Educators have simple and free ways to help make sure their content is accessible to families through the use of technology. Check out this tutorial to help you go from start to live on Facebook and YouTube to bring your workshops to your families.
I like to spend time teaching you new tech tools but also help you, school counselors and educators, use your time, expertise and energy efficiently. This video will help you learn how to use 100% free tools in Google Drive with Forms, Sheets, Docs and an Add-In called AutoCrat to create self-filling forms that can automatically share PDF copies with a set group of people to make for easy print outs, filing and more.
2018 was the third year that my school hosted our annual College Admissions Case Study event and it was a huge hit for the third year running. Not familiar with a Case Study? Don’t worry – I am going to walk you through what it is and how to run your first one over the next few minutes.
I am all for open source and when possible – I make my resources free. I had the opportunity to present with Franciene Sabens at the 2018 American School Counselor Association conference in July 2018 at the Los Angeles Convention Center. We presented on using marketing tools and techniques in the school counseling profession. While the slide deck doesn’t capture everything we covered – it does have some great links and you can get a feel for the presentation.
Why do I need to worry about graphic design?
School counselors have a lot to offer. Our core curriculum, sharing of data with stake holders, promoting opportunities to students and parents and so much more. We offer so much that it keeps is up to our necks in busy. It’s hard to justify spending time learning and creating interesting graphics to support our efforts and that is understandable. Stick with me today and I hope to show you that spending a little time on your public image and outreach is actually something that is essential to your full success and professionalism.
I bet you have 10 minutes a day….
That’s right. You do have 10 minutes a day. Likely more if you really looked hard, but we will go with 10 minutes. What would you say if I told you that 10 minutes was all it could take to make a huge difference (or even just a little) in a few kids lives each day you are in your office? You’d probably jump right on that bandwagon.
I want to share with you a step by step guide to creating a tool that we, at my school and other schools in my district, use a ton since we have had it implemented. I cannot take credit for the idea – a colleague in our district had the idea – but I cannot just sit on a great opportunity like this. School counselors know that relationships reign king (or queen) in our line of work. A number of indicators with research backing show that students who feel connected with at least one caring adult at school tend to fare much better. We wanted to capitalize on this fact, but need to know who is or is not connected and with what adults.
Hop on just about any school counseling department’s website and take a look around. 9 times out of 10 – the website looks like it is straight from the turn of the millennium. It also happens to be about as useful. Luckily for you – there are some really easy and FREE tools out there to make your school counseling websites both useful AND beautiful. Check out the video below to learn about how to quickly and easily setup a new website using Weebly.com.
Check out some awesome FREE resources for you high school counselors. A class at UCLA created a website that has a different theme for each month of the school year and it is geared towards an 11th or 12th grade class. They also created four posters that you can download below that are useful for helping show the standard process that seniors going through college or financial aid applications take. They are very well done! Enjoy and please share – they want these to be a resource and tool for anyone interested.
I wanted to share a pretty recent feature added to many Google Apps for Education users and districts. Most people are pretty well-aware of the power of Google Drive, but in the last few weeks they actually added some functionality to the platform. This comes in the form of Google Team Drives. The name itself is pretty intuitive and self-explanatory – it allows you the share a common Drive space with your team.
