This blog is maintained by the Wenatchee School District's Instructional Technology Department to keep staff updated on tips and techniques for navigating the digital world. The content on this website in no way represents the opinions or beliefs of WSD.
It's like that old Reese's commercial, "You got your peanut butter stuck in my chocolate!" Today PollEverywhere released a Google Chrome extension that allows you to add live polling to your Google Slide presentations. Both of these tools are very useful but putting them together makes them both that much better.
Once I installed the extension and jumped over to a Google Slide presentation there was new contextual menu at the top for Poll Everywhere. Clicking on that allowed me to insert a poll onto my current slide. Pressing present showed the live poll results. Awesome! Now I'm hungry for a Reese's peanut butter cup though.
So I was looking at Twitter and saw a Periscope about an online space for kids to read and take quizzes...how many times did we say that even two years ago. Never. But that's the reality of today's connected world. But that's not the point of this post.
The reading site I saw is called Wonderopolis and it has tons of content. The goal of the website, besides getting kids to enjoy reading, is to bring out their inner wonder; to help them ask questions about their world and discover the answers.
Some of the great features are the vocabulary support. For example, many of the challenging words you can hover over and get an instant definition. There are also content and vocabulary quizzes as well to keep the kids accountable for what they're reading. Beyond that there are lots of tools for kids to stay engaged, including a place for them to ask questions that could potentially be the wonder of the day. There's even a teacher space called WonderGround and a forum.
The Hour of Code is a great introduction for kids to coding and way of understanding the language of the digital world around them. In the past the Hour of Code has allowed students to create great games like Flappy Bird. This year they've upped the ante and are bringing not only Star Wars but Minecraft.
If you've never participated in the Hour before, make time during the week of December 7-13th to help your students learn to code.
I've been playing with a few tools lately that display Tweets in a slideshow or presentation format. These are useful when you're giving a presentation or at a conference and you want current, updated content to show on the screen. A few that I like so far (that are free) include:
I've been working with a colleague to track students' work habits throughout the day so they are self-reporting on how they're doing based on Work Completion, Participation, and Citizenship/Behavior. We created a Google Form that takes the kids about 5 seconds to complete and she gets data for every kid, for every period. Whether or not the data is valid is another issue, but at least there is some reflection by kids on how they think they're doing and it gives the teacher a bit of accountability and helps start discussions with other teachers, students, parents and admin.
We even put in some conditional formatting to change the color of the students' responses so at a glance the teacher can get a good read on how students think they're doing. We talked about sorting the data to clump a student's responses together so sorting columns. But then another colleague showed me a Google Sheets add-on he uses called RowCall that looks at your data, finds a common denominator, like a student's name, and creates a new tab on the bottom of the sheet with all of that student's data. He uses it for his bathroom pass so he can quickly see how many trips a student has been taking to check their phone in their locker go to the bathroom. Pretty slick.
Even slicker is the fact that the newly tabbed sheets will update too with new data.
One thing I've made a point of doing this year is using images in my blog and presentations that are free to use, with no copyright issues. In my new role I need to practice what I preach to students and teachers instead of just taking the quickest route and using Google. You can use Google's Advanced Search to narrow things down or with a few clicks you can find images that are free to use.
Yesterday on Twitter I came across this post by Dustin Senos that lists a ton of great places that have free stock photos. Even better are all of the comments where other people have listed free image sites. The more I use sites like this the easier it becomes to find images and I don't have the angel and the devil on my shoulder prodding me one way or another.
I think Google Maps is often overlooked when it comes to Google's amazing suite of tools, but I keep finding great uses for it besides just looking at locations. Last week I presented at a conference and showed off the Mapping Sheets extension that allows you to make a sheet with locations, (or get data from a Google Form) and, with a few clicks of your mouse, plot those locations on a Google Map.
Today I read on FreeTech4Teachers about how Google already has that capability baked in. Simply create a sheet with a column called 'Location', in Google Drive go to New > More > Google My Maps to create your map. On the left sidebar under the first layer you can import your Google Sheet and the locations will appear. You have to point it to the Google Sheet with the data and tell it which column has the locations.
In a social studies class you could use this to plot where all of our stuff comes from by looking at labels and tags. It's quite eye-opening. In an ELA class you could also plot a character's movements around the globe, complete with additional information that shows up on the map. It's worth checking out and then letting your students figure out stuff to map on it.
