Tech Tutor Mark

I am now a fan of David Kimball and his Windows 10 video tutorials, his Twitter posts and his Beyond Twitter podcasts. In honor of his new website:  http://www.davidvkimball.com/ I wanted to include a very helpful video that he made on the 5 Things You Should Do After Upgrading to Windows 10 . I found the tips on how to customize Microsoft Edge particularly valuable. Who knew you had to go into the Advanced Settings just to change the Home page? And I never thought of completely eliminating all of the tiles on the new Start menu, making it look more like Windows 7. Great tips, David, and good luck on your new site. We should talk sometime. Enjoy the video, everyone. If you have upgraded to Windows 10, it will be a great help. 

I created this video to show how students can use the commenting feature of Google Docs to edit a partner's writing. This Google Classroom workflow shows the writing, the editing, the commenting and the revising of the student writing sample.  

Many schools are holding Parent-Teacher Conferences in the month of November. This year, I wanted to find a tool that would help teachers schedule blocks of time in the most efficient way possible. I heard about a free tool called Calendly and spent some time with it recently. I wrote this blog entry on a different website, and I hope it helps you learn how to use it before conferences start. Several one-minute video tutorials are included. 

I'm making a tech prediction today. A year from now, millions of people will be talking about Blab . If you want to be "in the know" right away, check out this excellent article . What a great tool to video broadcast anything you want to present (from a mobile device or computer), and so far it is free.  Right now it is just a great beta, but watch it catch fire over the next several months, and I think it will.

I follow Listly (list.ly) regularly, and if you're a list-maker like I am, you should too. For example, here are some of their trending lists . This week, an eye-catching list came to my email inbox titled " Tame your Gmail: 30+ Tools & Resources " and it is the most complete and updated list of Gmail tools and resources I have found yet. Well done, Takis Athanassiou, the writer of the article. Some of these add-ons, sites and extensions I already use (like Unroll.Me and Sidekick), but most I had not even heard of. The article is worth reading, even if it's just for #29:  Become an Email Expert with these 151 Tricks I get these articles and tips in my inbox every day, and I like to share the best ones with others. #32 on the list is  100 Email Hacks: Become an Inbox Zero Superhero!   and where else but Listly would you find a set of tips like this but within another list all its own? Let me know if you find something you can use every day. I know I did....

I have been looking for a good head-to-head comparison between the two video uploading powerhouses: YouTube and Vimeo . While I may be partial to Vimeo in many ways, I often upload my video tutorials to directly to YouTube or Screencast.com and totally ignore Vimeo altogether. Why? Probably just laziness on my part, and because I know that many people have never even heard of Vimeo, much less go there to find videos, the way that they do liberally with YouTube, without even so much as a second thought.  TechSmith, makers of my personal favorite screencasting software, Camtasia Studio, as well as SnagIt and Jing, put together this great comparison article . The article compares and contrasts Vimeo with YouTube and does so objectively. Ultimately, TechSmith has now made it very easy to upload finished screencast videos directly to both Vimeo and YouTube, as well as Google Drive for that matter, so they are not partial to any one product. The article, however, shows that Vimeo d...

Yesterday I attended EdCamp Bluewater . This year, the camp met at the Pine River Nature Center . I was lucky enough to spend some time with Jeff Dahl , teacher and tech guru at Croswell Lexington Schools. Jeff has run a Coffee Hour session there, where he shares some of his favorite tech tools and practices. Judging by the amount of people who have been influenced by Jeff's tech knowledge, any time you can get him to pass on what he knows (for any amount of time), it is highly beneficial. He was nice enough to share his Coffee Hour 2015 presentation slideshow with me, and I am more than happy to share it with all of you. I hope you find something useful in this amazing collection of tech tools. 

On Monday and Tuesday, November 2nd and 3rd, I attended my second MiGoogle Conference , at Brighton High School in Brighton, Michigan. The conference brought in teachers, technology training staff, administrators and speakers from all over the state, as well as other states. If you missed out, here is a collection of all of my notes on the sessions I attended and all of the sessions I did not attend , as well. This is about as comprehensive a list as you can possibly get. If there is one thing I am good at, it's taking and compiling notes. :-)  By the way, all of this was done in Evernote Premium, so It guess it's a plug for them, too. 

Last week I met  Franci Atcho,  Technology Integration Coach for  Hazel Park Schools, a Michigan school district that I once worked for long ago. In one year on the job, Franci has put together this excellent collection of Technology Integration Resources , organized by topic, in a Google Doc with a very nice Table of Contents included. It certainly saved me a lot of time, and I hope to refer back to it many times in the future. Posting it here will hopefully help all of you as well.

If becoming a more productive person using technology is a goal in your future, I found this excellent article posted by Doug Aamoth on Fastcompany.com . These are 50 free apps to make you an incredibly productive person . Just as interesting is how I found this amazing article.  I found it while inside of my Evernote Pro account. While looking at one of my notes, this article popped up at the bottom. Being an inquisitive person, I clicked on it and found it very useful. So, here it is. I think it will definitely update you on what productivity tools are the best in each category right now.