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Monday, September 28, 2015

Kid Picker

I went to a great Google Summit in White River, WA over the weekend and picked up a lot of great ideas.  One of those was Kid Picker.  It's a script that runs that creates a Google Sheet where you put student names, then it randomly chooses them when you press the button.  It has an 'absent' button so someone's name doesn't keep popping up if they're not there.  It's very simple to use and keeps the kids on the edge of their seats!

Check Out Kid Picker Here


Friday, September 11, 2015

Kahoot! at OMS #kahoot #gamification #learningisfun

I've had the privilege to spend a lot of time at Orchard Middle School this week getting to know the kids and helping them get their iPads set up.  Today I spent about ten minutes watching Mr. Merriman teach his kids about appropriate iPad usage using a Kahoot! game.  Kids were engaged, having fun, laughing, cheering, and learning.  Imagine that.  You'd be hard-pressed to find a traditional classroom with this level of engagement that only takes a few clicks to setup.

The Kahoot! platform is great for all levels of students and abilities.



Wednesday, September 2, 2015

New Google for Education Tools #gafe #google #googleclassroom #chrome

Today is the first day of school in our district and there were some welcome surprises from Google to greet us.  You can read the entire post on the Google for Education blog or my favorite parts below.


  • Voice Typing - In a Google Doc, under the Tools menu, is a new tool that allows you to type using your voice.  This furthers Google's plans to free you from your keyboard and is slowly creeping into most of their apps.  It's available in 40 languages and also allows you to make corrections on the fly.
  • See New Changes - Now when you leave a document and come back to it there is a new link that allows you to see any changes that have been made in the document.  You can still do that via File > See Revision History, but this is a quicker route.
  • Google Forms - There are some new themes, which are always fun.
  • New Templates - Docs, Sheets, and Slides all have new templates that allow you to choose from pre-made documents, instead of having to create your own.
  • Explore in Sheets - This tool creates charts and insights automatically to help you visualize your data.
  • Share to Google Classroom Chrome Extension - Sometimes it's hard to share URLs because they take a long time to type.  This extension makes that easy by sending the current URL to your Google Classroom.
Plus, Google has a new logo!