Tuesday Tips, December 5, 20

 TECH TIP:  Delete Old Emails

As the year winds down, this is a good time to delete old emails.  Here is a quick way to do that.  In the search bar within Gmail, enter in: before: YYYY/MM/DD. For example…if you want to delete all emails before January 1, 2020. You’ll need to run the following search query: before:2020/1/1

Once all those emails pop up, hit the Select All box and then delete. It's that easy to say good-bye to years of old emails!

BOOK TIP:  Books We Love from NPR

I love to give books for gifts, but sometimes, picking the right book is the hardest part.  NPR has a great tool called "Books We Love".  You select the categories you want and then it will create a list of books that fit your request. This is also a good place to just find a good read for yourself!

Tuesday Tips November 28, 2023

 TECH TIP:  Photogrammar:  Cool old photo collection

Photogrammar is a collection of photos taken during the 1930's by photographers hired by the Farm Security Administration to document the Great Depression.  The photos can be searched by county and town.  I found this one of Great Barrington:

These photos could be good in a history class or as a story prompt for creative writing.  But mostly a fun rabbit hole to go down.

BOOK TIP:  Learning Ally program for audiobooks

For any student that struggles with reading fluency and decoding and fits these eligibility criteria, we can get them access to audiobooks through Learning Ally.  Learning Ally provides audio versions of many texts.  Some are human read books, and some are voice text that highlights progress with the text.   I can set you up with a teacher account or you can have students connect with me and we can see if they are eligible.  This is a great resource, but we do also have Sora with thousands of ebooks and audiobooks for all students.  

Tuesday Tips November 14, 2023

 TECH TIP:  Are you a tab-aholic?

Are you someone who always has too many tabs open and, as the cartoon says, they are all "critical" (and you are guaranteed to close out the most important one? )

There are two quick ways to figure out what your tabs are, since often it just shows an icon.  One is the "hover".  Just hover your cursor over the tab and it will tell you what the tab is.  The other is to use the Search Tabs tool.  In the upper right hand corner of the browser, hit the drop down arrow and there you can search or scroll down to find the tab you need.

BOOK TAB:  Accountable: The True Story of a Racist Social Media Account and the Teenagers Whose Lives It Changed by Dashka Slater

This is not a book to be taken lightly.  It is powerful.  It is disturbing (content warning).  But if you really want to understand what happens with teens and social media, and how schools respond, this is the book to read.  Dashka Slater is a best-selling author and award-winning journalist who spent years investigating this story and countless hours of interviews with all involved.  While a difficult and divisive topic, Slater handles the telling of the story delicately.  It is not a book you want to read, but boy it offers insight.