Tech Tip Tuesday: Leave Voice Comments Instead!

Tired of leaving the same comments on a Google Doc for students and realizing they aren’t reading them? Wish there was a way to personalize these comments a little more? You NEED to check out the Google Doc add-on Kaizena!

Kaizena is a Google Doc add-on (you’ll need to install it from within Google Docs) that affords you the opportunity to highlight text on a Google Doc and speak, instead of write, comments- leaving voice “notes” back to the owner of the document! There are a number of VERY USEFUL features with Kaizena including: feedback features, color-coding, lessons, and tracking of skills. You can even create a bank/folder of voice comments you have created/left for students, so that you do not have to recreate the same thing for eac.! What a time saver! Best of all, everything works within the Google Doc. No leaving the document to open Kaizena, then heading back to the document to insert the comment.

To get started, visit the Kaizena link above, or open a Google Doc –> click on add-ons –> get add-ons –> then do a search for Kaizena. Click on the app –> then install. It will ask you or permissions to sync with your Google account. Accept it. Once in, go back to add-ons –> select Kaizena –> and it will open in the right pane of the screen. Set up your classes and grade levels and you are set to begin!

Hope this helps!

 

Tech Tip Tuesday: 4 Great Google Doc Add-ons

Looking to differentiate and do a little more with Google Docs? Here are 4 tools to help you, and help your students.

Tech Tip Tuesday: Create More Engaging Google Docs

Want to revamp some of your old Google Docs  / Microsoft Word assignments? Consider updating them to make them more engaging and interactive. Here’s how to take your everyday Word Doc and do more: like change the page color, create a hyper doc, add a table of contents and create a web-page version of your Doc.

Tech Tip Tuesday: Advanced Google Search in Google Docs

Keeping everything students do within 1-2 big platforms helps mitigate student distractions. Google offers a host of add-ons, features, and tools within their suite of apps, as well as a number of key tools already built within. Google affords you the ability to do research right within a Google Doc. With this tool (found by clicking “tools” –> “research”) you can perform a basic Google search, search images, access Google Scholar (which is an awesome feature), find quotes, and look up words in the dictionary.