#OneNewThing: Toby Chrome Extension

Earlier this week, Meagan Kelly wrote a great post in which she described the new blogging challenge she had created for herself. Her goal was to write a blog post about one thing she learned every week. She called it the #OneNewThing challenge. (Click here to read the blog post.)

I really like this idea because it reinforces the importance of educators as life-long learners. So, I'm writing my first #OneNewThing post about a new Chrome extension that I learned about this week: Toby.

I found out about this from a Twitter post from Jen Giffen. She shared a resource full of super helpful Chrome extensions, and Toby was on that list. Toby allows you to organize your tabs into a visual workspace by dragging and dropping them into "collections." You can also easily create a "session" that will save all your open tabs with just one click.

I'm still exploring all the cool ways I can use the tools in this extension, but I'm already loving it! I can see this being helpful for students when they are researching and have multiple tabs open to all the different websites they are using.

What are some Chrome extensions that you find helpful?

Comments

Awesome Projects for January!

This week has been super busy! But it's that awesome kind of busy where I am working on multiple projects for January that I am SUPER excited about! Kinders on Chromebooks We are preparing for our 3rd Quarter EdTech session, and we are planning to include resources specifically designed for our K-2 teachers. We want to create videos in which we model strategies that K-2 teachers can use to help their students learn how to login to Chromebooks. My EdTech teammate reached out to the Kindergarten team at one of our schools, and they were kind enough to open their doors to us! We will be working with this team on the first day back from Winter Break in January. Our plan is for me to lead the first session while another EdTech team member records the lesson and assists students as needed. We will be sharing the video footage, along with other K-2 resources, with our teachers during our sessions throughout the 3rd Quarter. This week I am trying to build a Google Site th

Create an Instagram Story!

One day on Twitter, I came across a tweet from Ryan O'Donnell ( @creativeedtech ) in which he shared a Facebook template that could be used for students to demonstrate their learning. I clicked on the link to his website , and I was AMAZED at all the cool templates he had created for teachers to use for free! I decided to try using an Instagram template during a unit on the planets in our solar system. I wanted students to demonstrate what they learned about the different planets, but I wanted them to do it in a creative way. Here are the directions I gave to my students: Here are some student examples: Student Example #1 Student Example #2 Student Example #3 Student Example #4 I really enjoyed this activity, and I love how students familiar with hashtags were able to create and use them in clever ways! If I was to go back and do this again, I would spend some time working with students less familiar with social media and hashtags and give them some more

Creating PD Choice Boards!

As the new EdTech and Social Studies Specialist, part of my job includes planning and facilitating professional development for our social studies teachers. Our main PD sessions take place once a month on Wednesdays when teachers are released early from their school sites. Leading these PD sessions was a part of the job that I was SUPER excited about when I first started. However, there are some challenges that I wasn't prepared for that have caused me to reflect and rethink the way I have been planning. Challenges 1) We have 32 schools in our district, and there are three different release times. To honor everyone's time and make sure teachers don't have to work outside of contract hours, we decided to have two different sessions with a half-hour of overlap time. I set up the activities in Google Classroom, number them, and include videos and directions so that teachers can work through them at their own pace when they arrive. However, some teachers have a d

Roxi Thompson

Search This Blog