Casting with Google

This little $35 piece of tech can allow you to turn your TV into a laptop, phone, movie screen... the sky is the limit.  It easily plugs into an HDMI port in the back of a tv.  The Chromecast can be plugged into a wall outlet to allow CEC remote commands to turn on the television, but more easily it can simply draw power through the USB plug inserted into the tv.  Using a smartphone or computer as a remote control, content can be pulled up on the tv screen from a variety of sources (Netflix, YouTube TV, or even just a web browser).  The Chromecast Ultra ($70) casts HDR color technology with up to 4K resolution.  

When you think of home technology, what brands do you think of?  Apple? Google? Samsung? Sony?  What about when you think of school tech?  Google is probably in the top choices, especially since Google Classrooms are on just about every tech blog out there right now.  What Google devices are you familiar with, beyond the phone/tablet/Chromebook basics?  My new favorite Google tech toy is the Google Chromecast.  


Most televisions in classrooms currently serve no purpose or possibly to show the morning news, but not much more than that due to the use of Promethean or other smart boards.  However, when a bulb goes out or a fan stops working, panic sets in.  Entire days are ruined because the center of the classroom is thrown off and students can't see anything the teacher was wanting to show.  Heaven forbid it happens on an inside recess or Christmas movie day!  CHAOS.

The school's internet goes out completely?  HELL ON EARTH.

Which a Chromecast, teachers could easily plug the device in and cast Discovery Education, Flocabulary, Tumblebooks, or whatever site they were planning to work with that day.  If the school's network is down, teachers can pair up to create a dual hotspot situation to allow for a network for casting and a network for receiving (for the Chromecast to use).  Either way, a miracle is found and the school day is saved.

Students can easily cast their projects up on the TV to present any web-based project, whether it's a video playlist or a literature review.  The sky is the limit! 

For more information:
1. https://www.tomsguide.com/us/what-is-google-chromecast,news-17637.html
2. https://support.google.com/edu/castforedu/?hl=en
3. https://www.techpoweredmath.com/chromecast-for-teachers/

4. https://tedcurran.net/2014/07/25/teachers-use-chromecast-wireless-presentations-desktop-mobile/

Take Time to Shake It Up

I'd like for you, dear reader, to visit Shake Up Learning. I read through about fifteen different tech-based educator blogs until I found this one.  Kasey Bell's approach to education is one I can identify- shake it up and make it better!  I am all about keeping things new and interesting, so Bell's site fit my interests to a T!  It also doesn't hurt that Bell has just about every Google certification they hand out to educators. 

This specific post that I linked you to on creating "apps" with Google slides covers something I'd never attempted before reading this post.  This particular posting is from a guest author- Micah Shippee.  As soon as I read through all the steps, I began thinking of the different collaborative projects that could come as a direct result of being able to teach students how to do this during library time!  With Google Classroom becoming such a staple in many of today's schools, being able to add one more "tool to the tool belt" for student AND faculty use is critical.  Specifically, sharing with teachers how to do this with students in their own classrooms could allow integration far beyond what most classrooms are accomplishing now while allowing students to feel like they're doing something different from the typical slideshow or file sharing.  Finally, an extremely important piece to picking THIS post as a tool to share with teachers is brought to us by the number TEN.  It is all done in only ten steps.  That's it!  That means that it's broken down into the basics, which is perfect for elementary patrons and less-than-tech-savvy-teachers alike.  Icing on the cake- it just sounds cool to say you're creating your own app.

Once you have finished learning how to do this yourself, I highly recommend you peruse through more of Kasey Bell's posts (and those of her guests). She has a world of knowledge to share and truly wants to help create integrated classrooms.  I will continue to follow her and I hope you will as well.  

Fake News- is it fake news?

Fake news is a topic of much discussion and debate.  Is there such thing as fake news?  Is everything fake?  

This infographic (coupled with this article) gave some great insight as to how youth feel about the news in general. 
 In particular, this picture shows the information that stood out the most to me.  A third of students reading stories admitted that what they'd shared was wrong or inaccurate.  The same stats were shared in this article by CNN.  The Wall Street Journal shared information on a Stanford study with similar findings. 

Living in a digital age requires that we arm students with what they need in order to be responsible digital citizens.  We must teach and model how to find accurate sources so that they know what to do to avoid the "fake news" circus.  It's also our responsibility to teach the difference between that and bias. 

It reminds me of the old rumors that were spread, like that if you ate pop rocks and drank sprite it could kill you because it could make your stomach explode.  I won't lie- I definitely didn't enjoy that combo again until I was old enough to realize that it was "fake news" essentially.  What peers share carries a lot of weight among youth, making it all the more important that we teach them how to spot what's real and what's not, or at the very least how to find out. 

Personally, I only get my news online. I try to read a lot of different sources and weigh them against one another.  I really don't trust what I watch on tv anymore because so much of it feels skewed when weighed against the majority of the information found with a little research.  I don't know that this will change all that much when I become a librarian, other than that I'll probably tune in to "popular" news more so I know what patrons are hearing and possibly believing. 

Ultimately, I believe there is a lot of fake news out there, but I don't think that's a new problem. It's like racism and bullying... they've been around forever, but all the different media outlets spread it all and stir the pot so much.  You used to have a newspaper and a news hour and that was it.  Anything else that happened had to wait til the next day for everyone to hear about it unless it was a major world announcement.  Since the media won't always act responsibly, we have to make sure our students know how to read and share responsibly.