As part of my daily routine, I scan dozens of blogs, visit a handful of Facebook groups, and skim through Twitter.

The goal: find the most helpful resources, tools, and articles that I can share with my teacher friends (that's you!).

Here are my favorite links for April 2025

1. Custom Reading Content for Read Along - Teachers in EDU Plus domains can now upload custom content to Read Along. This means you can provide students with reading support for your own stories, articles, and assignments.
2. Google Vids Education Film Festival - teachers can submit their Google Vid creation to be featured in a Google For Education blog post. Submission deadline is May 15, 2025. Google Vids is available for EDU Plus and Teaching&Learning domains.
3. New sidebar menu for Google Slides - this handy menu provides quick access to templates, building blocks, and other features, based on your Google license.
4. Clone yourself in minutes - my latest YouTube video discusses three ways to use video in your classroom. It's not as hard as you might think!
5. 5 end of year project ideas - I know it's hard to believe, but the end of the school year is not far away. Take some time to plan an end-of-year project to help students reflect on their learning
6. Audio Overview for Gemini (and docs!) - This popular feature first appeared in NotebookLM, but is now available in Gemini as well. It is especially useful when using the "deep research" model. Audio overviews for Google Docs is coming soon.
7. Canvas for Gemini - When working on longer, complex writing projects, "Canvas" makes it easier to use Gemini as a co-writer. This is a great tool to use when developing lesson plans or assignments.
8. 5 advanced Gemini features - Google has added a LOT of impressive features to Gemini. If you aren't using these, you are missing out!
9. A Classroom Teacher's take on AI - Blake Harvard, HS social studies teacher from Madison Alabama, shares his honest thoughts on the incursion of AI in education.
10. uBlock Origin Lite - you may have noticed that some of your Chrome extensions are no longer available including some popular ad-blockers. uBlock Lite is an alternative that will work, although not quite as well as the original.

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