The world is innovating with technology quickly. How quickly? Let’s find out in this Kahoot! Head to kahoot.it.
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.
When you combine the engagement hooks in the book “Teach Like a PIRATE” with free tech tools, you get memorable learning experiences! Learn more here: DitchThatTextbook.com/pirate
5 digital tools to bring an electrifying game show experience to class
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.
What does a paperless classroom look like? How can paperless make your classroom more efficient and effective? See some examples from Matt’s classroom in this session. Learn more here: DitchThatTextbook.com/paperless
Hold on, because they’re going to come fast and furious! 60 useful digital tools in 60 minutes. Go to: http://DitchThatTextbook.com/lightning for the entire list!
1. Let the students do the heavy lifting when starting your class — The join code is your best friend when creating a class in Google Classroom at the beginning of the year. Let students add themselves to your class with the join code to save you tons of time!
2. Put classes in order — If you teach multiple classes, when creating those classes in Google Classroom, create them in reverse chronological order. By doing that, they will display in chronological order in Classroom.
3. Number all of your assignments — This one comes straight from Google Classroom guru Alice Keeler. Give every assignment a three-digit number (starting with 001). Use the same number for everything related to that assignment so it’s clear what goes with what. It makes working with assignments in the gradebook easier AND communicating with students about assignments. See more about numbering in Alice’s blog post.
4. Schedule posts for later — Google Classroom now lets you create posts (like announcements and assignments) and schedule them to be posted later. Create all the assignments you’d like now. Instead of clicking the post button, use the drop-down arrow next to it to schedule it for a specific time and date.
5. Use the right kind of comment — As you can see in the infographic at right, there are three places to add comments in Google Classroom. Each has its strengths and best uses. Using the right one can mean that your feedback is more useful and easier to find for students.
6. Use the class photo as a bulletin board — The ability to change the class header photo in Google Classroom is not that new. But this may be a new way to use it! Use a tool like Google Drawings to create an image the size of your class header photo. Type reminders and important information on it. Save it as an image file (probably a JPEG or PNG … try 1500 x 400 pixels under File > Page setup > Custom …) and upload it as your class header photo. It will provide timely reminders to students whenever they access Google Classroom. Change it regularly to keep information updated and interest high!
7. Don’t overload the About tab – Only add the most important, year-round links to your About tab. If you overload it with too much content, it will become difficult to find anything there!
8. See the student side – To see what the students are seeing, ask a colleague to invite you to one of his/her classes. That way, you’ll be a student in that class and you’ll see what Classroom looks like as a student.
9. Create new assignments from templates — Do you find yourself posting the same kinds of assignments or announcements in Classroom? If so, the new “reuse assignment” feature can help. Create a template that models the kind of assignment, announcement or question that you commonly use. (Maybe create a brand new class called “Templates” as a place to house it.) Then, when you need it, use the “reuse assignment” feature, find that template and change it as necessary before posting it. Save time and effort!
10. Keep parents/guardians in the loop — Help parents and guardians know what’s going on in class and stay informed about due dates and important information. Invite them to your class under the “Students” tab (Invite Guardians). They’ll get email updates about what’s happening in your class! See more in this Google support page.
Check out some of Matt’s most popular posts about Google Classroom:
LOTS of Google-fueled activities for class TOMORROW!
Shared notes. Students often have lots of information to share with each other when they work together as a group. By sharing a document with group members, they can all add ideas and resources — and see everyone’s changes in real time. Teachers can use this in committee work and at staff meetings.
Rethinking rough drafts. With the comments feature in Documents (and other Google Apps), rough drafts aren’t a paper students submit to a teacher. They’re a process. Teachers can guide students throughout the entire writing assignment so there are no surprises when it’s time to turn work in.
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.
Practice with the shared presentation below:
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.
Create a PDF ebook: PDF files are about as universal as it gets. You can open them on almost any Internet-ready device. They’re read-only, so publishing a PDF is a good way to distribute information to be consumed by reading. Google Slides is a great, simple PDF ebook creation tool. Create a slide presentation, change it to the dimensions you prefer, add content and finalize by going to File > Download as … > PDF Document.
Create a “slide deck book”: This idea is inspired by Matt Macfarlane, a middle school history teacher from California. In true “Ditch That Textbook” fashion, he has turned from traditional textbooks to creating his own. He finds engaging content on the web and collects it in his “slide deck books.” His students access them online and can click links to get more information. He gives students a “everyone with the link can view” link so they’re read only. Some examples:
Play a “Jeopardy!” game: Jeopardy on a PowerPoint presentation has been a staple in many classes. It’s also possible to create via Google Slides.Eric Curts, a Google Certified Innovator, created this template that you can copy into your own Google Drive to customize with your own questions and answers. Keep track of score on a whiteboard/chalkboard, on paper or through some other means. (Note: When a question is answered, it doesn’t disappear from the board. You might want to display the game on a whiteboard instead of a projector screen. When a question is selected, draw an X through it with a dry erase marker.)
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!)
Assess with self-grading quizzes. Self-grading quizzes give students immediate feedback. They also let students practice as much as they’d like without depending on the teacher. You can create self-paced assessments that provide answer feedback with Google Slides. For each standard four-question multiple choice question, you’ll need five slides:
On the question slide, for each possible answer, create a link to the feedback slide. Then, on each feedback slide, create a link to go on to the next question.
Want to see an example? Click here to see my quick one-question self-grading quiz.
Quick blog: Blogging is a useful reflective activity that can generate a lot of online conversation among students. A quick, simple version of blogging can be created in a Google presentation. Create a shared presentation (see No. 1 above), and have students write a short “blog post” in their slides. They can even add images (see No. 5 above). When complete, students can read each other’s writing and write comments on them using the comment button in the toolbar. Conversations stay grouped together when students reply to each other using the “reply” button. This creates meaningful conversation with very little prep time.
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.
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.
Timelines. Students can work together in a Google Drawing to add text and pictures to mark events on a timeline. When they’re finished, the image can be saved as an image file (JPEG or PNG) or a PDF file. It can also be embedded in a site to share with others.
Annotate images. A picture is, of course, worth a thousand words, but it can also teach important lessons. Let students manipulate that picture, and they can create meaning and own those lessons. Add an image to a Google Drawing and let students add text boxes and arrows, pointing out various parts of the photo that are of interest to the class.
Interactive posters. Google Drawings are great for bringing images, text and shapes together. Those elements combine for a great digital poster. But these digital posters are way better than a regular one made of poster board. Various elements in the poster can be clicked, delivering webpages and other online content to viewers. Click here to see Matt’s recent blog post on how to create Google Drawings interactive posters.
Take your classroom beyond the four walls of the classroom!
There are lots of cool projects that students can do to create and show what they’ve learned. See some ideas, from the basic to the advanced! Go to: DitchThatTextbook.com/videoprojects