Class Tools to Make Google BETTer

This week Google is in London at BETT, the world’s biggest educational technology exhibition. At the event, companies from all around the world show off their latest and greatest innovations for educational technology.

Google is using this opportunity to showcase new updates for Google Workspace for Education. These updates include new features for Google Classroom, Docs, Accessibility, Chromebooks, AI, and more!

Although I have never been to BETT yet (definitely a goal for the future!) I wanted to share these new updates with you. The big new update that caught my eye is "Class Tools" which is a classroom management solution for teachers and students to use on Chromebooks.

See below for the details on this new Class Tools feature, as well as an overview of what else Google announced at BETT.

EdTech Links of the Week - 1-22-25

Each week I keep an eye out for the latest edtech resources through blogs, social media, podcasts, videos, user groups, and more. I then try to reshare these resources in many ways.

One way I share these is here on the blog in these "EdTech Links of the Week" posts. See below to explore the latest batch of resources, and be sure to share with others who may benefit.

If you want to make sure you don't miss new resources, you can:

🔗 View all EdTech Links of the Week: bit.ly/caa-links

📰 Sign up for my weekly email newsletter: bit.ly/curts-news
📧 Join the "Control Alt Achieve" email discussion group: bit.ly/caa-emailgroup

🔔 Get new blog posts automatically through email - FollowIt link

And as always, please let me know of any resources that you recommend. I would love to learn from you!

"Abracadabr-AI" - MagicSchool AI Rooms for Student Learning

MagicSchool is a very well known AI tool for schools, which I have shared about many times before.

When most people think of MagicSchool they probably think about how it can assist educators with creating content such as lesson plans, rubrics, releveled text, DOK questions, and more. 

As awesome as that is, MagicSchool has another use that makes me even more excited… MagicSchool for students!

With MagicSchool:

• Educators can create school-safe student-friendly "rooms" with customized AI chatbots that students can interact with.
• These can include chatbots for writing feedback, idea generation, tutoring, sentence starters, character chats, and many more.
• And MagicSchool records everything typed by the student and the AI so you can review it and learn how best to support your learners.

Recently I had the pleasure to present a booth session at FETC on how to use MagicSchool for students. See below for the 25 minute recorded video of that presentation to learn all about creating student rooms, the student experience, and the teacher experience.

Top 10 Components of the Perfect AI Prompt

As amazing as AI chatbots are, to get the best results from them it is important that we provide them with well structured prompts.

As the old saying goes "Garbage in, garbage out."

Now certainly if you are not interested in creating your own prompts, there are many excellent tools that will do the entire process for you such as MagicSchool, TeacherServer, Khanmigo Teacher Tools, Fobizz, Brisk Teaching and more.

However, creating your own prompts gives you much more control and flexibility. And it really isn't that difficult! Prompt engineering is a valuable skill for everyone to help us get the most out of our use of AI.

In this blog post we will explore my top 10 tips for creating the perfect prompt, as well as other prompt engineering resources and techniques. And as always, please share your suggestions with me. I am excited to learn with you!

EdTech Links of the Week - 1-7-25

Each week I keep an eye out for the latest edtech resources through blogs, social media, podcasts, videos, user groups, and more. I then try to reshare these resources in many ways.

One way I share these is here on the blog in these "EdTech Links of the Week" posts. See below to explore the latest batch of resources, and be sure to share with others who may benefit.

If you want to make sure you don't miss new resources, you can:

🔗 View all EdTech Links of the Week: bit.ly/caa-links

📰 Sign up for my weekly email newsletter: bit.ly/curts-news
📧 Join the "Control Alt Achieve" email discussion group: bit.ly/caa-emailgroup

🔔 Get new blog posts automatically through email - FollowIt link

And as always, please let me know of any resources that you recommend. I would love to learn from you!

One Word of the Year - Google Slides Photo Word Template

The idea of choosing one word for the year has become a very popular activity to do. It can be a helpful way for anyone to set a goal to work toward or a focus to work on throughout the year.

There are lots of templates and tools to help you do this, but a couple years ago I tried this out by creating what I called a "Photo Word" in Google Slides. This is basically a clever way to make it look like you have a picture inside of a word.

If you want to learn all the gory details about that you can check out my earlier blog post as well as my short intro video and my very long deep dive video all about creating Photo Words.

However, to make things super simple I have a Google Slides template that you can copy and edit to make your own "One Word" for the year.

See below for a link to the template and a short tutorial video on how to make your "One Word" for the year.

17 Super Chrome Extensions

Google Chrome is a powerful web browser filled with loads of useful features and tools. I covered many of these in my earlier series of posts and videos called "Google Chrome Can Do That?!"

However, as awesome as Chrome is, it may not do everything you need.

Thankfully Google allows you to make Chrome even better by installing Chrome web extensions. Extensions are tools from the Chrome Web Store that give extra features and abilities to Chrome. When you have them installed, you will find them as little icons in the top right corner of your browser.

In this blog post and webinar video we are going to take a deep dive into extensions including how to get extensions, how to manage your extensions, my resource with over 150 recommended extensions for you and your students, and a deep dive into 17 of my favorite extensions!

See below for the recorded webinar and all the resources for this session.