Brain Ninjas

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How to Leverage the Power of YouTube in Your Classroom

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Are you using YouTube in your upper elementary classroom? Why not? It is full of ready-made resources for everything from science, to math to documentaries. Come take a look at how we make the most of it and you can, too.

As you know, YouTube is a wealth of resources for professional learning, both for fun and for learning how to fix your broken gas dryer (ninjas like to fix their own things, after all). Using YouTube in the classroom with your students is also a powerful tool (assuming you are allowed to)! Schools and districts that block YouTube are living in the wrong century! To us, it would be like banning a library (but that is a whole other issue and worthy of its own post).

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Use Google Classroom to Make Your Life Easier

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Do you use Google Classroom for your everyday lessons? If not, you might want to consider trying it to get your in class or online learning organized. Learn some of the basics to set it up and get started with this post, which includes some must know tech skills for yourself and your upper elementary students.

When the pandemic hit and classes needed to jump online, we were so thankful that we’d been spending the past few years teaching our students how to use the technology in our classroom and at home through Google Classroom.

If you haven’t tried it yet, you should. There are other Learning Management Systems out there, but Google is relatively easy to use, and it’s free. If your students already know how to use other Google Tools, it’s really not much different.

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How to Avoid Device Disaster

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Are your classroom devices supposed to be saving you time, but they are a disaster and you spend all your time organizing them? Check out these time-saving and practical tips to keep those devices in order once and for all!

Great! You have a brand new set of devices to use in your classroom. That’s awesome, but there are some things you’re going to have to do in order to keep those devices in top-notch condition and avoid device disaster.

Now, we are fortunate enough to work in a school where a technician is the one who sets up all the student accounts and installs all the software. We actually have no ability to alter these things, so this post will focus on looking after the hardware (not using the devices).

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