Formative

Although I usually provide tools or tricks more focused on student use and success, this one is great for teachers.

Formative is a tool that provides teachers with tools to engage, instruct, and assess their students. 

Just a few of the things you can do with Formative include transforming a PDF or Google Doc into an auto-graded quiz,  enhancing reading passages with questions, promoting higher-level thinking with advanced Math tools, and unleashing student creativity with the option of audio and video responses.

Check out Formative for yourself. 

Live Captions in Chrome

Chrome now offers live captions, it can automatically generate real-time captions directly in the browser. With a couple of quick settings adjustments you can automatically create captions for audio and video.

In the Chrome browser, go to the 3-dots menu in the top right corner.



Find ‘Settings’ in the dropdown menu.



In the menu on the left, open Accessibility.



Toggle on ‘Live Caption’.



You can select a preferred language (from a very short, very limited list), delete a caption language from your account and choose to ‘Hide profanity’ in the settings.

Reading Mode in Chrome

Reading mode in Chrome browser is now available on all Chromebooks.  Customize your reading experience with reading mode.  It allows you to more easily focus on the text, reduce distractions from images and videos, adjust the font and size, the spacing and the background color for any article or webpage you are reading.

To access Reading mode, open the reading list icon in the extensions bar.

On the dropdown that says ‘reading list’ select ‘reading mode’.

Adjust the size of the reading window using the 2 vertical, parallel lines on the left.

 

Adjust, from a limited set of options, the font style, size, spacing and background color.

Start of the Year

I hope everyone has had a wonderful start to the 2023-2024 school year!

It has been very busy over here, in the technology world. With the return of all of the staff and students on top of a variety of new district initiatives, it has not been dull.

I look forward to writing some new blog posts for you this year. I will touch on both Assistive Technology and Universal Design for Learning options.

Although the use of AI has been around for a while when OpenAI launched its new Generative AI called ChatGPT last November it seems to be the topic everyone wants to know more about.

Since the launch of ChatGPT there are new generative AI platforms every day. I will touch on some of them this school year, especially those that can be used in education, to help both teachers and students.

I look forward to another great year of AT/UDL blog posts, I hope you do too!