Author: Mark Salzer

The 3D modeling tool Sketchup for Schools is now available online for district students when using Chromebooks and Windows computers via their Google ‘waffle’ (aka app launcher) OR dashboard.

To learn more, visit …

• Getting Started with SketchUp for Schools
• Saving, Opening, and Downloading Models with SketchUp for Schools
• Creating and Editing Models in SketchUp for Schools

This year’s top Webby Awards in the category of Education went to Smithsonian Learning Lab and Ted-Ed. If you haven’t visited those sites in a while (or ever), we urge you to check ’em out.

Every year for the last 23 years (since 1996), the Webby Awards have been an award of high distinction for websites in many categories. Their awards gallery and archive is also worth exploring.

Background: The Webby Awards presents two honors in every category—The Webby Award and The Webby People’s Voice Award. Members of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (IADAS) select the Nominees for both awards in each category, as well as the Winners of The Webby Awards. In the spirit of the open Web, The Webby People’s Voice is awarded by the voting public. Each year, The Webby People’s Voice Awards garners millions of votes from all over the world.

As we have posted about before, Flipgrid is a wonderful free online tool for video responses in a social setting. On August 1st, Flipgrid added several new features worth noting including transcription, close-captioning, augmented reality (AR), video “Shorts”, and a whiteboard.

Redesigned with a focus on inclusion, accessibility, and performance. Now, educators have the option to have every Flipgrid response video automatically transcribed by Microsoft Azure and delivered through an updated closed-captioning experience.

As for AR, simply update your Flipgrid app: all existing QR Codes will be “autoMAGICally” upgraded to Flipgrid AR codes.

Shorts: Teachers now have a second option for recording short introductory videos to share with students and parents. In the teacher admin panel there is now a link labeled “Shorts.” Clicking on Shorts they can create a video that they can post anywhere including any Flipgrid grid, blog post, or social media site. They can also turn on whiteboard mode in videos to add context to stories.

Whiteboard: Now when someone launches the Flipgrid video recorder they will see a menu of drawing, sticker, and text tools on the right side of the screen. Within that menu there is a whiteboard icon. Clicking on it will launch a whiteboard that they can draw on while talking. They can even switch between showing their face in the video and showing the whiteboard in the video.

Interested educators that don’t already have a Flipgrid account can sign up for their free account here.

You can see a list of all the core G Suite apps enabled for our district in the User Dashboard at gsuite.google.com/dashboard. After a recent redesign, this page is now better-looking and easier to navigate, with a search bar that allows users to quickly find apps.

In the Your apps section, users can open their installed apps. G Suite core services are listed first, then other apps in alphabetical order. Users can’t hide an app or change the order of apps.

The Approved apps section shows the G Suite Marketplace apps approved for all users to install themselves.
When a user clicks an approved app, they go to Marketplace. Then the user searches for the app in Marketplace and follows the installation steps.

Which should you use — Dashboard or App launcher?

Users can open their apps in either Dashboard or the App launcher  (in the top right of the user’s window) Users with many cloud apps may prefer Dashboard and wish to bookmark it.

Adobe has updated Spark, its suite of tools for helping users create visual content. Initially launched in 2016 as an upgrade and rebranding of existing programs, the set of apps for web work enables non-graphics experts to design professional-looking graphics, mix text and images and create animated videos simply and quickly. All P-CCS staff and secondary students have access to Adobe Spark for Education, a premium, yet free, version of Spark which is made available to schools and colleges.

Spark now supports live collaboration through the web. Students and instructors can begin a project and invite others to work on it by adding their email and sending an invitation to make edits. Shared projects appear in a new tab in the project organizer, and edits made to the project will be visible to collaborators.

The feature only exists currently on the desktop or laptop version; mobile doesn’t include the capability yet. Also, only one person will be able to open the project at a time for editing.

The new version now comes in multiple languages, including French, Italian, German, Spanish and Portuguese. It also includes new text animations and animated stickers in the Apple iOS app. 

Adobe noted that it expected to add project commenting; real-time, synchronous co-editing; mobile project sharing; and “support for multiple brands” for users who participate in more than one team.

When you are ready to get started with Adobe Spark, you can log in by following the instructions at http://links.pccsk12.com/adobespark. As a reminder, the Technology Department has also enabled account provisioning for our secondary students. For a quick tutorial on how to use Adobe Spark, we encourage you to watch this tutorial video from Richard Byrne. You may also want to look at Adobe’s Spark Edu guide here.

On July 8, 2019 Google launched Code with Google, a new compilation of resources for K-12 educators for exploring computer science in the classroom.

According to Google, “We believe that training, resources, and community for teachers are key to improving equity in CS education and expanding access for all students. Code with Google is our new CS comprehensive resource for educators. It brings together Google’s free curriculum and programs that build coding skills—from beginner level to advanced—to help students succeed. Teachers can integrate CS First into their classroom, guide their high school students to the free code learning app Grasshopper to learn Javascript, or share CS scholarship opportunities with students.”

*Please note that these features will be available in the next few weeks and might not show up at the time of this blog posting.

IMPORT questions from previously existing GOOGLE FORMS into a new Google form – Google Forms now has a native feature for importing questions into new Forms from your existing forms. The feature will let you select individual questions or all questions from an old Form to add into your new Form. It’s an easy process to do. Link to Post

• First, open a form and from the action toolbar on the right, select Import Questions.
• Then, from the dialogue box, select the form with the questions you want to import.
• From the right hand sidebar menu, you can: 
  • Import all questions by choosing Select All> Import Questions 
  • Or, you can select specific questions to import and then select Import Questions 

VIEW the EDIT HISTORY of a cell in Google SHEETS

“Show edit history” is a new feature in Sheets that will help you easily see the edit history of a cell, including who made the last edit, when that edit was made, and the cell’s previous value. Link to Post

GRADEBOOK in Google Classroom now generally available

Google Classroom recently introduced Gradebook to make grading easier by allowing teachers to keep their assignments and grades in a single place. To learn more about this and other improvements for Classroom, see their post.

You will still be able to manually move images from Google Photos to Drive, but it won’t happen automatically. Learn more about this change here and here.

Users of Google’s Calendar app are being warned about scams that take advantage of the popularity of the free service and its ability to schedule meetings easily. Spammers/phishers are continuing to use, in ever growing numbers, unsolicited Google Calendar notifications to trick user into clicking phishing links.

Here’s how it works: Scammers send a Google user a calendar invite complete with meeting topic and location information. Inside the details of the appointment lies a malicious link that looks like it’s pointing you back to meet.google.com for more details. Once clicked, it’s back to the usual tactics of trying to infect the user’s endpoint with malware and so on.

Users have long been warned about their interaction with email and the web. Now it’s important to add Calendar invites to the list. This latest method demonstrates how attackers are continually updating their tactics, requiring organizations to remain equally persistently educated to enable users to make smarter security decisions.

The most important thing is to be attentive.

• Do not open messages from unknown senders.
• Never accept invitations from people you don’t know.
• Do not tap or click links in messages you weren’t expecting.

Note, if you do start to get spam invites, consider taking additional steps.

First, report the event as spam by double clicking the event you’d like to report, then at the top, click More Actions >  Report as Spam. 

Next, change your default settings for Calendar.

By default, Google Calendar will add events to your calendar whenever you receive an invite, even if you never clicked ‘accept’. As long as someone can blast invites your way, it’s easy for them to sneak garbage onto your Google Calendar.

Worse, even if you diligently decline events you don’t recognize, Calendar will still display events you’ve declined, meaning those phishy links will stick around, too.

You can read more about possible calendar default setting changes to consider to sidestep unwanted invites in this article.

You can read more about how Google Calendar, Google Forms and other Google services are being used by spammers et al in this article.

You can also check out Google’s page on Calendar feedback.

An idea that’s been in the works for quite some time, Google has made it official — the Chromebook App Hub went live on Wednesday, June 19th and is their online resource to help educators, administrators and developers work together to learn about Chromebook apps and activity ideas for schools. 

Google is inviting educators to share ideas on how to use apps in their classrooms, and will be reviewing submissions quarterly — let ’em know via this form.

Looks like a promising site to learn about and consider apps that might be worthwhile. Below is a snapshot of part of their search filter: