C4T #2

5 Chrome Settings That Will Make Teachers Smile
Mr. John Sowash is a strong believer in Google Chrome. This has been his browser of choice since it was launched in 2008. In this post, Mr. Sowash talks about his five favorite "tricks" for getting more out of Chrome. "These tips do not require any special plugins, extensions, or applications. They are available for anyone running Chrome OS or the Chrome browser for Windows or Mac." The first trick is launch tabs on start up. With this trick you can set it to where every time you pull up Chrome it pulls up your selected (most visited) webpages. Mr. Sowash recommends doing no more than three websites. The second trick is bookmark sync. "With this trick, you can use Chrome on your PC, Mac, Chromebook, iPhone or Android tablet. As long as you sign in to chrome, your book marks will be there when you need them." The third trick is tab sync. "With tab sync, you can view any open tab on any of your devices and open them with a single click." The fourth trick is zoom. "When you are projecting something in class and you want to highlight a specific area of the screen you can use the keyboard shortcut ctrl and + to zoom in. When you are ready to zoom back out, use ctrl and - or ctrl and 0." The last trick Mr. Sowash talks about is settings search. With this trick, Chrome user settings can quickly be found and adjusted.

My Response to Mr. Sowash:
I thought this blog was so interesting because this is exactly what we are learning about in EDM310. I explained to Mr. Sowash a little bit about our class and blogs. I also told Mr. Sowash that we use Google Chrome as well as Google Docs in our class. I explained that these tips/tricks will be very helpful not only during this class, but definitely when I become a teacher. These tips will make using the internet a lot easier and faster. I really like the launch tabs on start up and will apply this on my Chrome because I view several of the same sites every time I get on.

Free Plagiarism Checker for the Classroom
Mr. John Sowash explains a little about The Plagiarism Checker. This is a free service for teachers to use to check their students work for plagiarism on the internet. The teacher simply copies and pastes a chunk of the work onto this site and it will check to see if the work was plagiarized or not. The basic service of the checker is free to use, but their is a more advanced service for $8 a month. There are other sites out there that cost a lot of money and require a lot of leg work, but this site has been very useful to teachers and is nice because it is free or fairly inexpensive if you want the advanced options.

My Response to Mr. Sowash:
I thought this was a very useful post for educators. I explained a little bit about our class and how it is based on incorporating technology in the classrooms. This would be useful to all of us in our future classrooms when we are incorporating technology and allowing our students to use the internet to work on projects and papers.