We have probably all used YouTube to show our students some neat learning concept, and have often been met with frustration that YouTube is blocked for students. We understand the reasoning, but really would like our students to have access to view the great resource we showed earlier.
There are some alternatives that you could use. Here are a few of them: SchoolTube.com. This is not blocked on our district and if you sign up for a FREE account, then YOU could make a neat video and upload it to YOUR channel and then share the link via Google Classroom. Another option is to simply peruse their library selection.
TeacherTube.com is an another option. Sign up for FREE, upload your own video, or peruse their library.
Nextvista.org. There are already hundreds of videos--all education based, for you to use and share with your students via Google Classroom.
If there is a video that seems to only be on YouTube, don't forget there IS a work around. Check out this post from a few weeks ago for a reminder.
Hopefully, the next time you feel discouraged because you can't share a YouTube video with your students, you're remember that YES! you have options!
Teachers, do you find yourself giving pretty much the same comments all the time to your students when they turn in a writing assignment via Google Docs? Wouldn't it be a time saver, if you could somehow turn those repeated responses into canned responses?
This add on, according to the description mode, has 3 useful tools:
Rubric Builder
Commenting Tool
Grading Tool
Discovered this tip via Richard Byrne, the Practical Ed Tech guy from FreeTech4Teachers.com
Below is a YouTube tutorial of how it works. It's looks like a pretty cool tool. Check it out!
An app I have rediscovered is Doceri. An IWB app, it does what most IWB apps do. Allows you to create presentations straight from your iPad or Android Tablet. There is a free app, with the option to upgrade to the paid version.
What I REALLY like about this, is the freedom it gives you to NOT be bound to your computer or projector in the front of the room. Using the 30 day demo version, I have been able to wirelessly connect my Doceri app to my Mac computer using my iPad. Without having to physically be at my computer (which is wired through a data projector) I'm able to show long division problems, do markups on a map, highlight words in a PDF, and just about anything I want to do. Draw shapes in certain areas, erase a few strokes, or simply delete the whole thing and start over again.
There are two setbacks that concern me with this app. The app hasn't been updated since October 2015. That's over a year ago. We've had countless upgrades on multiple OS of both platforms, so isn't there SOMETHING that needs updating? However--it seems to be working fine. Maybe the old adage of, 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it" applies here..?
The second setback is the cost. While there is a free app, and a 30 day demo for the desktop, the cost for the "real" desktop app is $30! Then again, is it worth $30 to not have to be tied down to your computer or the front of the room? Is it worth it to be able to stand by "little Johnny" while you continue to teach, using the "close proximity" technique for classroom management? Is it worth it just to be able hand your tablet to a student and have them work the problem out at their desk while their classmates watch his/her work in real time on the board?
You decide. Download the demo app on your computer, and app on your tablet. Try it before you buy, and see if YOU think it's worth it.
Check out ClassFlow--a way to incorporate the Interactive White Board with the students' chromebooks.
Imagine using your IWB and take it up a notch. Imagine taking the wonderful lesson plan that you've created and push it out to your student's devices. Imagine having the students interact with your lesson, and send it back to the board to show the class.
That can be done! Check out the ClassFlow video below and see how you can incorporate the software into your already-dynamic lessons!
Picture this scenario: you're in your classroom, getting your PowerPoint set up. The projector is hooked up and running, the computer has the PowerPoint set up, and you start the lesson.
Then it starts. The bulb is dim, the students in the back can't see. The screen is blurry, and any number of issues that seem to crop up when you try to utilize a presentation to enhance the lesson.
Enter NearPod. I had heard of nearpod, but really didn't know anything about it. My "tech crew" helped me explore the software, and they were REALLY impressed!
Simplest terms would be it's a presentation you can show online. Perfect for a 1:1 classroom. Why?
A couple of reasons come to mind:
1. No more, "I can't see the board"
2. Within the presentation, you, the teacher, have the option to enter an "activity" slide, where the students can actually interact with the program.
3. You, the teacher, can choose to add 3D animation to the slides (free)
4. The basic usage is free, (that include student interaction to the slides), and for a subscription, you can have webpages embedded into the slides.
5. You, as the teacher, have the option to send out a Nearpod presentation in "live mode", which means YOU decide when it's time to advance to the next side, or as a "Student Pace", which is exactly what it means--students work at their own pace. This would be great for reviews.
There is a free version which in and of itself, is awesome. For a paid subscription, you have access to a few more bells and whistles. You decide which is right for you.
For the student interaction alone, as well as the "I can't see the board!" would be motivation enough for me to want to try it out. What about you? If you use it in your classroom, I would love to hear how you use it!
A neat idea I discovered this week was "Black Out". This is an activity created to help students discover the main idea of a story. Working in small groups, students each have an article to read. After reading the article, the students search through the article, and any information they find that is NOT pertinent to the article...not really all that important, they black out with a Sharpie. After this is done, anything that is left should be able to help the students formulate the main idea of the passage with maybe a few details sprinkled in. To save on the amount of paper needed, this could be done with dry erase as well. Take the same printed out article, and insert it into a sheet protector or some other sort of overlay. The students follow the same procedure using a dry erase marker. After discussion, the overlays are wiped clean and ready for the next small group to use. To make this a digital activity, assign the article from an online source--Newsela for example, then copy/paste the article onto a Google Doc, then choose "make a copy for each child" when it's loaded into the Google Classroom. The students can use the "highlight" color tool (choose black for the color) and work through it the same way. One bonus to using Black Out as a digital activity, is that it's a lot easier to undo when a student changes their mind about something that was highlighted. If you'd like to learn more, check out this link for more information: Improve Reading Comprehension with Black Out
Padlet is my new toy this week. Using it at a workshop, our presenter had us keep the tab open, and ask questions as they came up relating to the topic of the workshop. I LOVED it! The questions were written where I didn't have to strain to hear what the audience member was asking. It also enabled me to get the burning question out of my system and to the presenter so I could finish paying attention. I am the world's worst, if I have a question--I hear nothing else until I get the question out of my way. Not necessarily answered--just off of me and onto the expert.
So, what are some ideas to use with Padlet? Check out one that I created back in the summer and explore it a bit. Padlets are another way to:
Administer digital exit tickets
Create a Thank you board for a mentor
Students can leave "Get well" wishes for a sick student
You, the teacher, can make it as public or private as you wish. This can be students' best thoughts shared publicly, so students can share with far away relatives.
Use it as a "suggestion box" concerning new books in the library, upcoming activities or any number of items students may want an input.
I was elated when I discovered the Q & A section in the Google Slides a few weeks ago. My first thought was, 'What's the big deal? Just let the kids raise their hands and ask already!" Then I got to thinking. Some of our students, if they can't ask RIGHT THEN, they listen to nothing else. Using the Q & A option of the slide presentation, students can pose their question RIGHT THEN, and you, as the presenter have the option to decide when discussion can take place.
It might be wise to have some guidelines in place for your students when using the presentation as a teaching tool. Encourage the students to ask some very deep questions, or perhaps you could use the Q & A section to have the students post some "aha" moments. These could also be a spring board for some meaningful discussion.
Using the Q & A session is super easy. View the video below to get a general idea of how to start using it. Happy presenting!
Flowcharts are an available tool to be used by teachers and students alike. One such software that can help you create your flowchart (or your students') is draw.io.
The flowcharts you create can be saved to DropBox or Google Drive and shared like any other file.
Free for educational use, teachers can plan their goal reaching activities for their students, and students can create time lines, writing plans, and even their own goal planned activities. You can create a "yes/no" flow chart and have students use them to help guide their thought process on their reading. Check out this site for an example:
Look below for a short demo of draw.io.
We have used Google Forms religiously for surveys, spelling tests, vocabulary tests and the like. We collect the user information by having the students log in before filling out the form.
What about using Google Forms for other things AND being able to collect the emails from OUT of district? Maybe you're planning the party, and you'd like for parents to fill out the form as to what they could bring? Would you like to know how to get in touch with them via email?
It's easy to have your forms set up to collect email addresses from any domain--gmail, yahoo, msn, or anywhere else.
To do this, simply click the "Settings" gear icon in the top right hand corner. From the pop up window, make sure the "Collect email addresses" box is checked, and make sure the "restrict to Baker County School District Users" is UNchecked. This way, before a person can fill out the form, they will HAVE to sign in with an email address.
Today's tech tip is something I wished I had back when I was in the classroom. It's a neat little Google Forms Add-on called, "Check it Out!" This would be great for checking out science equipment, classroom library books, and a variety of other things within the classroom that need to be shared between students.
This add-on allows you to create a form with simply 2 questions: Check in and check out. Simple. You type up a list of items that will go into the "check out" section, and that's it. As kids check them out, the item moves from "check out" to "check in", indicating that the particular item is not available to use. When the student wants to return the borrowed item, they simply fill out the form again, this time selecting their item from the "check in" section. The form automatically moves the item back to the "check out" section.
Filling out the form could be a job for the classroom librarian and a great way to encourage responsibility among the users, so the library books do eventually get returned.
To get started, open up a new Google Form, click on the hamburger menu (the three dots to the right of the "send" button) and choose "add-ons" from the bottom. This takes you to the Google Store. From the Google Store, type in "check it out" in the search bar then install.
Have you ever wished you could have selections disappear from your Google form, after that option had been chosen?
Maybe you're having a class party, and you'd really like to NOT have 25 people bringing in napkins. You wish that after 2 or 3 people signed up to bring napkins, that choice will just vanish so it can't be selected anymore.
Would you like to have all of these choices on said spread sheet to reappear, so you can use it again next year?
With this neat little add-on for Google Form called Choice Eliminator 2, you CAN do just that! The video below is a little long, but this add-on is well worth the watch.
Have fun!
Have you ever wanted to just glance at your grade book spreadsheet and quickly see how your students are doing on a certain assignment, or over a certain span of time? That can be done in a snap with conditional formatting.
With just a few minutes of set up, you'll be able to glance at your spreadsheet. Check out the video and see how easy it is to make your spreadsheets pop!
So you're creating a document, slide show, or poster via Google Drawing. It's time to add some images. Using the built in search tool within the Google app, you set out to find that image of the cute little puppy you found earlier.
However, when you add that cute puppy image, you notice it's got this white background that sticks out like a sore thumb against your purple and gold background. It doesn't look right.
What can you do?
Within the Google omnibox, after you identify the picture you want ("cute puppy clipart", add the file extension PNG to the end. The PNG, (Portable Network Graphics) results should change slightly, only showing you the images that have been saved as PNG. When you choose one of these images, it should blend well with your background.
For a more detailed look at the differences between .JPEG, .PNG or .GIF, take a look at this website.
We've got the basic question and answers going pretty well with Google Forms. We can select various answer methods, create spreadsheet responses, add collaborators and make copies of forms shared with us. That's a pretty impressive learning curve!
What if we were to take Google Forms to the next level? What if, based on a student's answer, we could offer them some instant remediation through a video we've created and uploaded to YouTube? There are apps you could use to create your own video (My favorite is Explain Everything, available for iOS, Windows and Android), you could have your partner video tapping you giving a mini lesson on their smart phone, then upload it to YouTube (make it public so whoever is taking your practice quiz can see it).
Editorial Update: The only videos Google Forms will allow ARE YouTube videos. At the time of this video's creation, I was not aware of that. (Which is obvious, if you watch the video) Although this could not be used at school or from Google classroom, if you uploaded a "practice form" on your class webpage, then the students could practice at home, without having to log in via their school account. You could, however, upload a jpeg explanation of the question to help aid in student understanding and have them use THAT form at school.
Disclaimer: At the time of this blog writing/video making, it was late. I was tired, my brain was on overload. Please forgive the scattered thoughts in this video. Hopefully the "picture is worth a thousand words" will play into this.
Enjoy!
By now, we are all aware that YouTube is blocked for our students. If you've ever spent any amount of time ON YouTube, you're well aware that there is too many videos that are not appropriate for our students--either at home OR school.
However, there are also a lot of educational videos that ARE appropriate for our students. Khan Academy, a well known online tutorial uses YouTube to store his wonderful creations. We as educators can also create our own movies with our smart phones and upload to our YouTube channel (yes, all employees of our GAFE district has their own channel). Students cannot access videos on their student accounts
Is there a way to get around that?
Why yes, there is!
At the point of this blog, KeepVid is down. I suspect an update, or overloaded server. Above is a YouTube video demonstrating the ease of use for KeepVid. After you download the YouTube video, save it to your Google Drive (GAFE has unlimited storage). choose to "share with anyone who has the link", then post the link in your Google Classroom when you create an assignment.
There are a plethora of websites that offer to download movies from YouTube, Vimeo, and a slew of others. The one I used mainly was KeepVid.com. It's simple enough to use. There are others I have not tried. If you're inclined to check them out, please let us know your thoughts on them! Here's a partial list.
One of my favorite apps when I was in the classroom was called Explain Everything. Available for Android, iOS and Windows, this app allows teachers to quickly create a video recorded whiteboard lesson to share online.
There is a free version as well as a paid version, and I wholeheartedly recommend the $2.99 paid version. There's animation, loads of editing tools, and a 1-2 click option to upload to YouTube, or to simply save on your device. For schools that block the YouTube app, try uploading to SchoolTube (registration first). If you're a GAFE district, simply save the video to your Google Drive, and link the movie from there.
I used Explain Everything mainly for math, but it can be used in other subject areas. It's quicker to do a video tutorial of "how to solve for a variable" than it is to demonstrate it in class. Between disruptive behavior, interruptions from outside sources, I was lucky to get a full 15 minutes of "how to" time. I would create and save the video ahead of time, then play it for the class. The students knew they could log into our Google Classroom later and see the video again. The video was about 3 minutes vs the 15 minutes I never seemed to have.
Okay, so maybe you're not an iOS user. Maybe you're more of a Droid person, or simply just a Kindle person. Stick Pick has you covered. For $2.99 on iOS, Droid or Kindle, Stick Pick is like a Popsicle app on steroids. Like most similar apps, you add your students' names to the sticks and can select at random. However, Stick Pick goes a little further than that. It gives you options and examples of H.O.T. questions you can lead in with for reading comprehension (sorry math teachers! No mathematical lead in questions yet) You can set each individual student to Bloom's, Bloom's revised or ESL, or simply to just select the stick. If you choose to have the question lead in, you can mark that student as correct/incorrect, feedback from a 1-5.
I'll admit, it takes a bit more of a set up than the simpler apps, but the return is well worth it. Using the Bloom's or Bloom's revised section, you're able to record your feedback for later on when you have to input the information onto forms and other paperwork teachers are required to fill out. Great companion!
I am so excited! I get to use my Teachers Pick app again this year! For the last couple of years, I had been in a lab where I saw almost 800 students each week. There weren't really any small intimate groups where I felt I could utilize this app.
The Teachers Pick app (.99 cents or $1.99 in iTunes) are digital Popsicle sticks that help the teacher remember who's been called on and who hasn't. A neat feature is that the teacher can decide to choose someone that's already been called, or simply to go through the roster until everyone has had a chance. There are benefits to either way.
For my small groups, I lay my iPhone in the center of our gathering spot--table, floor, desks, wherever we are, and ask the question. They eagerly await to see who the app will pick to answer the question. Another thing I do with small groups, is that, if they DON'T call out the answer unless it's their turn, they receive a paw-buck. (PBiS), reinforcing the positive behavior of not all talking at once.
I feel like I've come home again. The best of both worlds have fallen into my lap this year. The students are precious, allowing me to teach, and I can utilize my apps again to help enhance our classroom management and academics. Try Teacher's Pick. I think you'll like it!
School might almost be out for summer, but that doesn't mean that learning still isn't taking place. Mrs. Christopher's class enjoyed having some time to explore how things interact with each other, including separating hydrogen gas from the water. Mento making memories were included in the activities. Check out some of the fun below from Mrs. Christopher's class! Chemical reactions. Who knew it could be so fun?
So what are the kiddos learning these last few days of school? Is it really all fun and games, or is there meaningful content still being shared among the students? Well, if you were to look in Mrs. Cabral's room, you'd see a little bit of both going on. Fun and games tied in with learning.
Her students took a journey down Florida's history, and imagined what it would be like to have stepped foot on Florida's sandy beaches back in the days of the explorers. What would they see? What would they feel? Using their Chromebooks and Google Docs, the students shared journal entries, 3 a day, as if they were explorers first setting foot on Florida's shores.
I don't know about you, but when I think of Florida in its yesteryear state, I think of driftwood, brilliant white sandy beaches, fresh air...
Well, hot air, actually.
How might the first Floridians lived? How do the students think they lived? Below are some snapshots of student thinking. What do YOU think it might have looked like in years past?
