Happy Almost End of the School Year, ya'll! Today's Digital Tool Tidbit is on Google Forms. I know everyone is in final countdown mode, but Google Forms will be updating soon to include some really cool changes that can help you for next year. This article released by Google earlier this month details the changes coming. Here is a brief outline of what you'll see: 1.-2. Quiz Answer Suggestions / Autocomplete Answers: Using machine learning, Forms will now suggest answers for questions that you type in. If you're like me, you hate figuring out distractors for your questions. This will help you out a ton on that front! 3. Answer Key for checkbox and multiple choice grid questions: I've had several teachers ask me about this feature, so I am stoked it's coming! Forms will now auto-grade these types of questions. 4. Give partial credit in decimal form: This is a manual grading feature, but you'll be able to assign half or quarter credit to questions if a student only misses part of an answer. 5. Improved feedback: I honestly didn't know this feature even existed. When looking at your Responses tab, there is an Add Feedback feature that has been there for a while. If you click it, you can add a link or a YouTube video for students to use as a reteaching or extension tool. You can include text as well. The YouTube feature is what's new! 6. See your total points while creating a quiz: As you add questions and assign point values to those questions, Forms will tally the total number of points at the top of the page. Hopefully you see something on this list that will help improve your instruction and efficiency. Gotta love it when Google is responsive to teacher requests! Shout out to Mr. Heilman for passing on the info! Forms icon above from Wikimedia Commons.
Sharma, Akshat. (2018, May 10). 6 ways Quizzes in Google Forms are getting smarter. Retrieved from https://www.blog.google/topics/education/6-ways-quizzes-google-forms-are-getting-smarter/
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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 You may notice a couple of things about the blog. One: it's been a month since I've posted - sorry about that! I have been fortunate to have been very busy this past month. Two: I've given the blog a bit of a makeover! My husband, who works in advertising, and I came up with a new name. Welcome to IgnitEDlearning! I hope you like the change as much as I do. For today's Digital Tool Tidbit, we are talking SlidesCarnival. One of my fellow Instructional Facilitators, Teresa, introduced me to SlidesCarnival when we were working on presentations for our district mini-conference. I immediately fell in lllooovvve. In a nutshell, SlidesCarnival provides FREE Google Slides and PowerPoint templates. They are all customizable and help you to create a presentation that is visually appealing and engaging. Here are a couple of title pages for presentations I have used: Each template also has a page with little icons that you can copy and paste anywhere in the presentation. You can change the colors of the icons as well. Plus, downloading the templates is super easy! With all this said, I'll offer a little food for thought on the idea of slide presentations. Slide presentations can be very ineffective and not allow students to learn. Slides can easily turn into a "sit and get" presentation, where students jot down notes but aren't truly engaged. I had a professor in college who literally stood at the front and read directly from her slides, adding no additional information. I tried my best to write everything down, but she went too fast for me to get everything; then one day she made the files available to us; at that point I quit writing and completely checked out.
I challenge you to make slides engaging for students, using them for discussion starters, or make them interactive, using Pear Deck or Nearpod. Use Slides for student collaboration or interactive activities, like these from Ditch That Textbook. There are so many possibilities beyond the sit and get! 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
Imagine this scenario: You, the teacher, have spent hours developing a lesson that includes great, thought provoking questions. You are excited to get students involved in a class discussion. You go to execute said questions with your first class. You ask the first question. One student volunteers an answer. You ask the second question. The same student raises her hand. You say, "Come on, I know Daniella isn't the only one who has an answer to this question..." Crickets ensue. You call on another student, who responds with, "I don't know." You let Daniella answer again. Sound any kind of familiar? I know I've had situations like this as an English teacher. So how do you get to that level of engagement where you can have a deep, meaningful conversation where all of your students participate? There are two instructional strategies that work very well together to achieve this: Think Pair Share and the Cold Call. In Think Pair Share, students have individual time to think about a problem, then work with a partner (or group) to solve it. Then students share out with the class. Letting them think gives that wait time students need to formulate an answer, and letting them work with a partner gives them the opportunity to make sure they have the best, most well thought out answer. When you are ready to have students share out their answers, the Cold Call comes in. You may be familiar with Doug Lemov's Teach Like a Champion (I know many teachers in our building use the STAR or SLANT technique). Lemov's Cold Call is when teachers "call on students regardless of whether they've raised their hands" (249). Lemov argues that this technique can truly transform a classroom. The idea is to avoid students checking out. In the scenario above, the moment Daniella raised her hand, or even when the teacher asked for someone to raise their hand and answer, most of the class checked out. There is no reason for them to think about the answer, because they do not have to participate. Cold Calling helps prevent this. If students know that there is always a possibility of the teacher calling on them, they have to be bring their A-game. Lemov gives four strategies to make Cold Calling effective: 1. Make sure it's predictable. If you use it once in a blue moon, it won't work. In fact, students may feel ambushed and become less likely to participate than before. If you have a positive classroom culture where students feel secure and you implement Cold Calling regularly, students will know it is a part of the routine. 2. Make it systematic. The best Cold Call is random. I used good old fashioned popsicle sticks in my classroom, but a great digital tool to keep Cold Calls random is the Random Name Generator on Super Teacher Tools. Just put in your rosters and the program randomly selects students with the click of a button! 3. Make sure it's positive. Cold Calling is inherently positive. You want students to be right, not wrong. It's not a good idea use Cold Calling to target students who may not be paying attention. This can call negative attention to the student, who most likely doesn't know the answer. You want students to feel comfortable with Cold Calling. There are a multitude of ways to make this happen, but I think using the Think Pair Share technique is a great way to give students a leg up with their answers. And again, classroom culture is SO important. If a student thinks everyone will think they are "dumb" if they don't know the answer, they won't want to participate. If they know it's ok to make mistakes and learn from them (Growth Mindset!) then they won't be as timid about participating. 4. Unbundle it. It's better to unbundle a larger question into several smaller questions, or to scaffold the level of questioning, so that you can Cold Call multiple students and increase engagement overall. I tried to find a good YouTube video that showed Cold Calling in action, but all the ones I found were lacking wait time for the whole class. For example, the teacher would ask, "What is the square root of 4, Jennifer?" Yes, you've randomly called on Jennifer, but now the other students don't have a reason to work through the problem for themselves. Instead, asking, "What is the square root of 4?" providing wait time, and then calling on Jennifer would provide more engagement for all students. I encourage you to try Think Pair Share with the Cold Call in your classroom if you aren't already doing it. I hope you'll be pleasantly surprised at the level of engagement you achieve! Works Cited
Lemov, Doug. Teach Like a Champion 2.0. Jossey-Bass, 2015. Photo from Pixabay |
AuthorChristin Barkemeyer Archives
April 2020
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