Cool Trick: Quizzes and Images in Google Forms

Summer 2016 brought a couple of upgrades to Google Forms that will please teachers wanting to create digital assessments: embedded quiz tools and image insertion. Check out the tutorial below covering both and/or read the resources below that.

Google’s Support Page for Quiz Functions

Google’s Instructions for Editing a Form, with Image Directions

Resource Update: Google Classroom Reaches out to Parents!

Google has rolled out several new features of Google Classroom for the 2016-2017 school year, and, as always, they seem to be listening to teachers. One of the most requested features of Google Classroom has been parent access, and now a form of that is here. Teachers can invite parents to receive daily or weekly notifications. That notification, called a “Guardian Summary,” will summarize assignments, questions, and announcements as well as list missing work. If you use Google Classroom with fidelity, this upgrade is fantastic. You will be able to give parents the clear and quick information they need to stay on top of things. Even better, parents will receive one update per student, not per class. Your updates will automatically collect with other teachers’. How cool is this? Look at the example update below. Then, read further for more information.

Want to know how to do it? Check out the tutorial below or scroll further to links to Google help pages.

Google Support Page of Guardian Summaries for Teachers

Google Support Page of Guardian Summaries for Parents

Google Apps for Education Back to School Update August 2016

Oh, and by the way, Google also added the ability to specific subjects when creating Classrooms and topics when creating posts. Even though none of that is as cool as the Guardian Summaries, you can still read about them in the update linked above.

Cool Trick: Teacher-controlled YouTube Approval

Sylvania Schools now offers its teachers the ability to approve YouTube videos that have been blocked by our content filters. In addition, YouTube has cleared a large amount of content for automatic safe viewing. Check out how you can approve videos while remaining safe with students. Watch the tutorial below or check out this instruction guide.

Cool Trick: End of Year Wrap-up for Google Classroom

If you used Google Classroom throughout the year, you probably loaded a whole bunch of assignments, announcements, questions, and more. At least some of that material is still viable for teaching the same class next year. So, how do you keep that material for next year? Here’s what not to do.

• Don’t delete the class and start over. That’s too much work.
• Don’t remove all the students and try to modify through deleting and keeping material, readying it for new student invitations.
• Don’t panic.

Google allows you to archive a Classroom, but use its material for the next year’s class. Here’s how you can do that:

1. Look at your dashboard, the tile-based list of Classrooms you have.
2. Click in the top-right, three-dot control of the Classroom tile.
3. Select “Archive.”
4. Create your new class.
5. In the bottom-right of the Classroom screen, click the plus button.
6. Select “Reuse.”
7. Browse through the class list and select the archived class.
8. Select the post and click the “Reuse” button.

That’s it!

If you’d like more help, check out the tutorial below.

By the way, archiving Classrooms is an excellent way to clean up your Google Classroom dashboard. And, if you ever wondered how to delete a Classroom, you can only do that from the archive. Once in the archive, you can delete a Classroom. This two-step process reduces the likelihood of accidental deletion.

Cool Trick: Creating a Backchannel in Google Slides

Watch the video below to learn about the new feature in Slides and check out the resources below for more information.

Google’s blog post for the new Q&A feature

Edutopia’s post on backchannels in education

Cool Trick: Typing Spanish on a Chromebook Keyboard

Join Northview Spanish teacher John Word as he instructs his students in how to type accents and symbols necessary for Spanish writing on a Chromebook. The first video below teaches students how to install the Spanish keyboard on the Chromebook. The second shows how to use that keyboard to type the correct marks. Feel free to use these videos to instruct students in these functions and help them go digital in Spanish composition!

 

 

Cool Trick: Keeping your Drive Organized

One of the biggest challenges to new (and many old) users of Google Drive is the effective organization of thousands of files. Check out this video discussion of the four best practices in organization: folder management, color coding, intelligent naming, and Shared with Me folder management.

Please note that since the recording of this video, Google has change their interface in a slight, but important way. In the “Shared with Me” folder, the folder location of a file will no longer appear in a side column. It will now appear as a file navigation tree at the bottom of the screen when the file is selected. See the image below.

Related Links

The Gooru’s Post: “4 Things You Can Do Right Now to Create a Perfectly Organized Google Drive.”

Cool Trick: Using Data Sheets to Target Student Needs

Are you looking for a way to target your students’ strengths and weaknesses? Do you want to make your students more responsible for their learning? If you answered YES to either of those questions then STUDENT DATA SHEETS may be what you are looking for. Learn how to create these DATA SHEETS to regularly enforce the standards, skills, and knowledge you want your students to master. Students will record and track their scores based on the categories you assess.

Check out this presentation for rationale, how-to tutorials, and content specific examples.