Best of the Web - August 26, 2014

This week has been crazy! Our amazing Language Arts teachers have been busy getting students logged into Chromebooks. They have also been testing out Google Classroom which has been a hit so far! Even with all of the insanity I have kept my eye out for some great resources to share with you.

• My great friend Richard Byrne is the author of FreeTech4Teachers. This week there was a guest post written by Beth Holland about how to use Newsela with Google Docs to provide differentiated and collaborative reading experience. Beth walks you through the entire process which works for elementary, middle, and high school students.
• I came across a post on the Twitterverse called Why We Need to Teach Kids to Code. The author argues that coding is a basic literacy issue and that all students must learn how to code.
• There are already a handful of teachers using Google Classroom at Gering High School. We are learning as we go! For people who are more comfortable starting out with some ideas in there hands I wanted to share these tips for getting started with Classroom.
• Skype has been around for a long time and educators around the world have used it to make their classrooms more exciting and relevant.  As I was browsing the Twitter stream a few days ago a post that had lots of ideas about how to use Skype in the classroom caught my attention. This post has so many wonderful ideas for how to use Skype with students of all ages. If you are looking for a unique and fun way to incorporate technology into your classroom I highly recommend figuring out a way to use Skype.
• More and more of our students are using Google Drive. This post covers nine things that all students should be able to do on Drive. This means teachers should probably know how to do these things, too!