Issue 8 • August 14, 2024

My 11 year old twins and I presented at the Nebraska Educational Technology Association’s conference in March.

This was the first time they have presented with me. They were totally prepared, and the audience (of about 130 educators) showered them with compliments afterwards.

We showed how to do digital stop-motion animations in Google Slides. Ellie and Connor created lots of examples, and did a great job explaining what they animated, how they did it, and what they learned from it.

Even before we stepped off stage, Ellie and Connor expressed that they wanted to present together again.

ShiftinEdu Showcase 🏝️

ShiftinEdu is a conference with its own personality. Before it was known as ShiftinEdu, it was called Miami Device. Yes, it takes place in Miami.

ShiftinEdu is held on the campus of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Day School (SSEDS). To give their faculty a amazing PD experience, SSEDS brings together an array of innovative speakers and attendees for two days of inspiration, learning, and networking.

The next ShiftinEdu is October 10 & 11, 2024. It’s a professional learning event open to all forward-thinking and student-centered educators.

And guess what—I’m presenting four sessions with Ellie and Connor! Our presentation titles are:

• Prints Charming: Preparing Printables with Canva

• Digital Snacks: Break for Student’s Brains

• From Prompts to Picture: Creative Illustrations with AI

• Artificial Sweeteners: AI for Teachers

We have been busy this summer planning and creating content for ShiftinEdu. I would love to see you there!

Photo Fantasies 📸

Meta generates four options, each of them square. You can download your favorites as JPEG images.

Tongue-Twisting Tool 🤪

Magic School keeps adding AI-powered tools for teachers. Try the new Tongue Twisters generator.

Input a grade level and a topic. You’ll get 10 statements that are challenging to say out loud. Use them as silly lesson reviews or as a whimsical brain break.

First Five ✋

Need a quick, engaging start to your school day or class period?

Edtomorrow's First Five offers nine fresh activities daily to kickstart your class. Each set focuses on:

• 🤝 Human connection

• 🤗 Self-care

• 💞 Empathy

• 😇 Character development

Choose from a variety of activities, including humorous memes, thought-provoking questions, suggested greetings, feelings check-ins, mindfulness moments, positive affirmations, inspiring quotes, and personal growth videos.

First Five is available for both primary (PK-5) and secondary (6-12) grades. Subscribe to their email list to receive a new set of activities every day.

Get started with the primary or secondary back-to-school editions.

Drag and Drop Delights 📲

You can drag and drop files and photos between apps on iPhone and iPad. 

Hold down on the photo or file you want to insert into another app until you can move it around. While still holding down, swipe up with your thumb to go to the Home screen. Drag the file or photo onto the destination app.

This 22 second video shows you things you can drag and drop.

Drive’s Digital Dialogue 💬

An important YouTube feature has finally made it’s way to Google Drive. Google Drive now uses speech recognition to transcribe a video’s audio.

Google Drive’s automatically generated captions are only in English, but Google plans to expand to other languages in the future. And, like YouTube, anyone playing the video can click Settings and choose Auto-translate to display the English captions in a different language.

According to Google’s blog post captions are automatically generated for business and education Google Workspace users.

For personal accounts, you have to request captions. Do this by clicking the three dots on the video’s file in Google Drive. Choose File Information and click Manage Caption Tracks. Then you can click Generate automatic captions.

It can take anywhere from seconds to minutes for the audio to be transcribed.

Unfortunately, when I try to add captions to previously uploaded videos, the captions never appear. I’ve had to resort to re-uploading the video so that Google Drive would actually complete the captioning process.

Google’s automatic captions generally do not include capitalization and punctuation. While you cannot directly edit the generated captions, you can download the captions file. It’s a .vtt that you can open in a text editor. After saving, you can add a new caption track to the file in Google Drive and upload the edited .vtt file.

The process in Google Drive is not as streamlined as it is in YouTube, but for people who do not want to upload videos to YouTube, it’s nice that Google Drive is finally supporting automatically generated captions.

Polling Pupils 📊

Quizizz is great for multiple choice quizzes—but Quizizz isn’t just for quizzes! You can conduct polls and see charts showing the results. You can invite students to enter responses and generate a word cloud that visualizes words that were frequently used in those responses.

I made a slide to guide you through setting up a Quizizz lesson that contains polls and/or word clouds. Download the slide as a PDF.

Please spread the word. If you find value in this newsletter, share it with fellow educators. I would love for the Learning in Hand Newsletter to reach more inboxes.

Smiles from Iowa,

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