Apps for Education Chromebooks

Drawings | Infinite Painter

Used by students to create art, illustrations, or edited
photographs.

Student Benefits:

• Offers layers, photograph filters, and over 160 natural media brushes
• Teaches students concepts and features they can translate to other popular desktop illustration software

Teacher Benefits:

• Timelapse recording of the students’ process demonstrates to educators how students are approaching design-related problems
• Offers a growing Classroom section to teach both the application and design-related concepts

In Action:

1. Ms. Salazar instructs her students to create a unique skyscape.
2. Students use Infinite Painter to complete the assignment.
3. They turn in both the finished piece of work and a timelapse recording of the creation process.
4. Ms. Salazar reviews the timelapse recordings and sends each student specific, personalized commentary that helps them improve their next project.

Screencasts | Explain Everything

An interactive whiteboarding platform for teachers and students to experience a collaborative and open learning environment. Almost any kind of content can be created or imported on the infinite whiteboard space, including images, videos, documents, slides, websites, clipart, and more.

Student Uses:

• Create video projects to demonstrate understanding of a concept or present ideas
• Collaborate in real-time to solve problems
• Access teacher-made project templates or assignments

Teacher Uses:

• Formative assessment
• Capturing the learning process
• Whiteboarding collaboratively with students in real-time
• Creating instructional videos, explaining assignments, and introducing new concepts
• Reviewing prior material or creating new assignments

In Action:

1. Mr. Duncan wants his English students to submit a bibliography with their next writing assignment.
2. Using Explain Everything, he shows students how to find the information they need from each source to create a citation—in real time or by creating a video.
3. Students who need help finding their source information can get back to Mr. Duncan’s lesson at any time or ask him to join their whiteboard so he can provide real-time help.

Notes | Squid

A powerful and simple-to-use app that allows users to take handwritten notes naturally on Chromebook devices, then insert images, move content between pages and notes, draw shapes, add typed text and more.

Student Benefits:

• Allows students to quickly fix mistakes with undo/redo capabilities
• Can write just as they would on paper using an active pen, passive stylus, or finger
• Notes stay organized when students create a digital notebook for each class
• Cuts down on lost notes and wasted paper

Teacher Benefits:

• Easily markup PDFs to edit/grade papers
• Turn a device into a virtual whiteboard or give presentations in a class by casting to a TV/projector
• Export notes as PDFs or images to upload to Google Classroom, send to others, or store in the cloud

In Action:

1. Ms. Hart wants to demonstrate the Pythagorean theorem to her class.
2. Using Squid, she is able to break down each step by hand, just as she would on a whiteboard.
3. At the end of the class, Ms. Hart can export these notes and send them to her class so they can easily reference the lesson later.

Books | Book Creator

A simple, multi-purpose tool for creating digital portfolios, interactive stories, learning journals, comic books, research reports, and so much more.

Student Benefits:

• Can combine text, images, audio and video to make engaging digital books that demonstrate their learning
• More adventurous students can embed G Suite documents, forms, maps and other interactive content directly into their books, allowing them to curate and reflect on all their learning across all the digital tools they use
• Finished books can be published and shared in multiple formats—students are fantastically motivated when they know they are writing for an audience beyond the classroom!

Teacher Benefits:

• Book Creator is versatile and can be tailored to all abilities, learning styles, and grade levels
• Teachers can create unique textbooks for their students that are interactive and designed to meet their needs

In Action:

1. Ms. Burkhead decides she is going to throw a Science Book Fair.
2. Her students complete science experiments at home as usual, but instead of presenting their findings on a large poster board, they will submit a book designed in Book Creator.
3. Students use Book Creator’s camera feature to include pictures of the experimentation process and the pen tool to draw diagrams.
4. Rather than throwing their poster board away at the end of the Fair, students keep their custom books to reference later.

Podcasts | Soundtrap*

A revolutionary, user-friendly platform for music and podcast making that works seamlessly across all WiFi-connected devices.

Student Benefits:

• Provides a creative environment in which they can collaborate and develop their critical thinking and communication skills
• Completely cloud-powered, so students can continue working on their projects from home
• Offers access to an extensive collection of quality loops, effects, and software instruments

Teacher Benefits:

• Amplify your current curriculum through music, podcasts, language, literacy training, and other audio recordings
• Prepare your students for their future working life

In Action:

1. Mrs. McCauley wants her students to team up in groups of four to create a podcast episode about a battle of the American Civil War.
2. Each student in the group is able to record their part of the podcast on a separate Soundtrap* track in the studio or at home.
3. Soundtrap’s* interactive transcript allows the students to easily edit the podcast collaboratively, while its extensive sound library allows them to punch up the recording.

Videos | WeVideo

A secure, cloud-based video creation platform that offer project templates, collaboration tools, and a built-in media library with over 1 million licensed and royalty-free video, music, and image clips.

Student Benefits

• Helps to develop communication, critical thinking and creativity skills
• Offers the tools they need to create green screen videos, podcasts, screencasts, personal narratives, portfolios, flipped classroom projects and more

Teacher Benefits:

• Video creation encourages students to collaborate, share their discoveries, and demonstrate their learning
• Empowers their students to easily capture, create, view and share their ideas through video

In Action:

1. At the beginning of the new school year, Mr. Hanson asks his students to submit a “book report” about their favorite summer read using WeVideo.
2. He provides a list of prompts that would work for any book, such as, “If you could ask the main character of this book three questions, what would you ask?”
3. Students use WeVideo to record and share their answers.
4. Mr. Hanson edits his favorite answers on WeVideo and shares a special compilation with the entire class.