Tekiota number 19 will share our insights on:
- Real estate for your menubar
- Share links with your students with Symbaloo
- Socrative assessments
Make Room on your Menubar
- TIP OF THE WEEK - [icon name="fa-cloud-upload"] STANDARD 3: model digital age work and learning
This is a quick tip to save you some real estate screen on your Mac laptop. This article will give you the simple steps to remove your name from the menubar.
OS X Menubar with and without a name
Steps to Remove Your Name
- Go to System Preferences > Users and Login
- If the lock is engaged, click on it and type your computer password to unlock the preferences
- Click on Login Options
- Uncheck Show fast user switching menu
At this point, your name should be removed from the OS X menubar, saving you some precious pixels which can be used to show long menus from other apps.
Remove Name from Menubar
As an alternative and if you like to lock your computer by clicking on your name, you can choose to show the fast user switching menu as an icon which will save you some space while keeping the fast laptop lock available.
Share Links with Symbaloo
- TIP OF THE WEB - [icon name="fa-slideshare"] STANDARD 2: design and develop digital age learning experiences and assessments
Symbaloo is a bookmarking or link sharing site. With Symbaloo, teachers can curate and share resources with their students. Links are laid out in a grid, and can be arranged within the grid.
Group Links by Topics
In this example, the links are grouped into categories. In the upper left, there are links to social sites, and in the upper right, links to shopping sites.
Various categories of links shared with Symbaloo
Link sharing with Symbaloo is self-explained on this Symbaloo page.
Symbaloo Uses for Teachers
Symbaloo could be good for when teachers have a bank of resources they want to share with students. There are many ways to do this, but Symbaloo could be a good option for visual learners who need to see everything laid out in front of them.
This could be useful in the younger grades when teachers want to give students the sites to visit for a project instead of having them go searching. It could also be interesting to use Symbaloo as a formative assessment to see what students know about a subject.
Browser Extension
Symbaloo also offers browser extensions to add your bookmarks directly to your Symbaloo page. This is Symbaloo Bookmarker for Chrome.
Note: For a complete walkthrough of Symbaloo, access the Knowledge Base file “SymbalooHandout.pdf”.
Formative Assessments with Socrative
- TIP OF THE HAT - [icon name="fa-group"] awarded to Yeni Toribio [icon name="fa-slideshare"] STANDARD 2: design and develop digital age learning experiences and assessments
Yeni Toribio gets this week’s this of the hat for using Socrative in her classes. Yeni is investigating various types of formative assessments in her class and tried out this very impressive web app. Socrative enables you to get real time answers from your students during class. Students only need a room code (no account necessary) to start answering the teachers questions.
Create quizzes, quick questions, exit tickets or even space races and watch your students answer in real-time:
Socrative Activities: Quiz, Exit Ticket, Quick Question or Space Race
I witnessed Socrative during a workshop where the presenter used the tool to gather questions from the participants. She then had us rank our top questions to answer them in the most relevant order. Watch this video to get some insight on what can be done with Socrative. We’ll be sure to review this amazing tool in more details in the future.
Getting Started with Socrative
3 simple steps for you to test it out too:
- Go to Socrative.com,
- Click on Teacher login, and
- Click on Sign in with Google