TTfT-180_mixdown

[00:00:00] Shanna Martin: Thanks for listening to the Tech Tools for Teachers podcast, where each week we talk about a free piece or two of technology that you can use in your classroom. I’m your host, Shanna Martin. I’m a middle school teacher, technology, and instructional coach from my district.

[00:00:31] Fuzz Martin: And I’m her producer and husband, Fuzz Martin.

And I’m really excited about this week’s episode because after today, we have to turn around We’ve hit episode 180.

Wow. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So we’ve got a complete 180 and now we’re going back the other way.

[00:00:50] Shanna Martin: Yeah. So we’ll start counting down. Yes. 179 B and then when we get to 178 B,

[00:00:56] Fuzz Martin: We get to episode 360, we’ll have come full circle. Oh, yeah. That’s so special. Thank you. Good job. Very special boy.

[00:01:07] Shanna Martin: Yeah. So we had two weeks off.

It was spring break. Which was always fun. We enjoy spring break. I did not have two weeks off, but we took two weeks off of the podcast because we needed the weekend before the weekend after since Easter fell in there and we went to Disney. We did. So yeah, so it was a fun little break, but now we are cranking into the end of the school year.

Fourth quarter. The weather here is still cold and gross in Wisconsin. We had a snow storm, snow day this week. So there’s that. So this week, moving forward. Let’s hope there’s some spring weather and it’s pleasant outside.

[00:01:43] Fuzz Martin: Yeah, hope so. Some rain, some flowers. I mean, we’re supposed to be in the 60s.

[00:01:46] Shanna Martin: I mean, but that’s lies.

Let’s be real. Yeah. You know, our weather is never what we think it’s going to be. It’s supposed to be, uh,

[00:01:54] Fuzz Martin: around, uh, 15 or 16 degrees Celsius for those of you in beautiful Canada. Or wherever you may be listening, that’s not the U. S.

[00:02:03] Shanna Martin: Yes, because, well.

[00:02:05] Fuzz Martin: You’re very big in Greece. Yes. Portugal, Portugal, um, New Zealand at one point.

[00:02:12] Shanna Martin: Hello from other parts of the world. Yes. Yeah. So, you know, it’s fun. I appreciate all of my listeners. Yes. Thank you all. So let’s talk about learning and some tech

[00:02:27] Fuzz Martin: tools. Great. And I was wondering why we were here,

[00:02:30] Shanna Martin: You know, a little bit of everything. While digging, cause you know, two weeks off is.

A lot of time for me to be trolling the internet on my phone, especially in airports. And we all know in past episodes, I mean, we can pull up probably every single time that I have mentioned Google, Google Chrome experiments, which I have always been a huge fan of, Which originally is experimentswithgoogle.

com. Yes. And over the past 14 years, so my podcast has not been around that long, but over the past 14 years, Google Experiments, they have created 1, 613 experiments. That’s a lot of experiments. Which is awesome. However, for those of you that don’t know, Google Experiments has made a change. What? And they are no longer a thing.

No! And they point out that in the In the thought of change and experimenting, they’re going to make a change. So Google Chrome experiments still exist in like the past experiments site, however, Google now has a new place to house cool projects and it is labs. google

[00:03:49] Fuzz Martin: labs. google labs.

[00:03:51] Shanna Martin: google.

[00:03:52] Fuzz Martin: Not even com, just labs.

google. How do they get that? I want Labs.

[00:03:56] Shanna Martin: google, folks.

[00:03:57] Fuzz Martin: I want podcast. fuzz. Yes.

[00:03:59] Shanna Martin: Labs. google. Because you’re not Google. Because I don’t have a kajillion dollars. So, l a b s. google. That’s all you gotta type in. Cool. Easy enough. And it is so cool. So, labs. google is all of the cool things like Google Experiments.

I’m going to highlight a couple of them today. But like the homepage I feel like you just need to be on the homepage right now. Okay, because the home page the visuals Like they float around the screen and they like bump around so you can like drag and move the shapes and they like Move, but the links still work like they’re animated, but you control the animation on the home page That’s like how you want.

I don’t know. I just thought it was cool. Like Not your usual homepage for anything and there’s like little things twirling around the screen and it’s just kind of cool. So Labs at Google will be similar to your Chrome experiments kind of deal so there’s all kinds of just cool things that people come up with and submit to Google and they have a team of people and Just all kinds of cool ideas being shared And so I’m going to highlight a few of them today, but I’m not, I mean, I’m just going to highlight a couple of them because like Chrome experiments, there’s like all kinds of them.

So the first one. For wherever you are on the screen. Cause that’s something like I referenced, like at the top, right. Yeah. I can’t do that because when you go to the site, it’ll look, I don’t know, look for the yellow lumpy star flower.

[00:05:28] Fuzz Martin: Yes. It might be different by the time you get there too.

[00:05:31] Shanna Martin: It might be it’s I M a G E F X.

So image FX. That’s the product. And. Click try now. Yeah. sign in with my Google account. Yeah. So sign in with your Google account. I’m already there. So I have a Google account. Don’t want any of those things. And we love a fun AI image creator and this one you don’t have to pay for, and you don’t have like limits on stuff.

Like a lot of them you do. So, and it tells you ahead of time, like, make sure this is community appropriate, you know, all that kind of stuff. Cause sometimes we worry about with our students, making sure that they’re obviously appropriate. So you can choose, um, a crayon drawing of a wolf in a nightshirt.

Maybe we could use this for Little Red Riding Hood and And you just click generate. And what I like about this one is it’ll, you know, it takes a second to generate the pic, the pictures that you choose. But then what’s cool is when it’s generating the certain words, it then gives you dropdowns to make changes to them.

So then I can click the dropdown and change my crayon drawing to a charcoal drawing, and I don’t have to type anything new in. I just click my little dropdown arrow. And then it resets and gives me my next set of pictures. I said, generate, and it will do the next set and it keeps them for you. And you can like scroll through the images that you’re creating and choosing.

Is that fun? Like it’s a little extra compared to like what you’ve done before.

[00:07:09] Fuzz Martin: A photo realistic of a woman podcasting with an electro voice, RE-20 and a pair of headphones. She’s wearing a Wisconsin long sleeve t shirt and has her laptop open in front of her as she podcasts. That’s super cool.

[00:07:20] Shanna Martin: Is that fun?

Yep. So I did a wolf in a night shirt and a hat and I shifted from crayon drawing to pencil drawing, but they’re so cool. And it is that we’re like passing our computers back and forth through each other. This is so weird. But then.

[00:07:33] Fuzz Martin: I can change you into a hoodie. That’s cool. Cool.

[00:07:35] Shanna Martin: And so you can just make small adjustments and my hat, it gives me more specific words, a cap, a crown or a helmet.

My night shirt can shift from pajamas to a robe to a tuxedo. So it’s a really fun experiment and you have your images there. So it’s different than some of those other AI generators that we’ve talked about before, just because this has so many different. Options with it. Mm-Hmm. . Um, and it’s very user friendly and like protected.

So that’s a fun one to play around with.

[00:08:04] Fuzz Martin: So like I, oh man, I, I put in what microphone you’re using Yeah. Right now. Mm-Hmm. . And then in the dropdowns it gave me, so you’re using is, electro voice re 20. Very nice microphone, Uhhuh . The other one that’s similar to that in the market is the. Shure SM7B and that’s one of my choices and the audio technica, AT-2020.

And the PodMic, which was your mic you had before I went and spent three times as much on the mic. Right. Yeah.

[00:08:29] Shanna Martin: So that’s awesome. Yeah. So it gets like super specific for you, which is just cool. Like it’s just a cool, it’s a cool image creator. It’s so, and it’s easy to play around with and I would feel okay with my kids using this one and not have any like.

So long as they’re searching appropriate things, it’s fine. So, okay. Back to labs at Google. So leave the yellow squiggly star thing. And then the green, I don’t even know, like hexagon again, like they move around the screen, the instrument player going to next. So that’s still from arts and culture. This one does still come up from arts and culture.

So this is why I wanted to point this one out was that some of these new, like Google labs will shift back and forth to experiments. So they’re not like gone forever. So like blob opera and all of our favorites, like they’re still there. Okay. That was worried about that. So you can still pull up some of the other ones.

Um, and they’ll still come up for you. This one is really cool. You pick an instrument. And it will compose music with the specific instrument that you want. And you can change your AI generated instrument, and then you can click next and you can type in like an adjective and how you want it to sound like moody or mellow or whatever you want to say.

And then it will. I don’t know if you can hear this, but it like comes up with AI generated audio clip for 20 seconds, based on your mood and your instrument that you want. Yeah. And then you can click on the keys. Like if you want to add things in your own keyboard, you can add different things into there and then click next.

And then you can change your beat. So you can add your beat into there as you choose to, and then you can add your pitch and you can make adjustments to the ambience on it. Like Sound and then once you’re good you hit end and then you hit go and it comes up with this like cool Song that you can play which is kind of really awesome.

It is awesome. Yeah, so yeah There’s all kinds of I don’t know if you can like you’re me playing kind of sort of And then you can record off of it, too

[00:10:41] Fuzz Martin: Yeah, that’s pretty slick

[00:10:43] Shanna Martin: anyway, so there’s all kinds of like cool ways to introduce different types of music and sound and mood and tone and all those pieces, which I think is great for music class. But also that goes with writing. If you’re doing creative writing, you want to talk about mood and tone. You can totally build sound and to move in tone.

In your creative writing lessons or even your descriptive writing lessons or narratives like those pieces You can hear the sound like make a sound for what your character. I want some suspense Topian book would be listening to exactly. There’s just all kinds of things. It’s fun. And

[00:11:12] Fuzz Martin: now the situation is resolved and everything’s You know, hunky dory again.

[00:11:17] Shanna Martin: Yeah. So how would that change the mood? What would that sound like? Mm-Hmm. So, I don’t know. It’s just super fun to play around with it. Very easy, straightforward. It just lays it all out for you and then you can play around, and you can change and you can record, and all those types of things. So Very cool.

So that was the instrument playground.

And there’s one more on the home screen. I want to show you because there’s, but wait, there’s more, , on the, I think on the left side of the, Beaker. Nope. I’m on the right side of the beaker. Yeah. When you look at the site, you’ll totally understand what I’m talking about, but right now I’m trying to explain this.

Okay. So there’s a giant blue oval. It’s called DJ mode. Music. Bye. Are you in

[00:12:05] Fuzz Martin: that? Is that the one I’m, is that the one I’m on?

[00:12:07] Shanna Martin: Uh, is it music? FX DJ?

[00:12:11] Fuzz Martin: It says music FX

[00:12:12] Shanna Martin: radio for me. Yes. So when you’re in there, you can make your own music. Okay. So like there’s mongoose, post punk, indie, electronic, let’s see,

[00:12:26] Fuzz Martin: I want a, uh, hip hop sports theme, uh, with a lot of driving bass,

[00:12:36] Shanna Martin: all right, let’s generate, there’s really no bass on your computer, just so everybody knows.

You’re gonna turn the bass up on your soundboard. It’s optimizing

[00:12:44] Fuzz Martin: my project. Ah, let’s see. Chips help you explore other ideas. Okay, yep, we got that. DJ mode. DJ Fuzz. I’m still generating. Oh yeah. Welcome to Fuzz’s DJ special with special guest MC Shanny Shan. Yeah. Yeah. And it gives me two options. And then you could change that with the cards.

Let’s see. I want to make a romance

[00:13:13] Shanna Martin: theme. And then you can put a glockenspiel in it. Oh, clock

[00:13:16] Fuzz Martin: and spiel. I like that. All right.

[00:13:21] Shanna Martin: Oh, this is going to be like too much for people’s ears. Yeah.

[00:13:24] Fuzz Martin: I’m sorry, but I’m never going to stop playing with this. I’m going to just play with this until, until I’m no longer on this earth.

Yeah. This is that hip hop romance theme, a lot of driving base, but we could say, uh, You want it to have soaring strings instead.

[00:13:41] Shanna Martin: So all these things. Okay. Okay. So this is fun.

[00:13:45] Fuzz Martin: Shanna’s had enough as a teacher. You will too

[00:13:50] Shanna Martin: make sure they’re using headphones is all I can say. Oh my gosh. It’s so much fun though.

Like it’s so much fun. So you can DJ all that you want and all your DJing amazingness. And it’s just a fun way to create sound. Obviously you can play around with different types of. Listening, um, different skills and listening, different things. It’s really cool. So that one’s DJ mode in music FX. So that’s like an option.

So again, there’s more, I’m sure there’ll be more than one episode on this one, but I want to point out, so this is just the labs at Google homepage. That’s all I’ve talked about is the homepage and that’s not even all of them. You can click I’m feeling lucky and it’ll just send you someplace and then you get to learn cool things.

But if you scroll like at the bottom,

[00:14:34] Fuzz Martin: I clicked, I’m feeling lucky. And I got to a help support page about Google messages. So, um, so,

[00:14:40] Shanna Martin: so there’s that. So

[00:14:42] Fuzz Martin: there’s like, didn’t win the 1. 2 billion in the lottery. So,

[00:14:47] Shanna Martin: you know, it’s fine. At least you might learn something from the help page. True.

Right. So there’s a little pink arrow on the bottom of this screen and the home screen of the home screen. And this then. Like experiment with the future of AI, like there’s highlights of different things coming out like January 24th. So it like gives you. Like upcoming or just past, you know, things are on their page, but they have like AI and Chrome and notebook, L notebook, LM, personalized AI notebook career.

So there’s like more AI experiments and things like that. So we will talk more about some of these in the future, but just so you know, like as you scroll down, there’s lab sessions with teachers that link to their, They’re YouTube videos that explain kind of where some of those comes from and, and the different things with Google labs.

So labs, Google labs, not Google, so much fun. And as we loved our Google Chrome experiments, these are going to be super duper fun. And there is so many things. To look into. So we had some pictures and some music ones today. There will be plenty in the future. And there’s a lot of AI cool stuff that you might want to dig into.

If you’re into finding out new information about different ways to use AI in your life. Yeah, cool. Is that fun? That is fun. Labs. google.

[00:16:11] Fuzz Martin: Labs. google. Now I need to go update all the things in the edtech directory, like chrome experience.

[00:16:17] Shanna Martin: I mean, chrome experiments still exist though, but they’re shifting to not adding more to it.

Okay. They’re adding to labs. google. Yeah. And it is

[00:16:25] Fuzz Martin: markedly fun, more fun design than the,

[00:16:30] Shanna Martin: it’s like a fun website, like the homepage is. Yeah. It’s just fun.

[00:16:34] Fuzz Martin: You’d say they were experimenting with their design in the lab. Okay. Sorry.

[00:16:40] Shanna Martin: So fun. Well, I’m excited. We’re back and a few more weeks folks and the school year is going to be over.

Yes. So hold on. Anyhow. Thanks for tuning in. This has been the tech tools for teachers podcast. If you ever have any questions, you can find me on the app formerly known as Twitter. That’s Martin WI or on threads or on Facebook. And if you want to get more information on the links to the technology discussed in this episode, you can visit smart and w I.

If you’d like to support the show, please consider buying me a coffee or to visit, buy me a coffee. com slash smartinwi or visit smartinwi.com and click on that cute little purple coffee cup. Your donations help keep the show going. New episodes each week. Thanks for listening. Go educate and innovate.

[00:17:24] Fuzz Martin: The ideas and opinions expressed on this podcast and the smartinwi.com website are those of the author, Shanna Martin, and not of her employer. Prior to using any of the technologies discussed on this podcast, please consult with your employer regulations. This podcast offers no guarantee that these tools will work for you as we’ve described, but we sure hope they do.