Technology Medley

Salem City Schools recently added Google Apps for Education to its list of technology options. Google Apps provides a free alternative to Microsoft Office products for students in the secondary schools to use. Teachers can easily create and share documents and calendars with each other as well.

I have created several files explaining how to use the various features of Google Apps in Salem. The plan is to add gmail this summer to replace our current mail system. Even though some of the information is specific to Salem teachers, others may find it useful. You can access the pdf files from these links:

Your Dashboard

Start Page

Contacts

Google Calendar

Google Docs Overview

Google Documents

Google Presentations

Google Spreadsheets

Google Forms

Google Sites

There are lots of keyboard shortcuts that may speed up your productivity, and here is a list of some of the most useful ones. Most of these work in any program, but they all work in Word and PowerPoint. You might want to print out a copy and keep it by your computer as a cheat sheet!

Control Z – undo (Office programs will let you go backwards numerous levels, but some kids’ programs will only undo the last action.)

Control Y – redo (This will undo the “undo”)

Control A – Select All

Control S – Save

Control X – Cut

Control C – Copy

Control V – Paste

Control P – Print

Control drag to duplicate in Word (control D in Powerpoint)

Control + Shift + > to increase size of selected text

Control + Shift + < to decrease size of selected text

Control + E to center text

Control + R to right-align text

Control + L to left-align text

Control N – create new document

Control O – open

Control W – close document but not exit program

Control F – find specific word(s) in the text

Control B – Bold

Control I – Italics

Control U – Underline

Shift F3 – Change case (toggles from lower to upper to title case)

Control End – Go to End of Document

Control Home – Go to Beginning of Document

I hope this saves you some time!

Scholastic Keys is actually a suite of programs that interface with Microsoft Office, but the programs are designed to be used by young children. The software is installed in the computer labs as well as on all of the laptops on the mobile carts, and I highly encourage you to check it out if you have not already done so. When you click on one of the Keys icons, you will notice that the Office program opens up first, and then the Keys program. Here’s a very brief description of the 3 components:

MaxWrite

MaxWrite is the kids’ version of Word. Students can type, add pictures or borders, work with tables, and do almost anything you might normally have them do with a word processor. They can add images of Clifford or Ms. Frizzle, or they can draw their own pictures right within the program. They can also search for images from the regular Word images search. The documents are saved as a Word format, so they can be opened later on any computer that already has Office installed.

MaxShow

This part of Scholastic Keys is the interface to PowerPoint, and it’s probably my favorite to use with kids in the classroom. This is a wonderful program to use as a culminating event for almost any unit or story. We’ve had third graders create slideshows on their favorite animals, second graders create slideshows of their color poems, fourth graders create word problems shows….you get the idea. The possibilities are endless! After the children enter their information and images into their slides, they enjoy exploring other options such as colors, fonts, and animations to truly personalize their shows.

MaxCount

MaxCount is a spreadsheet program similar to Excel. There are several activities already built into MaxCount that can be used with the very young children. Older kids might enjoy creating multiplication tables or entering data and converting it to graphs. They love the “magic” of filling the columns with fomulas so the computer does the math for them! This is a great program for working with any type of data including practice with mean, median, and mode. It’s also excellent for showing various types of graphs using the same data.

There is a handout for Scholastic Keys in the blue box in the sidebar. Just click on the name of the handout and select download. I’ll be happy to come in and help you any time you want to use this awesome software!