lessons for teacher/student communication barriers with ESOL/ELL students. This is a LOT of overhead for a teacher trying to handle communication barriers with students needing the additional assistance of content provided in their primary language
• The translate feature is built into Word. It is not directly visible within O365 in the browser, but used within Office365 by opening any document from O365 and selecting “Edit in Word”. Has a 3-4 easy steps, but perfectly reasonable.

You can. Depends on the what and how.  Here are some methods available to LCS Faculty just as a help FYI

Google translate (using the search page’s built-in translator box) can help somewhat with basic chunks of text for small quick snippets, but it has a max of 3900 character limit, so less than one page of text generally. Not really viable for more than a single sheet of text

To do more, it requires you open the Translate.google.com site which has some odd properties behaviors of what will do what and where

• Copied and pasted text, but still maxed at 5,000 characters, but now in rolling “chunks”.
• Websites URL’s can translate the full source text, but generally not the public comments associated in community responses
• Uploaded documents can be fully translated.

There are two additional options:

• Office 365/Office suite –
  • This is good for the occasional document needing converted, but not for daily lessons for teacher/student communication barriers with ESOL/ELL students. This is a LOT of overhead for a teacher trying to handle communication barriers with students needing additional assistance of content provided in their primary language
  • The translate feature is built into Word. It is not directly visible within O365 in the browser, but used within Office365 by opening any document from O365 and selecting “Edit in Word”. Has a 3-4 easy steps, but perfectly reasonable.
    • Source Document in Office 365 – This example is a OneDrive doc in Chinese (PRC). Simply select “edit in Word” and it will launch locally.
  • Local Word file
    
  • The whole document is sent to the Microsoft web translator (Can also handle URL’s like Google
    
• Schoolwires
  • If a teacher needs content to be readily available for a student on an ongoing basis and doesn’t have the time to do the manual conversion process above for ESOL and ELL and sending of the translated documents, there are a couple ways to handle this
  • They can make a specific page within their website and leverage the websites built-in text translator functionality by doing either of the following:
    • Add an article library app and post the individual content as an article
    • add a headlines and features and post an article with the text pasted
    • Any content shown as text on the website can then be translated (For example this article list translated to Punjabi, Urdu or Japanese)
  • 
  • 
  •  

Scott Whittle

ave you ever wanted to get a typed transcript of what was said in a meeting, or broadcast?  Well, now you can!!

What are automatic captions?

Automatic captions are machine transcriptions of the words heard in a YouTube video performed by Google software. While those transcriptions are almost never perfect, more and more, the accuracy seems to be improving. When it comes to transcribing videos for the purpose of making subtitles, automatic captions can mean fewer words that have to be typed by humans.

About DIYCaptions' Automatic Captions Clean-up Editor

This app is intended to make it easy to access the automatic captions that YouTube creates for videos and to manually correct any transcription errors so that the text can be used to create more professional-looking captions. For videos where the accuracy of the automatic captions is high, using automatic captions can significantly reduce the amount of time that it takes to type a transcript of a video's spoken content.

To use the tool, navigate in a separate tab to the YouTube video you want to get transcribed and click "Share"

Copy the shortened YT link and paste it back in the Auto-captions box and press "Go"

The user can then use the interface to play the video, listen to verify accuracy, make a correction, insert speaker shift breaks, skip to specific points forward or backward, and update the transcript on the fly before copying off to a separate file format.

To give it a spin, simply click the link: DIY Captions 

Just want to get the text fast??  Try their Chrome extension - DIY Captions Chrome Launcher

Scott Whittle
whittles@leonschools.net

How to Make Windows Desktop Shortcut for Specific Browser

Posted on April 29, 2018 by Mitch Bartlett 12 Comments

So you have Microsoft Windows set to use Chrome as your default browser, but you want to use a desktop shortcut to open a specific site in IE. Or maybe another website icon that will only work in Firefox. Creating a shortcut to a web document won’t work. However, you can open a URL using a shortcut to a non-default browser using these steps:

1. Right-click a blank area of the desktop and select “New” > “Shortcut“.
2. For the location, type the path to the browser you wish to use followed by the URL you wish to open. For example:
   • Chrome: “C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe” https://technipages.com
   • IE: “C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe” https://technipages.com
   • Firefox: “C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe” https://technipages.com
     
3. Provide the name for the shortcut. You will probably want to use the name of the website in most cases.
4. Select “Next“.
5. Select “Finish“.

Now you have a shortcut that will open the website in a specific web browser, no matter what the default browser is set to in Windows.

I have tested this thoroughly and it works in Windows 7 as well as Windows 10.

So you're looking at  PDF products.  The question you need to answer, is what are they trying to do? And do you want or need to spend $$$?

So let's get right to your next question.... The short answer is NO, the district doesn’t have any licenses for Adobe Acrobat for Teachers/Admins to use.  Schools have to purchase individual seat licenses for that if they have to have Adobe Acrobat  

However, depending on your answer to the question above depends on which option works best.

• Trying to edit a pdf but need it in Word first?
• Needing to make a fillable form?
• Required to encrypt the pdf with a password due to FERPA/HIPPA rules?

There are three options

• Option#1 – PDFCandy - PDF Candy Interfacehttps://pdfcandy.com/
  • Handles - Basic conversion of word to PDF and PDF to word, passwords, editing text, removing specific pages, and lots of other functionality, etc.
  • They can simply use PDF candy in ClassLink – its free and I pushed it out there for everyone out to their ClasLink.  Just don’t use it to encrypt/password sensitive student FERPA or HIPPA data,
    • Technically their privacy policy states all submitted data is deleted from their server that you send up within 1 hr. from upload, but we do not have an official security agreement so NO FERPA/HIPPA type data should be sent to PDF candy

PDF Candy Website Screenshot

• Option #2 – PDF Creator/PDF Architect –
  • Available in SCCM.  Free and does the functionality of Acrobat, but if they want it for password protection, it requires the user set up an encryption profile to do so, but allows users to password sensitive Student FERPA/HIPPA data without sending that data offsite to a 3^rd
  • Instructions on how to set up the Password Profile in PDF Creator to be able to set passwords on PDF's
  • The only downside is being free, it LOVES to use the bottom right corner of your screen to show offers and upgrade ads and can get annoying sometimes. 
  • A little bit of a learning curve and not as clean and straightforward as Adobe Acrobat, but it’s got what it needs

PDF Architect & PDF Creator screen

• Option #3 – Adobe Acrobat Pro–
  • Either Use a license you hold with an Academic Site license or buy a workstation seat license (around ~$80-90 dollars on avg for academic institutions @ CDW)  Just don’t forget we are a tiered level purchaser so we get the maximum discount.
    • Adobe Acrobat Pro 2017 - CDW Linkhttps://www.cdw.com/product/adobe-acrobat-pro-2017-media-and-documentation-set/4668017?pfm=srh $26.99 (1/11/19) TLP Program
    • Adobe Acrobat Pro DC 2015 - CDW Link  26.99 (7/23/19) TLP Program
    • Personally, I prefer the Pro version and dislike the DC version just because I don’t like monthly or annual subscriptions( Vampire tech software……) and the DC cloud layout is just weird to me. 

Acrobat XI Pro screen

Scott Whittle

Microsoft Visio is a powerful piece of software, allowing IT professionals, business people, engineers, and others working in highly technical fields to map out and display complex information in the form of flowcharts, site plans, floor plans, diagrams and more.

Useful though all this is, the price point is well beyond what the average home user is willing to spend at $300 for the “Standard” version and $590 for the Pro version. (If you’re dead-set on using Visio, there is a potentially cheaper option where you can get Visio Pro for Office 365 for $13/month if you get an annual subscription or $15/month for a monthly commitment.)

However, if it does not have to be Visio specifically, but a flow chart type program, why pay at all when there are perfectly free and viable Visio alternatives available to you? Here are some top picks.

Four good alternatives:

--Best options--

• yEd Graph Editor - (Closest in functionality to Visio)

  • yEd Graph Editor (Dowwnload)

  • yEd Graph Editor (Online)

• LucidCharts (Imports/Exports visio)

  • LucidCharts

-- Other options --

Gliffy - (14 day trial and then free w/ watermarked diagrams)

• Gliffy (Online)

LibreOffice Draw -

• LibreOffice Draw

• VRT Network (Extra shapes)

Scott Whittle (Drawn from Robert Zak's article)