Chris Malanga – Tech Tuesday Tips

Spring Cleaning for Your Google Classroom 🧹

May 18, 2021May 14, 2021 by Chris Malanga - Leave a Comment

It’s hard to believe that we are almost to the end of another school year! Before we get to this week’s Tech Tip, I want to give a quick shout out to all you teachers and staff for all your hard work this year. You have gone above and beyond in this strange year. YOU ROCK! 🤘

(Please take some time to relax and recharge this summer!)

As we head into spring and the end of the academic year, I always end up thinking about spring cleaning. In addition to washing windows, decluttering and filing, you can also spring clean your digital world as well. read more

What’s trending? Find out with Google Trends

April 27, 2021April 27, 2021 by Chris Malanga - Leave a Comment

At the end of the year, many teachers are looking for ideas for a student project. If you want a project that is timely, how about checking out Google Trends. Google Trends showcases what Google searches are trending around the world. It is a very interesting way to see what people are talking about.

To start, go to trends.google.com. Once you’re there, you can jump right in by entering a keyword or a topic in the Explore bar, or see some examples:

Here I searched for COVID-19 vaccine. These are the results: read more

Schooling You on Google Scholar

April 13, 2021April 9, 2021 by Chris Malanga - Leave a Comment

If you’ve taken Northern Buckeye’s Google Certified Educator Level 2 cohort, you’ve learned about Google Scholar. If you haven’t taken our cohort, it is likely you’ve never heard of Scholar. Allow me to enlighten you.

So what is Google Scholar? Well, Google has this to say:

Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. Search across a wide variety of disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions.

All the Pretty Colors!

March 23, 2021March 23, 2021 by Chris Malanga - Leave a Comment

At Northern Buckeye, I’m the design guru among our team. We often joke about “Chris-ifying” things because I am so passionate about how things look and feel.

Last week, I wrote about the Lexend series of fonts which have been specially designed for increased readability. This week, I’d like to share some thoughts on color. Even as a designer, I have trouble with color. I don’t know what looks good together or which colors I should use on a project. I am going to showcase a few tools to help you with your color choices. read more

Is your font choice harming your students?

March 16, 2021March 15, 2021 by Chris Malanga - Leave a Comment

Here is a sobering statistic:

How do we address this problem? One way is in our font choices.

In 1999, Bonnie Shaver-Troup, an educational therapist, observed that reading issues hid students’ true capability and intelligence.

She theorized that student reading performance could be improved by:

Using a sans-serif font to reduce cognitive noise;
Scaling of that font to improve potential for character recognition;
Hyper-expansion of the spacing in between characters, creating a greater lag time and reducing potential crowding and masking effects.

Shaver-Troup, along with educator and type designer Thomas Jockin, coordinated their efforts around one simple idea:

“A font, much like the prescription in a pair of eyeglasses, should change based on the reader’s unique needs.”

Shaver-Troup and Jockin collaborated in the development of seven fonts which provide for improvement in reading performance. read more