Invite parents/guardians to monitor their student's work in Google Classroom
Google Classroom offers a great feature to help parents and students keep up with class work. Within Classroom, you can invite parents/guardians to opt in to receive email summaries that include missing work, upcoming work, and class activities. Guardians will need to accept the invitation you send to activate the email summaries. Teachers can email an individual student's parent/guardian or the parents/guardians for the entire class from within Classroom. Click the hyperlinks within this post to access instructions for teachers and guardians. Want to learn more about Google Classroom? Check out Larry Ferlazzo's A Beginning List of Best Resources to Learn About Google Classroom.
Twitter for Professional Development?
I know I wrote about Twitter last spring, but one of Lori Gracey's (TCEA) blog posts this month gives some great tips on using Twitter for PD without even opening an account. I love her advice: "You don’t have to be a contributor in order to take advantage of the wealth of knowledge and resources that are available on Twitter....you can just relax and take in what others are sharing." So, if you are looking for some bite-sized PD (140 characters!), but have been put off by the whole social media thing, check out the Lori Gracey's tips to lurk and learn.
College Info
Last week Google posted a blog written by the U.S. Secretary of Education. The post summarizes digital tools that students and their families can use as they plan for college. One of the tools that really caught my eye is the College Scorecard (screenshot above). The College Scorecard offers a great place to conduct initial college searches . According to the post, "the College Scorecard has the most comprehensive data ever published about college costs, graduation rates, employment outcomes and student debt for every college. The dataset includes nearly 2,000 elements for more than 7,000 institutions, dating back 18 years." Whether you teach high school or elementary school, this site has a lot to offer for financial literacy lessons or college planning.
