This week Google made the Nik collection free to all users. The Nik collection is a set of plug-ins for desktop editing tools like Photoshop and Aperture. While those tools are powerful they are probably more than most of need for editing images that we'll put into slideshows, collages, or documents. Google Slides and Google Documents have image editing tools built into them. Those tools are more than adequate for most classroom uses of images. In the video embedded below I demonstrate how to use the image cropping and filter tools in Google Slides. Learn more Google Drive tips and tricks in the new section of Getting Going With GAFE starting on April 5th. H/T to Lifehacker for the news about Nik. Join me in July for the Practical Ed Tech Summer Camps. Discounted early registration is available now. This post originally appeared on Free Technology for Teachers if you see it elsewhere, it has been used without permission.              Related StoriesJoeZoo Express Makes It Easy to Grade in Google Docs5 Ideas for Using Google Sites in Your ClassroomCheck Out the New Google Docs & Slides Templates 

Quick Key is a free app that turns your iPhone or Android phone into a bubble sheet scanner. It has two parts to it that when combined make it very easy for you to quickly grade multiple choice and true/false quizzes. This week Quick Key introduced the option to sync your Google Classroom rosters to your Quick Key account. Here are the basics of how Quick Key works; create your quiz on the Quick Key website then print and distribute a bubble sheet. After your students have completed the bubble sheet you simply scan the sheets with your iPhone or Android phone and the grading is done for you. From the app you can send grades to the classes that you have created on the Quick Key website. If you enter students’ email addresses into your class rosters on Quick Key, you can have grades emailed to students. Google Classroom users can sync their rosters with Quick Key for distribution of grades. Watch the video below to learn more about Quick Key's Google Classroom integration. Quick Key: Sync Rosters with Google Classroom from Quick Key on Vimeo. Applications for Education Tools like Quick Key don't directly change the way that we teach, but they can give us more time to actually teach and build relationships with students instead of spending time manually grading tests and quizzes. Join me in July for the Practical Ed Tech Summer Camps. Discounted early registration is available now. This post originally appeared on Free Technology for Teachers if you see it elsewhere, it has been used without permission.              Related Stories3 Tools for Creating Comics on iPadsNew Commenting Options in Google Slides, Sheets, Docs Mobile AppsHow Do We Know What Color Dinosaurs Were? 

Whenever I run a workshop that is longer than an hour I use Google's built-in timer function to time breaks. All I have to do is type "set timer 5 minutes" into a Google search and a timer appears and starts counting down. You can enter any amount of time after set timer and you can pause the timer if you need to. Watch the video below to see how that works. A new to me feature of Google search is the option to use a metronome. To access a metronome in Google search simply type "metronome" into your search and the metronome appears. You can adjust the tempo of the metronome by dragging the slider below the tempo display. Thanks to Lifehacker for the metronome tip. Join me in July for the Practical Ed Tech Summer Camps. Discounted early registration is available now. This post originally appeared on Free Technology for Teachers if you see it elsewhere, it has been used without permission.              Related StoriesNow You Can Sync Your Google Classroom Roster With Quick KeyHow to Use Google Slides to Crop and Filter ImagesThe Week in Review - 50 Million Page Views 

Quizzy is a free service that enables you to quickly make and publish online quizzes. To get started simply register for a Quizzy account then title your quiz and start writing multiple choice questions. When you have finished writing your questions you can publish your quiz publicly or keep it private. Quizzes that you mark as public can be shared with others by simply directing them to the URL assigned to your quiz. People taking your Quizzy quiz online receive a score as soon as they complete all of the questions. You can try my sample quiz here. At this time Quizzy quizzes are entirely text-based without any options for inserting images or videos. Applications for Education Quizzy could be a good tool for creating practice quizzes for your students. At this time Quizzy doesn't have a mechanism for you to record students' scores on the quizzes that they take. If you don't work in a 1:1 environment you can print Quizzy quizzes with just one click in your Quizzy account. Join me in July for the Practical Ed Tech Summer Camps. Discounted early registration is available now. This post originally appeared on Free Technology for Teachers if you see it elsewhere, it has been used without permission.              Related StoriesThe Week in Review - 50 Million Page ViewsBuncee Buddies Connects Classrooms for Earth DayStoryTop Story Maker - Create Simple Image Based Stories 

ClassTag is a new service that aims to help you organize parent-teacher conference, classroom volunteer requests, and school events. The highlight of ClassTag is the option to create appointment slots that parents can reserve to meet with you. To get started on ClassTag create an account and enter some basic information about your classroom or classes that you teach. To get the full benefit of ClassTag you will need to enter the email addresses of your students' parents. Once those steps are completed you can create a parent-teacher conference schedule. You can create time slots as short as 15 minutes or as long as an hour. Once a parent reserves a slot no one else can grab it. The other core aspects of ClassTag are a requests feature and an event scheduler. The requests feature in ClassTag allows you to send out notes requesting things like field trip chaperones or material donations to your classroom. Parents can volunteer to fulfill the requests through the note that you send via ClassTag and ClassTag will keep track of the responses for you. If you have a school event coming up, you can promote that event through ClassTag. Your ClassTag event page can include information about times, things you should bring to the event, or event costs. ClassTag will also keep track of RSVPs for you. Overall ClassTag does offer a nice set of features of teachers. Many of the features can be found in other tools, but ClassTag does a good job of putting them all into one place for you. Join me in July for the Practical Ed Tech Summer Camps. Discounted early registration is available now. This post originally appeared on Free Technology for Teachers if you see it elsewhere, it has been used without permission.              Related StoriesQuizzy Offers a Quick Way to Create Online QuizzesNeed a Metronome or Timer - Just Google ItNow You Can Sync Your Google Classroom Roster With Quick Key 

EdTechTeacher, an advertiser on this site, has launched a new FREE video series called #ETTchat. Each week, one of their instructors posts a new video with ideas using technology in the service of learning.  Collaborative Crowd-Sourced Reading with PrismThe Prism Scholar Lab is an experimental tool from the University of Virgina. Teachers can create a free account and then paste any text into Prism for their students to then annotate using various facets. In this video, Greg Kulowiec (@gregkulowiec) shows the potential for using this tool in classrooms as a way to quickly assess for comprehension, encourage class discussion, and scaffold analytical reading.  Learn more about collaborative tools and ePub creation on the EdTechTeacher web site. Join me in July for the Practical Ed Tech Summer Camps. Discounted early registration is available now. This post originally appeared on Free Technology for Teachers if you see it elsewhere, it has been used without permission.              Related StoriesClassTag Streamlines Scheduling of Parent Teacher ConferencesQuizzy Offers a Quick Way to Create Online QuizzesNeed a Metronome or Timer - Just Google It 

Tap to Learn produces a bunch of educational apps for Android and iOS. The Tap to Learn Grammar app for Android offers more than 200 self-paced grammar lessons. The lessons don't have videos embedded in them, but there are links to external videos hosted on YouTube. After working through a lesson students can test their new skills in a series of quizzes. Instant feedback is provided in the skills quizzes within Tap to Learn Grammar. The free app records and tracks students' progress for them. Applications for Education Using Tap to Learn's Grammar app isn't a revolutionary approach to learning. That said, if you're looking for an Android app that your students can use to practice and track their progress in developing their grammar skills. Join me in July for the Practical Ed Tech Summer Camps. Discounted early registration is available now. This post originally appeared on Free Technology for Teachers if you see it elsewhere, it has been used without permission.              Related StoriesNow You Can Sync Your Google Classroom Roster With Quick KeyStoryTop Story Maker - Create Simple Image Based StoriesFreshGrade Now Offers an Android App for Teachers 

This morning I received an email from a reader who had heard that there was a way to create word clouds in a Google Spreadsheet, but needed a little help doing that. She was worried about how to get all of the words in a document into a spreadsheet in an easy manner. My suggestion was to skip the spreadsheet and just use the Tag Cloud Generator Add-on for Google Documents. My video embedded below demonstrates how to create a word cloud within Google Documents. Applications for Education Word clouds can help students analyze documents written by others as well as documents of their own creation. By copying the text of a document into a word cloud generator your students can quickly see the words that appear most frequently in that document. Word clouds can also be used to help students see which words that they have frequently used in their own works. Have your students create word clouds of their work during the revision process of writing a story or essay. The word cloud will quickly show students which words they have used the most. Then ask them to think about synonyms for the words that they have used most often in their writings. Topics like this one and many others will be covered in depth during my spring and summer offerings of Getting Going With GAFE.  Join me in July for the Practical Ed Tech Summer Camps. Discounted early registration is available now. This post originally appeared on Free Technology for Teachers if you see it elsewhere, it has been used without permission.              Related StoriesHow to Use Google Slides to Crop and Filter ImagesJoeZoo Express Makes It Easy to Grade in Google DocsImproved Voice Commands and More New Google Apps Features Released This Week 

Zaption is a popular tool for creating video-based lessons and quizzes. The service operates on a freemium model in which they offer a mix of free and paid options. Last week Zaption announced that the free options have been expanded. Teachers can now utilize all of the video lesson creation tools that Zaption offers. Those tools include adding required questions that students must answer before moving forward in a video lesson. The other enhancement to the free version of Zaption is the removal of the limitation on the number of viewers your lessons can have. To create a quiz on Zaption you start by creating a "tour" in your account. A tour is a combination of videos, images, and text arranged into a sequence. To add a video to a tour you can search and select one within Zaption. Zaption pulls videos from YouTube, Vimeo, PBS, or National Geographic. After choosing your video, start watching it then pause it when you want to add a question. You can add questions in the form of multiple choice, open response, or check box response. When students watch the video they will see your questions appear in the context in which you set them. Applications for Education Zaption can be a great tool for creating flipped lessons to share with your students. Students do not have to have Zaption accounts in order to use the tours that you create. The free version of the service used to only allow only one video per tour/ lesson, but it now allows you to include multiple videos within a lesson/ tour. Join me in July for the Practical Ed Tech Summer Camps. Discounted early registration is available now. This post originally appeared on Free Technology for Teachers if you see it elsewhere, it has been used without permission.              Related StoriesThe Week in Review - 50 Million Page ViewsVibby - Annotate YouTube & Vimeo Videos on Your Own SiteThe Instructional Technology Tool I Recommend in Email More Than Any Other 

Over the weekend I was looking at the Google Analytics for FreeTech4Teachers.com and noticed that last week one of the most frequently searched terms that directed people to this blog is "bibliography generators." I took that as a clue that more than a few people are interested in that topic. To that end, here are the tools that I frequently recommend for creating bibliographies. As with any tool that automates a process, teach your students to check the accuracy of the citations created by any of these tools. For Google Docs users the EasyBib Bibliography Creator is my go-to tool for creating bibliographies. The EasyBib Bibliography Creator makes it easy to properly cite resources and format a bibliography in APA, MLA, or Chicago style. Click here for directions for the process of using this add-on. RefMe is currently my favorite tool for creating bibliographies outside of the Google Docs environment. RefMe offers browser extensions, a free Android, and a free iPad app for saving resources and generating bibliographies from your collection of resources. Watch my video embedded below to learn more about how to use RefMe in your web browser. Join me in July for the Practical Ed Tech Summer Camps. Discounted early registration is available now. This post originally appeared on Free Technology for Teachers if you see it elsewhere, it has been used without permission.              Related StoriesRefME in Safari - Cite Sources With a Click or TapNew Features Coming Soon to RefME - A Great Tool for Creating BibliographiesZaption Expands Free Options for Creating Flipped Lessons