Instead of keeping your important notes on paper or on your hard drive where they can get lost, try using Google Keep. This Google tool is perfect for creating “sticky notes” that you need to refer to frequently. Google Keep works with your existing Google account, so no new username/passwords are needed and all of your notes are continually backed up to your account. Simply create a new note and store your important information. You can easily share notes in Google Keep with other Google users for enhanced collaboration. This feature is especially helpful for shared to-do lists. You can also color code your notes to help stay more organized. My favorite feature of Google Keep is the ability to set up reminders that are attached to your notes. If your notes start getting too long then you can easily convert them over to a Google Doc. Try out this productivity tool today!
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The JoeZoo Express Add-On for Google Docs can save you a lot of time with giving feedback on student work. With this add-on, you simply highlight text on a document and then select feedback statements from a huge menu of feedback statements. You can use standard feedback statements provided by JoeZoo or set your own statements to re-use throughout your documents. This add-on would be especially helpful if you find yourself constantly referring back to a rubric. JoeZoo offers a free rubric builder tool that allows you to customize a rubric and insert it into students' documents when you are grading their work. JoeZoo also integrates with Google Classroom to streamline the returning of work.
Noisli is a tool that allows you to customize your own white noise to help you stay focused while you work. You can choose from a variety of sounds (campfire, rain, coffee shop, etc.) and combine their volume levels to create the perfect combination. Personally, I like the “nighttime” sounds set to medium volume, with “railroad” sounds at a lower volume. Noisli could obviously be used to help improve your concentration at home but can also help students avoid distractions when they are working independently on their devices. It’s actually a lot more awesome than it sounds- go watch a demo video here.
Draftback is an extension for Google Chrome that gives you a video playback of the revision history of any document that you have editing permission on. This allows you to see how documents evolve over time. Draftback allows teachers to actually watch the writing process in their students, to better identify areas of weakness and offer suggestions for improvement. It would also be difficult for students to plagiarize when teachers are able to watch where they’ve typed on a document, or copy/pasted in many cases of plagiarism. This extension also allows the teacher to see how long the student spent on a document and how many revisions were made in each writing session.
Skype gives us the opportunity to make connections with other educators, students, and professionals around the globe. There are a few options for integrating Skype into your course that are all worth checking out:
Backchanneling, or having a real-time conversation alongside an event, can be a great way to keep students engaged during lessons. Backchanneling improves direct instruction, meetings, presentations, Socratic seminars, movies, silent activities, oral reviews and more. One of the easiest ways to facilitate backchanneling in your classroom is by using a website like Today’s Meet. Today’s Meet gives everyone in the classroom a voice by allowing students to make comments via their device, while a teacher (or student) is presenting information. It is like having your own personal chat room for your class. Today’s Meet does not require students to have an accounts and it requires very little set-up on the part of the teacher. Even the quietest students are empowered to share their thoughts during class when you use Today’s Meet.
5 Easy Ways to Use Today’s Meet in the Classroom Dotstorming is a fun and useful tool for collaborative brainstorming and decision-making. It works similarly to Padlet, in that students are given a link to an online “wall” to post digital sticky notes to. The difference is that Dotstorming then allows the students to place a dot to “vote” for their favorite ideas. The teacher can set parameters on how many votes each student can cast. This is a quick way to settle debates, make decisions, or get feedback on everyone’s input on a particular topic. Dotstorming could be used by all grade levels and content areas. In the example below, students were asked to list the strongest piece of evidence to support their thesis and then the class voted for three pieces of evidence that they found to be most effective.
This is a very simple tip but I often find people who don’t know that these options exist. In Google Chrome, you can secondary click (right click for most of you) on any tab to get a list of very helpful options. The ones that I use most frequently are “pin tab” and “close tabs to the right.” If you are like me, you could have 20 tabs open at any given moment. When I find myself being overwhelmed with tabs, I “pin” the ones that I want to keep open while I work and then I “close all tabs to the right” of my leftmost tab. I always have my Drive and Gmail tabs “pinned” to keep them in the same spot and to keep myself from accidentally closing them. Speaking of accidentally closing a tab, if this happens then all you need to do is secondary click on any tab and you will find an option to “reopen closed tab.” Close out this tab and try it now it really works! The “duplicate” tab option can come in handy too. I often use it when I want to keep a webpage open but also quickly open another page on the same website. Once you get in the habit of using these tab features then you will become more organized and work more efficiently. Please share these tab tips with your students!
Elementary teachers, this one is for you! I think we have all had those moments when you “Google” a seemingly innocent word or phrase and get an inappropriate result in your image results. Teachers are often afraid of turning their students loose on Google’s search engine for that very reason. There’s a solution to that problem and it is called Kiddle. Kiddle is a kid-friendly search engine, with all the power of Google, but with strong filters. Not only is Kiddle clean, but it also a visual search engine, making it easier for kids to find what they are looking for. Check it out today and have your students bookmark this one!
You may have already noticed this but Google just recently launched a new feature for Docs that makes navigating your documents a whole lot easier. When you are working with long documents, it can sometimes be difficult to scroll and find the section that you are looking for. Now, you can just use the Document Outline toolbar on the side of your document to jump to a particular section in one click. Go to Tools > Document Outline to hide/show the toolbar. The outline will automatically be built and headers will be added for you if you haven’t done so manually. You can always edit the headers that were chosen for you if you wish. Be sure to share this new tool with students so that they can be more efficient with their online writing.
When you are presenting or teaching to a group with the help of Google Slides, it is always best to allow a time and place in your presentation for some interactivity. Most of the time, people leave the presentation and go to an external website (or even their phones) to start a countdown timer while this interactivity takes place. To make the presentation more seamless, it’s much easier to just embed a countdown timer directly into your slides by using Youtube. On the slide with the instructions for the group discussion or activity, just go to Insert >Video and search YouTube for “__ minute timer.” There are lots of timers on YouTube for just about every time interval that you might need. This would also be a great way to manage stations in your classroom, with instructions on the same slide as the timer. I hope this helps with engagement and classroom management!
Prism is a tool for “crowdsourcing text interpretations.” Students use different colors of digital highlighters to annotate text that is added to Prism by the teacher. The colors of the highlighters correspond with different categories that the teacher has prescribed for the text analysis. As students are highlighting the text, a visual representation is created that demonstrates the combined interpretation of the text in different text colors and different font sizes. The idea of Prism is to reveal patterns that exist in the subjective reading of text. Although it sounds complicated, Prism could be used by all grade levels and various content areas. The categories that the teacher sets for highlighting could be as complicated as detecting the author’s tone, or as simple as distinguishing fact from opinion. Some other ideas for categories to highlight could be detecting different emotions, locating key words or vocabulary, establishing themes, locating parts of speech or other literary elements. Any text that can be copy and pasted can be added to Prism. Check out the demo video on their website for more information, http://prism.scholarslab.org/.
Google Drawings is a very powerful classroom tool that is often overlooked. Here is a slideshow of Google Drawings work samples from various grade levels. Check out some of the ways below that you might be able to incorporate Google Drawings into your class.
Please do not hesitate to contact me if you need help instructing or supporting your students with Google Drawings. Although Adobe Connect's chat pod is sometimes good for collecting quick responses, it is difficult to give students individual feedback when using the chat pod to check for understanding. Questions and answers get disconnected too easily in the fast pace of the chat pod when several students are involved in the conversation. Instead, try using the Q&A pod in your next virtual class. Although the Q&A pod is designed for the participant to ask questions to the presenter/host, it can be used in other ways. If the teacher poses a question to students verbally or with the use of a share pod as seen below, then students can be prompted to submit their answers in a Q&A pod. With the Q&A pod, teachers have a much more streamlined record of student answers and the ability to reply directly to the student or send the question and answer out to all students. Students can get individualized feedback and carry out a private conversation with the teacher, all from within the Q&A pod. All of the responses are directly attached with the students’ answer submissions and are exportable to email. Don’t forget that you can move the Q&A pod to the Presenter Only Area when you don’t want the students to see it. For more help with the Q&A pod, contact me or visit this site.
A little known fact is that you can save a file to multiple folders in Google Drive without having to make a copy of the file. By selecting the folder icon at the top of your file, you can then select “organize” and use the Ctrl key on a PC or the Command key on a Mac to do a multi-select of all of the folders that you want to put that particular file into. It does not create a copy of the file in each folder, but rather an index of the original file. This can be very helpful in those situations when you’re just not sure which folder to put a file into!
Blendspace is one of the best tools that can be used to facilitate online activity in a flipped lesson. Blendspace helps to organize digital material (videos, files, images, links, quizzes) in a visually appealing format that is easy for students to follow. All from within Blendspace, you can search for digital content from the web, from your Google Drive, or from your computer to add to the lesson. There are even pre-built public Blendspace lessons that you can make a copy of. The Blendspace format gives students the opportunity to leave comments/feedback on the various items in the lesson and gives the teacher the ability to view the number of student views, with some other basic analytics. This is definitely a tool that every teacher should have in their blended learning tool belt! Check out the Blendspace lesson gallery to see how others are using it.
Here’s a full-length webinar on flipping your class with Blendspace: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=14&v=D_5x3MW3p7A Padlet is a quick and easy way to get students collaborating. Teachers will start off by creating a virtual “wall” and will then share a link with students so they can add notes to the wall, all displayed in real-time. The possibilities are endless with the option to upload a custom background and add multimedia content to the notes on the wall. Padlet is perfect for brainstorming, note-taking, writing activities, collecting resources, organizing information, formative assessment, and much more! This tool can be used synchronous and asynchronous and all Padlet walls are exportable to various formats. Since Padlet is web-based, it works on all devices and is very easy for both teachers and students to use. Check out these examples for inspiration in all content areas.
Whether you are doing online research or just reading digital text for pleasure, Readability provides the user with a better way to read content from the web. This Google Chrome extension can be installed from the Chrome Web Store for free by teachers and students alike. With the click of a button, most web pages get removed of all sidebars, ads, menus, and other clutter, making the text easier to read in an adjustable font with white on black or black on white color options. Check out the before and after images below for an example of what Readability can do. This extension is recommended for those students who get distracted by the clutter of most web pages and have a difficult time staying focused on the content of an online article. Readability also helps to make hard copies of articles cleaner when you just need to print them. The “save for later” feature could also come in handy when collecting various sources for online research.
You can use ClassTools’ Keyword Checker to scan student essays for key words. With a simple copy/paste of a student essay and a list of vocabulary/key words, you can run the check to get a table that details which words were used and unused in the essay. This tool could be used by teachers or even students too to check for assigned vocabulary words in writing assignments.
Flubaroo for Google Sheets can save you a lot of time with grading. Teachers can create quizzes or assignments in Google Forms and then run this add-on in the correspondong response sheet to make it self-grading. Each form submission will be graded via a teacher-created answer key and data will be disaggregated on the response sheet. There is even an option to email the results to the student. The Super Quiz add-on will also automatically grade your Google Form assignments and quizzes but it will also allow you to send feedback to the student. Student data will always be saved right in your Drive if you set up your assignments this way. You can get these add-ons from any Google Sheet by accessing the “Add-ons” menu. The steps for using Flubaroo and Super Quiz will appear when you run the add-on but please feel free to contact me if you need any help!
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AuthorKristen Wolf Archives
June 2016
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