One Tab – Organizing Your Tabs

I abandoned using One Tab for a while.  I’m not sure I had a good reason, but I tend to jump around with tools to see how they would work in my environment.  One Tab is back in my life now!

One Tab is a way to organize and save your tabs in Chrome.  Essentially it’s a bookmarking tool, but there are some great features that provide a step up from just staring URLs in the Omnibox.

Today I was reading through the blogs of our participants in Get Your Google On 2 – several teachers chose that option to share their journey of using Google Tools and tech integration in their classroom.  My workflow was to go into the spreadsheet with the URLs and click them open to peruse and comment.  Many times, I just keep all of the tabs in a window and leave the window open.

It works that way, but it’s annoying.  For some reason, I decided to put them all into One Tab.

After you add One Tab from the Chrome Webstore, click the One Tab icon (it will be to the right of your Omnibox)

One Tab pulls all of the tabs into one tab in Chrome (this is going to reduce clutter and help Chrome work a little quicker, especially if you have tons of tabs and windows open)

I can rename the group of tabs so that I can find them easily (I used to use this if I was in the middle of a project and didn’t want to lose my resources).  Also, if you have a tab that you don’t want in that group of tabs, you can hover over the URL and X it out to the left. If you’re ready to work with those tabs again, you just click Restore all.

Okay, so far you’re thinking, no big deal – it’s a glorified bookmark organization tool.  Wait for it…..

Want someone else to have ALL of those tabs?! (I’m thinking some research sites that you want students to access and since you don’t want to take the extra step and put it in a doc and then upload…yada, yada)

You can share ALL of the tabs as a web page:

It gives it a unique URL and a QR code!

What are some ways you and your students can use this tool in your learning environment?

GDocs Suggested Edits

Using Google Docs has changed what writing looks like in my classroom.  It has been the “game changer” for me.  On the surface, Google Docs provides me with the most convenient way to manage all of the writing my students do.  Looking deeper, the collaborative features enhances most student’s writing.  Students tend to enjoy writing better when they can collaborate with their friends in and out of our classroom and even get feedback and ideas from students in other schools, districts and occasionally a professional writer or expert on a topic.  This is why I was excited to see the Suggested Edits feature from Google.  In the past, when I would give feedback to students about their writing, I could do one of two things.

1. Delete what they wrote and rewrite it.  Typically, I would change the color of the font so the author knew where I changed something.  I taught my students how to go back through the Revision History and see what was changed if needed.  2. I would highlight a portion of the text and add a comment with my ideas/thoughts/corrections.  Students could then make the correction themselves and resolve the comment.  They could access all of the resolved comments through the Comments button.

Both of these worked for me and my students.  It required some modeling, required a bit of independence to go back and reflect on the revisions, and was effective for most students.  It was, though, a little bit cumbersome – having to change the color of font and having to go back through the Revision History to make sure students made corrections and didn’t just click resolve, but it still improved student writing and they very much enjoyed using GDocs instead of Microsoft Word.

Suggested Edits is a newer GDoc feature.  This feature does not actually change the document, but it provides guidance for the student’s writing.  To use this feature,  you first need to change to Suggested Editing mode.  When you access the document you want to edit/revise, click the Editing button under Comments/Share buttons in the upper right hand corner.

Choose “Suggesting” and the Editing button will turn green.  As you make “corrections”, GDocs strikes through the current writing and inserts your suggestion before it.  Students will see your suggestion in the margin and will be able to choose whether or not they want to accept the change or reject the change.

Click to see a larger version

When students are writing, we want them to be able to make decisions about their writing – we want them to feel like authors.  Authors take suggestions from their editors, their peers, other authors, their families – they take suggestions – they have the final say in what gets published.   We don’t just want to tell our students how to make it better, we want them to reflect on the feedback and make good decisions about how to make it better.

Tech Byte: Biblionasium

A couple years ago when I was teaching 5th grade at Norton Creek – one of my fab colleagues really wanted to figure out how to have a Goodreads-type website for her classroom.  We toyed with using Edmodo but it didn’t have the flair that Goodreads had.

And now….our problem is solved! Cue lights – drum roll please……if you’re a K-8 teacher and want to get kids excited about reading and talking about books, get yourself over to Biblionasium!

I’ve put together a Google Folder that includes written directions for setting up an account, templates for organizing student username and passwords and videos that highlight the basic features to help you get started.  As always, let me know how I can support you in your classroom with using this tool!

Follow them on Twitter! @BiblioNasium