Three Easy Ways to Open and Edit Office Files on Your Chromebook

October 28, 2015
There are three easy ways to work on Office files on your Chromebook device. Using these three tips, you will be able to open and edit your Office files and also share them with others and start collaboratively editing them in real time. For these tips to work you need to make sure your Chromebook software is up to date and that you have the newest version of Google Drive.

1- Use Chromebook’s built-in editor
You can  easily open and edit Microsoft files on your Chromebook using Google Docs, Sheets, and slides app. To edit an Office file you need to

• Download the Office file to your Chromebook.
• Click the magnifying glass to open the launcher .
• To get to your file, click All Apps > Files .
• Double-click the file to edit it.

Collaborative editing of files
To be able to simultaneously co-edit office files with others, you will have to save your file as Google Docs, Sheets, or Slides then share it with your collaborators. Note here that any updates made to the Google Docs, Sheets, or Slides file will not carry over to the original Office file.

2- Use Microsoft Word Online app

This is a Chrome app that 'combines the most common Office features and real-time co-authoring capabilities so teams at school and home can collaborate on shared documents, presentations and spreadsheets.'

3- Use Office Editing for Docs, Sheets and Slides

This is another great Chrome app for working on Office files on your Chromebook. 'Once the extension is installed, Office files that you drag into Chrome, open in Gmail, Google Drive, and more, will be opened in Docs, Sheets, and Slides for viewing and editing. You can save each file back to its original Office format, or convert it to Docs, Sheets, or Slides to unlock more features, like inviting others to edit with you, commenting, chat, and more.'

Source: Chromebook Help Center

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7 Great Chromebook and Google Drive Apps for Editing Photos

October 18, 2015
In response to a couple of requests we received from our readers here in EdTech & mLearning, we went ahead and curated for you this collection comprising some of the best photo editing tools in Chrome web store. Most of these apps work perfectly on Chromebooks and some of them are also integrated with Google Drive allowing you to easily edit and save photos directly to your Drive account. Some of the things you can do with these apps include: editing photos, cropping, resizing, adding effects, adjusting contrast, rotating, removing unwanted parts, adding frames and many more.

1- Pixlr Editor

‘Pixlr Editor is a browser photo editor for all your editing needs. Have full control over your images, including layers and effects…If you're used to working with Gimp, PaintShop Pro, or Photoshop you will feel right at home with this online image editor. It contains a lot of the features that you normally see in desktop graphic design applications. Jump in and start using this tool with no registration required.’

2- PicMonkey

‘Free photo editor with Collage, Touch Up, Teeth Whiten, Fonts, Effects, Filters, Frames, Stickers & more…When you install our chrome photo app, the PicMonkey icon appears in Chrome's app launcher on the New Tab page, along with your other Chrome apps.  So you can fire up the Monkey from here, instead of pinned tabs or the address bar.  Go forth and photogrify!’

3- BeFunky

‘With BeFunky’s photo editor, you can play with hundreds of amazing photo effects that you can’t find anywhere else, like our world-famous Cartoonizer®, oil painting, and pop art effects. You can also add extra flair to your photo with hundreds of one-of-a-kind, hand-drawn graphics, like hats, beards, jewelry, photo frames, and graphic overlays. If text is your thing, BeFunky photo editor has tons of fonts and customized text layouts for you to choose from, or use any of the fonts stored on your computer! ’

4- Fotor Photo Editor

‘Online photo editing & photo creatives made simple and fun with Fotor. Fotor's free photo editing features including photo collage, photo frames, photo effects, photo retouching, color splash, tilt-shift, clip arts, text, photo cards, online HDR and more.’

5- iPiccy Photo Editor

‘iPiccy provides new, easy-to-use tools for modifying pictures, using advanced image processing. iPiccy offers the easiest user interface and workflow of any photo editing application, allowing users to easily pull images from any Web site or file folder. iPiccy includes an extensive variety of easy Web-based photo-editing tools such as Auto-fix, Rotate, Crop, Resize and Color adjustment and Sharpen - all in one place and in real-time. ’

6- Pixlr Express

‘Pixlr Express is a fun and powerful photo editor that lets you quickly crop, resize, and fine-tune any picture, all in a completely ad-free experience. Choose from over 2 million combinations of free effects, overlays, and borders to further personalize your images. Pixlr Express makes you look like a pro, even if you’ve never edited a photo before. ’

7- Pixlr Touch Up 

‘Smart, easy offline photo editor. Touch up, clone, crop, resize, rotate, adjust color, add effects, and more. Put the finishing touches on your photos with this free offline photo editor from Autodesk. Automatically remove unwanted details from your photos so it looks like they were never there.’

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An Excellent Chromebook App for Improving Kids Reading Skills

October , 2015

Kids Sight Words is a great Chromebook and Android app  to use with kids to help them improve their reading skills.  This is basically an engaging game in which kids get to play with Tammy the frog as it sets out to explore the four major activities in the app. Using a list of 220 Dolch sight words, Tammy moves from one activity to the other learning and reviewing the commonly used words in English . 

Kids Sight Words is ideal for kids who have already mastered the basics of phonics and blending sounds. It provides learners with five levels of vocabulary to work on. Kids will have to listen to common words and try to identify the correct sight word. They will also learn to recognize common words at their reading level. The strength of Kids Sight Words is that it improves kids reading fluency and skills by by practicing words that they may have seen or are familiar with.

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Two Great Chromebook Apps for Planning and Managing Projects

October 11, 2015
For those of you using Chromebooks, below are two good apps to help you manage your projects and tasks online. Both of these apps offer collaborative features ideal for group work. They are also integrated with Google Drive and Gmail and Calendar.

1- Zoho Projects

‘Zoho Projects is a feature-rich online project management tool with collaboration and bug tracking that helps teams to come together unlock group’s potential and get work done faster. Some of its features include: Connect with your team, view updates and keep track of your tasks from Apple and Android mobiles. Reports give you instant insight into what's been done, what's on schedule and what's falling behind; Communicate effectively with your team using wiki, chat rooms and forums…’

2- Smartsheet Project Management

‘Smartsheet is a leading online task and project management app with unique collaboration features that work your way. The friendly spreadsheet interface makes it easy to track to do lists, coordinate event planning, keep dates and calendars in sync, share files, and manage any type of project.’

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6 Handy Chromebook Apps for Social Studies Teachers

October 6, 2015
Chromebook is a versatile gadget with a huge potential in education. Several school districts and classrooms have been using them over the last couple of years and they proved to be of tremendous help in the instructional process. Chromebook section in this blog features everything teachers need to know to make the best of these devices in class including things such as tips, apps and video tutorials.

Today, we are adding another resource which is basically a collection of some of the best Chromebook apps for social studies teachers. We featured apps that students can use to create presentations; write, save and share documents; create mind maps, and many more. You can also watch this wonderful Google hangout video to learn more about how some teachers are actually using Chromebooks to teach social studies and foreign language

1- Popplet

‘Popplet is the simplest tool to capture and organize your ideas. With Popplet you can quick jot down your ideas and sort them visually…Popplet is great for school and for learning in the classroom and at home. Students use Popplet to think and learn visually. By capturing facts, thoughts, and images, students learn to create relationships between them and generate new ideas. ’

2- Google Drive

Google Drive lets you create, share and keep all your stuff in one place.You can use it to access your files, even the big ones, from wherever you are. Share them with whomever you want, and edit them together in real time.

3- Google Classroom

‘Classroom is a new tool in Google Apps for Education that helps teachers create and organize assignments quickly, provide feedback efficiently, and easily communicate with their classes. Classroom helps students organize their work in Google Drive, complete and turn it in, and communicate directly with their teachers and peers.’

4- Haiku Deck

‘With Haiku Deck, anyone can create stunning, image-rich slideshows in a fraction of the time required by most presentation software. Easily import photos from Google Drive, Facebook, and other popular sites, or tap into millions of free Creative Commons images through the app's unique built-in keyword image search. Sizing, formatting, and attribution are all handled seamlessly, leaving you plenty of time to focus on your message. ’

5- TimesMaps

The World History TimeMap contains over 660 history maps and 1,000 pages of high-quality supporting narrative, wrapped up in a unique interface that creates a framework for world history.You can use it to easily navigate to any time and place in history.

6- Newsela

Explore a library of high-quality, engaging nonfiction that you need to meet the new, rigorous demands of the Common Core. Newsela’s constantly expanding archive helps students develop a love of reading while they expand their understanding of the world.
7- DOGOnews

DOGOnews is the leading destination for Current Events Articles for Kids and Teachers. Featuring award-winning content written for children, DOGOnews is rapidly becoming the defacto favorite for language arts, science and social studies lesson plans in the classroom and current events homework help at home.

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3 Powerful Chromebook Apps for Creating Educational Infographics and Posters

October 4, 2015
Looking for tools to use on your Chromebook to create posters and infographics to share with your students? The apps below are good places to start with. Our favourite tool in this list is PiktoChart, we have been using it for few years now and never had any issues with it plus it’s very easy and simple to use which will make your infographic making a simple drag and drop process.

1- PiktoChart

PiktoChart is a web-based application that allows you to create beautiful visuals without the need for any prior design knowledge. You can choose from a wide variety of professionally made templates; customize the text, graphics, charts and color of your infographics, add interactive elements such as charts, HTML output then save and publish to social networks or download as an image.

2- Canva

Canva is another powerful tool to create visuals on Chrome. It allows you to design a number of things that include flyers, presentations, cards, invitations and posters. You can choose ‘from more than one million layouts, stock photographs and illustrations. Search for the best graphics, photos, and fonts then use Canva’s simple drag and drop tool to create a design.’

3- ThingLink

ThingLink is an excellent web tool that allows you to create interactive images online. The images you create can come alive by adding to them text, video, music, and links. ThingLink has also recently rolled out a new feature, which is still in beta, that allows you to add interactive pinmarks to YouTube videos. These pin marks can be links to other videos or websites

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Some Notable Teacher-tested Chromebook Apps to Use with Students

August 24, 2015
Does your classroom or school use Google Chromebooks? If so, here are some notable Chromebook apps tested and chosen by teachers like you.

Desmos 

A powerful and free visual graphing calculator.

VoiceThread 

Record and layer your voice over any kind of media.

Google Slides 

This is Google's answer to Microsoft PowerPoint.

RealtimeBoard 

An online whiteboard for any kind of media and collaboration tools.

Want more? Check out these shelves of tools.

Chromebook Usage 

This is curated by instructional designer KC Testerman.

PBL Using Chromebook Apps 

This one is curated by high school teacher R Sexton.

By: Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf
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A Collection of Some of The Best Chromebook Apps for Teachers

August, 2015
One the occasion of the start of a new school year, Educational Technology and Mobile Learning is working on a series of posts aiming at providing teachers with a variety of educational resources specifically curated for teachers keen on effectively integrating technology in their instruction. In this context and after we have covered some of the best educational Chrome apps, we are sharing with you today some excellent Chromebook apps to use with your students in class. Enjoy

1- Chromebook Apps for recording and editing audio

• SoundCloud
•  Voice Recorder
• Vocaroo
•  Twisted Wave

2- Chromebook apps for digital storytelling

•  Haiku Deck
• Storybird
• Powtoon Presentation
• Pixton 

3- Chromebook apps for drawing

• Sumo Paint
• Sketchpad
• deviantART muro

4- Chromebook apps for note taking

• Google Keep
•  Evernote
• Quick Note

5- Science apps for Chromebook

• ChemReference
• The BioDigital Human 

6- Task management apps for Chromebook

• Google Tasks
• Todoist for Chromebooks
• Wunderlist
• Any.do

7- Chromebook apps for editing videos

• YouTube Video Editor
•  WeVideo
• Stupeflix

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10 Essential Chromebook Apps for Teachers

July 2, 2015
Over the last few years we have reviewed hundreds of educational Chrome apps some of which are also Chromebook compatible. We know from the emails we receive  that several of you are using Chromebooks with their students in class. We are actually working on organizing all the Chromebook apps we have covered so far into different categories easily accessible from the menu bar. From tips on how to effectively use Chromebooks in your instruction to subject-specific apps to enhance your lesson planning and delivery, these collections will definitely have you covered. However, as we were wading through our archive we pulled out some Chromebook apps which have really been popular among teachers. These are particularly helpful for those of you  looking for an initial list of essential apps to use on their Chromebooks.

1- Google Classroom

‘Classroom is a new tool in Google Apps for Education that helps teachers create and organize assignments quickly, provide feedback efficiently, and easily communicate with their classes. Classroom helps students organize their work in Google Drive, complete and turn it in, and communicate directly with their teachers and peers.’

2- Socrative

                                   

Saocrative is one of my favourite tools for getting feedback from users. Teachers can use the different question types provided by Socrative to poll their students and garner their feedback in a variety of formats using both smartphones or computers.

3- Google Keep

Google Keep is an excellent tool to use for creating digital sticky notes. You can use both text and images to capture and share your notes.  You can also use it   to create to-do lists and bookmark content from the web.It has an intuitive and user friendly interface that makes it way simpler to navigate and control than is the case with several other note-taking apps out there.

4- Wunderlist

“Wunderlist helps millions of people around the world capture their ideas, things to do and places to see. Whether you’re sharing a grocery list with a loved one, working on a project, or planning a vacation, Wunderlist makes it easy to share your lists and collaborate with everyone in your life. Wunderlist instantly syncs between your phone, tablet and computer, so you can access your lists from anywhere.”

5- YouTube Video Editor

YouTube Video Editor is definitely one of the best and easy tools you can use to edit and create new videos. It allows you to combine multiple videos and images you've uploaded to create a new video. Other features include trimming clips to custom lengths, select music to add to your videos from YouTube’s library, and customize your clips with special tools and effects. Video Editor also has an awesome interactivity feature that allows you to  add interactive elements to your videos.These interactive features can be annotations, links to other videos or external resources on the web, call-for action buttons and 

6- Magistro

‘Magisto Magical Video Editor & Maker is a fun and easy way to automatically edit videos and share them with your friends and family. Just select videos and photos, and Magisto will turn them into beautiful edited movies, complete with music and effects, in minutes.’

7- Pixlr Editor 

is a great photo editing tool that you can use to work on the pictures and images you want to use with your students or in your presentations. Pixlr is easy and simple to use and works right from your web browser. It is also integrated with Google Drive.

8- Evernote

This is definitely one of the must have apps for taking notes and recording ideas. Evernote allows you to save all your notes and bookmarks into one single place that you can access across different devices. You can also use it to create task lists and to-dos, attach images and audio to your notes and many more.

9- Kahoot

Kahoot is a web tool that allows you to easily create and play quizzes, discussions or surveys ( Kahoots). Using a simple 'drag & drop' creator tool on any device, you can build quizzes with embedded imagery and video, based on educational content. Or, find public content to play. Kahoot also allows you to engage your audience and grab their attention by projecting the quiz onto the screen at the front. Without needing an account, everyone in the room quickly joins through their personal device, seeing their name appear at the front. Real time feedback is also supported.

10- Timeline

Timeline, as its name indicate, is a very good tool from Read Write Think that you can use  to create web based timelines. The tool is very simple and students can use it to graphically represent a sequence of data (events, facts..,etc) along a chronological line. These timelines can be arranged by by date, time or event.

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