Google Inline ("hot") Linking is...

There's a pretty pervasive ice breaker in the tech world where the presenter asks the attendants to come up with innovative uses for a paper clip.  

I've been on both sides of this ice breaker.  As a leader, I like to talk about the innovations folks come up with and point out that typically, children generate the highest number of innovations--usually because they make more choices like "Well, what if the paperclip were the size of a pea or what if it were as big as an airplane."  Children do not let the physical representation of a paperclip in the lesson inhibit them.  

When we design in lessons or innovate in the classroom, we often do not have the luxury that children do in the icebreaker exercise.  It's hard to get hands on a paperclip as big as a plane to work with in the physical world.  

The problem is that sometimes, inadvertently, we get stuck there.  

A few weeks ago, I lead a professional development on Google Slides as a PDF maker and profiled some of the innovated uses the teachers in my building are employing while using Slides. We've had Google Slides for years now, but since the push for the online classroom, the notion of using PDF documents as class organizers has really taken off both in the online and real life worlds of education.

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Make your own Google Apps
This would be awesome for the ACC room.
SlidesMania
Scratch tickets
SlidesCarnival
Everything you could ever want for templates. ​

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These types of innovations for software in the classroom are what is driving the revolution of blended learning.  Being able to have information and assignments in formats that are versatile and adaptable for both students and teachers to use is one of the keystones of the #blendedmodel.