The Voice of the Active Learner: Education from a Digital Native’s Perspective (YouTube link)
Click here to see Matt’s slides from this workshop.
Shared presentations. Create a presentation with one slide per student and give students permission to edit it. Then assign an activity — some quick Internet research, a writing prompt, an image search to find an example, etc. When they’re done, show the presentation on a projector. It’s student work instantly on display.
Graphic organizers. Drawings gives users a blank canvas where they can add text, shapes, lines, etc. When done, they can save their work as image files or PDF files and can add those images to documents, slides and spreadsheets. It’s a perfect medium for creating graphic organizers. I’ve created 15 of them that can be copied, saved, changed, tweaked or completely redone to fit your needs and your students’ needs.
Animation. This is a great hack (i.e. non-traditional use) of Google Slides that could take some time to complete but yield amazing results. Check out this video, where the creators made an impressive animation with 450 slides in a Google Slides presentation just by clicking through the slides quickly.
Choose Your Own Adventure story/activity: As a child, I loved these books, where your decisions affected the outcome for the character in the story. Google Slides lets you create similar experiences. They can be stories where the student can choose the path for the character. Students can create them, or teachers can create them for students. They can even be tied to any kind of class content. Tie the choices to answers for a question. (i.e. The character goes left if the student thinks the answer is 4.4 and goes right if the student thinks the answer is 7.2.)
I created a quick example of an impromptu, decide-on-a-whim vacation trip story where you decide for the main character. Click here to see that file (and feel free to make a copy and change the text for yourself!)
Interactive whiteboard. Create a Google Drawing and share it with students, giving them permission to edit. Display the drawing on a projector screen. Students can add text and shapes, draw arrows to important ideas and connect concepts with lines. Everyone can make changes, and anyone can watch — in class or away.
Real life comic strips. Take photos of students using a webcam and add them to a Google Drawing. Add speech bubbles to the photos. Then save those images and add each one to a different slide in a Google Slides presentation. Here’s a Google Site about Comics with Google Tools and Creativity Games for examples and more details.
For more fun, creative uses of Google Apps, go to:
Several digital tools created for the classroom bring those exciting game show-style experiences to students with learning as the focus.
Here are some of the ones I’ve found that I think are the best, along with pros, cons and what makes them different:
Kahoot! (getkahoot.com) — Kahoot! turns your classroom into a game show. Create your own questions or choose from millions of publicly available Kahoot! games. Students see questions on the screen and select the correct answer on their own devices. Track who has the most points with a leaderboard after each question. Fun music and flashy graphics make this one a crowd pleaser!
*** Quizizz (quizizz.com) — lets you turn your multiple-choice questions into a class game show. Students join the game and progress through questions at their own pace. They see the questions and answers on their own screens. The faster they get the correct answer, the more points they receive. Plus, the memes that appear after a correct or incorrect answer are a lot of fun!
Plickers (plickers.com) — Don’t have devices for every student? No problem. Get instant info on what your students know with Plickers. Students hold up cards that represent the answer they choose (A, B, C or D). The teacher scans the room with his/her phone/tablet camera in the Plickers app. Plickers summarizes student answers and provides quick results.
Quizlet (quizlet.com) (iTunes: free) — Quizlet is online flashcards with a twist. Teachers (or students!) can create their own cards by typing terms and definitions. From there, students can take simple quizzes, flip through their flashcards and even play games. Space Race and Scatter are student favorites! Plus, their flashcards can be accessed on their phones. With your terms in a device that’s constantly attached to their hip, how can you lose?
Quizalize (quizalize.com) — The gameplay experience in Quizalize isn’t what makes it stand out. Like the others, you can create questions and answers and deliver them to your class. Like the others, there are existing games you can search and use. (Quizalize uses a marketplace model where you can offer your Quizalize games to others for a fee a la Teachers Pay Teachers.) Quizalize stands out with the data that it offers on how students are doing. When students are finished, Quizalize breaks the data on their work down in many ways (by question, by type of question, etc.) to provide great insights for the teacher.
Take your classroom beyond the four walls of the classroom!
Maps and mapping tools can reach so many content areas and grade levels:
These mapping tools can take students places the bus can’t:
Take your students on the streets almost anywhere in the world with Google Maps Street View. Drag the little yellow man onto the image to explore. (Click image to see full size.) (Screenshot taken at maps.google.com)
1. Google Maps Street View — Street View makes it possible to drop your classroom virtually onto almost any street in the world and walk around. It uses panoramic images that let you turn around, zoom in and walk down roads to check out the scenery. Just grab the little yellow “peg man” and drop him where you’d like to go. (See animation at right.) For practice, try dropping yourself at your doorstep of your school if you’ve never used it before.
2. Street View Treks — Once you’ve seen your school from the curb on Google Maps Street View, take it to the next level with Street View Treks. These custom-produced exploration experiences are awesome for students. They provide information about the location and videos that pair nicely with the panoramic views. Locations include Nepal, Gombe National Park, the Pyramids of Giza, the Great Barrier Reef (a Street View Trek underwater!) and more.
3. Walking tour screencasts — An extension to Street View and Treks is to let students take you on a walking tour of someplace in the world. They do some research and collect some facts about the location first. Then they load up the location using Street View or Treks. They start recording a screencast video (a video of what’s happening on their screen with their microphone recording their voices). Some free screencasting tools: Snagit for Google Chrome (my favorite), Screencast-O-Matic and Screenr (there are others). Students narrate the tour as they “walk” the streets using Street View or Treks.
4. Google Cultural Institute — These virtual tours don’t have to be confined to what you can see from the street. Google Cultural Institute gives you access to top-notch art collections from around the world (Art Project) and modern/ancient world heritage sites (World Wonders). Witness significant moments in history with Historic Moments, giving students a version of a field trip to the past.
Kurt Wismer created this map of his travels, complete with year visited and images. Students can create similar custom-built maps with MyMaps. (Screenshot from Kurt Wismer’s map)
5. Mapping fun — Creating or viewing an interactive map with images and information can be the next-best thing to visiting a location, and students can create their own. Kurt Wismer’s great resource site for using Google Maps and Google Earth shows you how. Have students create a map using MyMaps. Select locations, use custom icons, add photos and share.
6. Geoguessr — This game is like a surprise virtual field trip every time you play. Geoguessr uses Google Maps Street View and places participants in a random location somewhere in the world. By panning around, zooming or “walking” down the street, participants place a pin on a map to guess where they are. The closer they guess, the more points they win. It’s great for critical thinking and using context clues.
7. Smarty Pins — Smarty Pins is like Geoguessr’s cousin. Granted, it’s a little less like a virtual field trip, but it does use geography-based questions to play. Participants answer questions by dropping a pin where they think the answer is.
If we can deliver feedback in the moment — while they’re still wrestling with a question or problem or assignment — it’s more likely to hit the mark.
That’s where Formative (goformative.com) — one of my favorite classroom tech tools right now — comes in. It’s a free assessment tool that lets you …
You can deliver the questions/content to students through a classroom you set up in Formative or just by giving students a quick code to the assessment that they can enter at goformative.com/join.
Once you jump into the site, you’ll find that creating an assessment and adding questions to it is pretty easy. But as I’ve used it, I’ve realized that I’m only scratching the surface when it comes to Formative. There’s so much you can do.
Link: 20 ways to use Formative for awesome assessment
Advanced Google Apps ideas for the classroom
Video project ideas (From Matt’s session, “Video projects: Making them practical and fun”)
Images: What is Creative Commons, and how can I find images? AND teacher copyright essentials
Twitter for teachers AND social media in the classroom (teacher example / blog post)
Open educational resources (OERs)
A tool/app slam