Massac Tech Ed

     One of the great online video creation tools I have come across is WeVideo ( http://www.wevideo.com/ ). WeVideo strives to make sure video creation is available for everyone. The interface ranges from being suitable for a novice to experienced editors. There are a variety of editing modes including storyboard, timeline, and advanced. There are also many themes to choose from. WeVideo is browser based, but also works on some mobile devices. This is free, but there are paid options available as well. WeVideo is certainly worth checking out if you are interested in any aspect of video creation.

One of the easiest tech tools I have found to use is Screencast-O-Matic ( http://www.screencast-o-matic.com/ ). The free application allows you to perform  screen capture (also audio and webcam) recording on Windows or Mac computers with no installation needed. Screencast-O-Matic is centered around being user-friendly. The free account allows you to record up to 15 minutes, publish to YouTube HD, and also publish to various file formats. It is a wonderful component for those of you that want to record lessons for your students to watch at home, on their mobile device, or in school. The paid account ($15/yr) offers quite a bit more features, but the free account is certainly very useful.

One of the interesting features about Google Search is that you can refine results by reading level. Google breaks items up into three areas (Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced). If you or your students are searching for information, this may be handy in finding level appropriate content. The following is from Google's help page about reading level: How to modify your search results by reading level Click  Search tools  at the top of the search results page. Click  All Results . Click  Reading level . You'll now see results annotated with reading levels as well as a percentage breakdown of results by reading level. To filter your results by a specific reading level, select your desired level ( Basic , Intermediate , or  Advanced ). At any time, you can click  View results for all reading levels  to go back to seeing all results. Here is a picture illustrating this feature: To learn more about this feature, check out Google's help article at http://support

During the last week of March, I had the pleasure of attending the Illinois Google Apps for Education Summit. While there will be more information shared via training/etc, I figured this was a good platform to share three different, but very useful Google Chrome extensions. [This applies only to those of you using the Chrome Browser ( https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/browser/ )]. Make sure you are signed into Chrome for these extensions to apply themselves to your account. This way they will work on any computer that you sign into with Chrome on it. 1) Big G Black Bar Sorter ( https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/big-g-black-bar-sorter/oiamgkpplhllmgmjkmpoapkidpgfhmdo ) This extension allows you to reorder the options in the black bar that you see at the top of various Google websites (i.e. http://google.com ). You can even put items on there that have been previously removed (i.e. the Sites link for Google Sites). 2) Eye Dropper ( https://chrome.google.com/webstore/det