I've got another cool new Google feature for you today. This one is only in beta right now, though, so it's not available to the general public yet. Read on to see how you can request early access! Google Forms Locked Mode allows teachers to give an assessment during which students are unable to navigate away to other sites. It works on managed Chromebooks, and it's easy to do: just click a checkbox!
Now our school has a monitoring program for our Chromebooks, but to lock students into a Google Form, it's a few steps. This Locked Mode option makes it super easy to do! If you are interested in trying out Locked Mode, you can fill out this form and Google may grant you early access. The form also allows you to request access to Google for Edu's other new beta feature, an updated gradebook in Google Classroom. Both features will roll out to everyone eventually, but if you're eager to try it out, fill out the form!
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So what is stop motion? Basically, it's taking a lot of pictures of something and manipulating that something just a teeeeennny bit for each picture. Then you run all the pictures together and it becomes an animation. Think the old Rudolph Christmas movie. It was done in stop motion. There are two stop motion Chrome apps that Sarah showed me: Stop Motion Animator and Clap Motion. Both essentially do the same thing, except Clap Motion lets you take photos by clapping - a really cool feature, but I'm not sure how it would work with a whole class working on a project in the same room. Both use a technique called onion skinning, which allows you to see a faint ghost image of your previous photo so that you know how much to move your object before taking another photo. It's very helpful. It also helps to use a small document camera or a webcam if you are using a Chromebook to take pictures. The forward facing camera makes taking photos for stop motion a challenge, but it's super easy to use a webcam or document camera. Our librarian, Brian, suggested the document camera - a big thank you to him for the idea! My (very) amateur stop motion video using Stop Motion Animator So what can you do in the classroom with stop motion? There are loads of possibilities, really! Hatten (2014) suggests, "Stop animation is ideal for helping students learn about concepts that involve processes and progressions — anything that benefits from including an element of movement to explain how it works." Her article on using stop motion in the classroom, while elementary focused, gives some really great suggestions that apply to all levels. This article from Discovery Education gives some excellent examples by subject area. YouTube can provide you with hours of stop motion entertainment. However you decide to use it, the level of student engagement is bound to be high, and stop motion gives the the opportunity to really use their creativity! Hatten, S. (2014, Aug. 15). Engage elementary students with stop animation! Retrieved
from https://www.iste.org/explore/articleDetail?articleid=128 Do you rely on your mouse for all the work you do, or are you a keyboard person? I used to be mouse all the way, but the more I use a Chromebook, the more I rely on keyboard shortcuts. It's just a very efficient way of doing things, and I'm aaalllll about efficiency, ya'll. If you aren't sure what keyboard shortcuts you have at your disposal on your Chromebook, you can hold down Ctrl, alt, + ? which will bring up this super handy keyboard menu: Keyboard shortcuts traditionally start with Ctrl, Shift, Alt, or a combination of two of those. Then you can hit various keys to make things happen. The menu you get by holding down Ctrl, alt, + ? lets you see what keys do what function. For example, for the screenshot above, I opened the menu and held down Ctrl + Shift. This brought up what you see in the screenshot: all the functions available by holding down Ctrl + Shift. Most people are familiar with Ctrl + c or Ctrl + v for copy and paste, but there are SO many more shortcuts out there. Here are a few of my favorites: The rotate screen 90 degrees is handy to know because students often use this to make their screen spin in circles (both clever and annoying, right?). I am currently obsessed with the paste without formatting shortcut (yes, obsessed with a keyboard shortcut, I am a nerd). Say you are copying and pasting information from one Google Slide file to another. If you paste without formatting, the text will adhere to the font, size and color of the second Google Slide file, so you don't have to go through and reformat everything. It also helps when I'm doing works cited pages; I can copy and paste without formatting author names and article titles directly from websites, and I don't have to worry about them pasting in my document all huge and weird and then having to fix it. You can see all the Chromebook shortcuts by using the Ctrl + Alt + ? I mentioned above, or you can go here to see them spelled out for you. Hope you find something to make your life a little easier! Computer clipart from pexels.com
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AuthorChristin Barkemeyer Archives
April 2020
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