8 Apps For Class Warm Ups

Class warm-ups are an important part of the class. The teacher can use them as a review of the previous days material or they can provide an inquisitive foundation for the days learning. Below are five apps that can get the days class off to a good start.

Recap: With Recap, the teacher can initiate a chat-style discussion. In addition to the typed chat response, one of the cool things about Recap is that it gives the teacher the flexibility to let the students respond to a class warm-up with a video response.

Socrative: A great app for multiple choice quizzes. Socrative allows for the creation of a short answer warm-up question as well. If you feel a little competition would be fun, you can create a digital race where students answer questions faster than the competition to reach the finish line.

Seesaw: A fantastic online digital journal. Seesaw provides the flexibility for the teacher to either post a video, a drawing, a link, or something from Google Drive to the students journal for them to write about.

Google Sheets: That's right, you can use Google Sheets for class warm-ups! Simple create different sheets for different opening topics. When students enter the class, they open their shared Google Sheet, choose a square, and address the topic.

Newsela: Not just for English or Social Studies. Newsela is a great way to increase literacy. Choose from a variety of subjects. Ask students to read the content and answer the questions.

Kahoot: Gamify the opening of your class. Have your Kahoot waiting as students enter the room. A great way to get students seated with their device ready to begin the day.

Padlet: Create a Padlet board to open the class. Ask students to address the topic with links, photos, or video to make the discussion more interesting

Tag Journal: Tag Journal is the only app in the list that's for iOS only. What makes Tag Journal cool is that it allows the students to tag topics. For example, if the class is studying World War II, the journal topics may have something to do with the subject matter. Students can add pictures or audio to their journal entries.

11 Apps That Foster Student Collaboration

1. Explain Everything: The well-known whiteboard where groups of students can work on a project together.  Anyone with a link/code can edit.

2. iMovie: A great way to get students to work together!  Making a movie forces groups of students to collaborate, by virtue of the app.  Someone can direct while others act.  And, they should be working from a script, which they all collaborate on as well.

3. Voicethread: Have students put together interviews, conversations, or theatres of the mind.  Ask them to collaborate on a script and the actual voice recording, with students playing different parts in the audio recording.

4. Google Docs & Slides, Apple’s Pages & Keynote: All of these productivity apps can be used collaboratively.  Use them to take collaborative notes, write dialogue as a group, create slides etc.

5. Book Creator for Chrome: Have students create a book on whatever topic you choose.  And the cool thing is, they can do it collaboratively.  Students invite their partners to their library and they can work on a book together.

6. Padlet: Each group can create a thinking map.  Students can use Padlet to address a question or explain the steps in a process, perhaps how to solve a math problem.

7. Popplet—Great on the Chromebook!  Students use the share button with their partners to collaborate on timelines or graphic organizers.

  

8. Recap: Pose a complex question to groups of students and ask each student to contribute to a discussion.  Ask students to present their answers to the rest of the class.

9. Google Drawing: Life Google Docs and Slides, students can collaborate on a poster or drawing, working on the project at the same time in real time.

10. Canva: Students can work together creating posters, photo collages, or infographics.  Students simply share their creation with a partner and their off and creating together.

11. Evernote: Have students share a notebook.  Then, they can work on a piece of writing together or add different entries in a journal style writing assignment.

Technology Alone Won’t Help Your Students

A teacher recently told me that he has both a class set of iPads and a class set of Chromebooks in his classroom.  He went on to say that he has trouble deciding which to use on a daily basis.  This got me thinking.  It should never come down to trying to decide what technology to use, but it should come down to the learning objective or target.  

So I told them that although it’s great to be surrounded by technology, it doesn’t mean a thing if you don’t have a learning objective. If you don't have a learning objective, technology won't help you.  You don't determine the technology, the learning objective does the choosing for you.

The iPad or Chromebook is not the end all be all of education.  Technology is just a tool after all. If you don't use your tech with a purpose, those iPads might as well just be sitting in the corner of your room.  Your objective determines the tool that you will use. 

Those Chromebooks and iPads the teacher referenced are just tools. They are a means to an end. You don’t use technology for the sake of using technology, you have to know where you’re going first. Your objective must be clear and concise, then determine which tool you will use. 

If you know me or read any of my other pieces, you’ll know I love technology!  Walking into a classroom that’s equipped with iPads, Chromebooks, or even Windows laptops makes me think about the possibilities of the extent of learning that can happen in the classroom. But at the same time, I know those iPads are just a means to an end. Making the technology effective begins with the days' target. 

If you want the students to write a short essay, perhaps using a Chromebook with its keyboard might be a better choice.  If you want to shoot and edit video, the iPad might be the tech of choice.  Now I know that not all teachers are lucky enough to have both iPads and Chromebooks, but the point is, you shouldn't use whatever tech you have just for the sake of using it.

A coherent and clear objective begins with SWBAT.  Objectives should begin with the words “Students will be able to...”.   At the end of your lesson, what will your students be able to do?  Then, once you've determined that, ask yourself which tech tool is a better choice.  Or, in most cases, it's not which hardware will work best, but which app suits the assignment.

Again, if you don't have a clear objective, technology won't help your students.

EquatIO: A Must Have Chrome Extension For STEM Teachers!

Rejoice math and science teachers of the world!  You have an extension to Google Chrome that works great with Google Docs and Google Forms!  That extension is EquatIO!  My tone of excitement stems from knowing that EquatIO is awesome!  Ok, no more exclamation points.  Equatio is an easy way to integrate Chromebook's into math and science classrooms.


In the EdTech universe, apps for math seemed to have lagged behind those apps that can be used more easily with English and Social Studies.  EquatIO levels the playing field with its ease of use and the simple way it's used with Google Docs.

Add the EquatIO extension to Google Chrome and you're off and running.  After creating a new Google Doc, clicking the EquatIO button on the browser opens the EquatIO toolbar on the bottom of the document.  The toolbar contains the equation editor from which you'll fashion your equations.  One of the cool aspects of EquatIO is that it predicts what you want to say and inserts it into your equation.  For example, typing 2xsq will tip EquatIO to type your equation with the superscript while typing 2pl will tell EquatIO to insert the "+" symbol.  Cool huh?  Also, anything you insert into a document, you can extract as well into the EquatIO editor for further editing.

Formulas are also included in EquatIO's prediction abilities.  For example, type "qu" and you'll get various formulas such as the quadratic formula.  Chemistry compound predictions are also included in Equation.

EquatIO has two other components that make EquatIO a must for STEM teachers.  The first is its handwriting component.  Use your trackpad or stylus to write out an equation and Equatio will translate it into a clean type that can be exported into your Google Doc.  The other part is speech recognition.  Speak an equation and EquatIO will filter out the non-math terms and create your math formula or problem.

If you're a STEM teacher, you need to get EquatIO!

Five Apps to Get Students Excited About Journaling

Journaling can play an important part in the classroom for a number of reasons. Journaling helps students develop their writing skills and become a more confident writer. It's a great way for students to self-reflect. And, in the case of a free-form journal, it may aid in decreasing stress as they are able to pour out their thoughts and emotions. Journaling in the classroom is also a great way for students to reflect on their learning.

As far as journaling tools go, there are the obvious word processors such as Google Docs, Pages, and Word. But the following are five unique ways students can journal in the classroom:

1. Google Slides/Keynote: Presentation apps are an easy way for students to organize their journals and an easy way for teachers to review them. Simply use each slide as a day's journal entry. Let students edit the slide so they might include pictures, themes, and various fonts.
   
   
2. Seesaw: I've written how cool Seesaw is as far as keeping a student portfolio. In essence, it's a journal where students can reflect on their work by including pictures and video about what they're doing in the classroom. Take it one step further and post some of the student entries on the class blog included in Seesaw.
   
   
3. Kidblog: A way for students to not only keep a journal, but develop good digital citizenship skills by creating a blog. Kidblog is a blogging platform tailored for the classroom. With Kidblog, the teacher is in complete control. From who can see the posts to who can comment, Kidblog puts the teacher in total control of the blog.
   
   
4. Tag Journal: An iOS app that can be used for both note-taking and journaling using, text, voice recording, and pictures. The cool thing about Tag Journal is reflected in its name. You can "tag" your entries. A student may want to tag journal entries specific to what they're learning in class. For example, tag entries regarding the Civil War or World War II. It's a great way for students to organize their journal according to topic or subject.
   
   
5.  Paper by Fifty Three:  A unique way to keep a journal. Unleash students creativity and give them ownership of their learning with this iOS app. There's no end to what students can do with Paper. Paper enables students to be creative in documenting their learning by giving them the ability to draw using a variety of tools, annotate screenshots, incorporate photo's, as well enter text.

Five Ways to Turn Up the Power of Google Sheets

Google Sheets can be much more than a simple spreadsheet application. Turn up the power of Sheets with these five add-on's!

Flubaroo

Attched to a Google Sheet, Flubaroo is a powerful grading tool. Not only can it grade assignments that in a Google Sheet, but if you have the student email, you can return their grades to their shared folder.  Using one of my favorite application in Pear Deck?  You can send your Pear Deck results to a Google Sheet and use Flubaroo to grade them.

Doctopus

Doctopus is a great way to distribute classroom assignments in a paperless classroom. Students simply look in their "Shared With Me" folder for their assignment. The thing that's great about Doctopus (of which Google Classroom recently added) is that it provides a way to differntiate assignments among the students in your class. Want student "A" to do all of the questions on the worksheet while student "B" should only do half of them, it's easy to send out separate assignments. Once the due date for the assignment has arrived, you can "ingest" the assignment for grading and return the digital copy.

Goobric

Goobric takes that rubric you have on a Google Sheet and attaches it to student work for easy grading. It works hand in hand with Doctopus. Once you've got the student work in Doctopus, attach the Goobric, grade and return--it's really easy to do and makes grading simple.

Rostersync

Rostersync is heaven sent for those that are typing rosters into a spreadsheat to use for different applications such as grading apps. It works in conjunction with Google Classroom in that it pulls your roster from Classroom or vice versa sending a roster from your spreadsheet to Google Classroom. It works great when you want to set up a class with Doctopus.

Autocrat 

Autocrat is a document merge app that takes information you have on a spreadsheet and moves it to a Google Doc or PDF. For example, you've asked the students to sign in using Google Forms when attending an after school study session because want to give the students a certificate of participation. The Google Form is connected to a Google Sheet for easy reference. You can take the information on the Google Sheet and create certificates of participation using Autocrat. It's also great for use at staff meetings. The staff signs in through a Google Form that's tied to a Google Sheet. Use Autocrat to create a certificate of attendance.

Five Ways Teachers Can Use Google Forms For Classroom Administrative Tasks

There are a number of ways a teacher can incorporate Google Forms into their lesson plans. But what about the administrative side of teaching?  We know that there are many classroom administrative tasks that teachers do in order to keep their classroom running like a well oiled machine.  Here are five ways Google Forms can help with some of those administrative tasks.

1. Sign out form.

If you keep a sign out sheet for when students leave the classroom, Google Forms is a great way to keep it paperless!  Simply create a form with pertinent information such as name, period, reason, leave time.  Link the form to a Google Sheet and you've got a record of students that leave the classroom.

2. Contact form.

This is a great way to keep all of the times students and/or parents have been in contact organized.  Create a Contact Form with such information as parent or student name, best contact email, and reason for contact.  Imbed the form in your website (especially easy to do if your using the new Google Sites) in your Google Classroom site.

3. Discipline referral.

A reality of teaching is that sometimes students need to be referred to the administration or discipline office.  A Google Form can easily help with the appropriate referral form.  Simply create the form with the relevant information that your school needs.  Then, on the occasion that it becomes necessary to use, you can simply and quickly fill out the form.  You can print it, email it, or share it with the appropriate person.  This is also great for keeping track of discipline referrals when linked to a Google Spreadsheet.

4. Teacher lesson plans.

Another way to stay organized with your lesson plans.  You can create drop down menu's for grade level and standards.  Use text areas for your objectives and other relevant information.  Link to Google Sheets to keep all of your lesson plans quickly accessible and organized.  If needed, you can quickly email the spreadsheet to an administrator.

5. Material check out.

There are times when a student wants to borrow a book or some other classroom item.  Instead of trying to remember or jotting it down on a piece of paper (which you'll lose), set up a check out form.  You can easily refer to the attached spreadsheet to see who has what item.

Training for Google Apps is Just a Click Away.

If you haven't heard, Google has made a new extension available called Training for Google Apps.  If you're new to Google Apps or just want to know more about them, you MUST install this extension.

One of the many cool things about the extension is that it's app specific.  By app specific, I mean that if you're in Google Slides, clicking on the training icon in the upper right will present you with a plethora of training videos about Google Slides.  For example, if you're putting together a Slides presentation and want to insert a video but aren't sure how to, simply click on the Training for Google icon and scroll to the video.

And, as the name implies, training is not only available for Google Slides, Docs, and Sheets, but it's also available for other Google Apps such as Google+ and Google Calendar.

I can really see the value for not only teachers but students as well.  Now, there's little excuse for a student not knowing how to insert a chart or copy a slide in Google Slides or how to rename or copy a Google Doc.

I couldn't recommend installing this extension enough.  If you use Google Apps, installing is a no brainer.

Differentiate With Doctopus

This is a public service announcement: Doctopus is great!  
Doctopus is a must for the differentiated classroom.  Those of you who know Doctopus, know how powerful it is in differentiating work among your students.  Those of you who are unfamiliar with Doctopus, it is a Google Sheets add-on that brings easy differentiation to your class.

Some classes today are integrated to include both regular education students and special education students.  Obviously, a classroom such as this has students with different abilities.  This is where Doctopus comes in.

 A key to conducting an integrated class is differentiating the work.  In the old “paper” days, you may have had to print different copies of an assignment for different students.  Today, in a paperless classroom, printing worksheets is a thing of the past.  With Doctopus, one need only send work to a student's Google Drive wherein they open it and use it in class.

The instructor simply creates as many differentiated assignments as they need in their Google Drive.  Using Doctopus, you can send the differentiated assignments to the students of your choosing.  Doctopus is a must in an integrated classroom.

The first thing you want to do is add it to Google Sheets by opening a Google Sheet and clicking on the Add-ons tab.  Doctopus is easy to use.  Simply create a roster of students and import them into a Google Sheet.  Using Doctopus,  choose which students get which version of the assignment.  Along with differentiating work for specific students, Doctopus allows you to differentiate among groups as well.  If you're not familiar with Doctopus, you owe it to yourself to check it out.  Like I said earlier, it's a must have in your classroom.  It will make preparing assignments in your differentiated classroom a breeze.

Give Google Drawings Some Love

Google Drawings is one of those hidden gems that is an essential classroom tool.  We all talk about using Google Docs, Google Slides, and Google Sheets, but what about Google Drawings? Google Drawings can open a wealth of ideas for use in the classroom.

Drawings is not apparent when one clicks the "New" button in Google Drive.  You have to dig a bit deeper to get to it.  After sliding down the tab to "More," it is only then you see Google Drawings.

Drawings is as useful as your imagination and creativity will allow.  And, needless to say, like its Google Drive brothers, it allows the classroom to go paperless--woohoo!  I've used Google Drawings a few different ways this year and am looking forward to exploring new ways I can integrate it into my classroom.

Here are some of the ways to incorporate Google Drawings into your class:

1. Introduce Yourself
Google Drawings can be used as an introduction tool.  I ask the students to tell my about themselves using Drawings.  They copy and paste pictures from the web, draw representations of likes and dislikes, and write about their family and other things using text boxes and shapes.  Google Drawing is a blank canvas that unleashed student creativity using technology and the web.

2. Newspaper
Students create newspapers about certain time periods.  You want your students to summarize a time period?  Assign a newspaper assignment to the class.  Students create a name for their newspaper, headlines, and insert pictures and write articles about the topics of the time period.

3. Timeline
Students can create timelines of events in Drawings.  Grab the lower right-hand corner and drag the canvas to the right to expand it, making more room for the timeline.  Students can not only put dates on their timelines, but they can include colorful text boxes chalk full of information and pictures for each event as well.

4. Poster
I ask students to create posters describing different topics.  For example, they create biography posters about different historical figures.  Students are asked to scour the web for pictures, quotes, and resources to include in their poster.

Get Interactive with Google Slides Q&A

After hearing about the new Q&A feature in Google Slides and knowing I was going to give a Google Slides presentation the next day, I knew this was a great opportunity to try it out.  I'm happy to report, all went swimmingly well!


If you haven't heard, the new Q&A feature in Slides enables viewers to ask questions while you're delivering your presentation.  Now before you say, "What's the big deal, why not raise your hand and ask a question?" Well, it's not so much that you can ask a question, but how Q&A enables the participants to do so.  And in a classroom environment, Q&A sets those shy students free to ask questions at their will.

Oftentimes, a participant has a question during a presentation, but the presenter may only take questions at the end, asking them to hold onto their question until the end.  Unfortunately, when the time comes to ask questions, the participant has forgotten what they were going to ask.  Q&A solves this by letting questions be asked as soon as they strike someone's fancy.

To enable the new feature, open your Google Slides presentation and click on the down arrow next to the "Present" button.  From there, click on "Presenter View."  Make sure you're on the Audience Tools" tab and click "Start New."  Above your presentation will appear an address from which your students can ask a question regarding your presentation from their preferred device.  The question can be asked anonymously by clicking a check box.

While presenting, you can see the questions as they're being asked.  Participants also have the ability to choose which questions they like and want answered the most.  So, at the end of your presentation, you can see which questions were more popular and address those first.

In my high school classroom, I found that students are much more actively engaged during a presentation than they otherwise would be, having to really pay attention to ask relevant questions.  And, as I mentioned before, those students that are too shy to raise their hand have been set free to ask questions to their heart's content.

There's another reason why today's high schooler might be more excited about a presentation--they get to use their cell phones!  The glee in their eyes when I asked them to take out their cell phones and go to the listed address to participate could have brightened up a room.  I told each of the students to come up with at least two questions and to vote on at least two others.

The new feature in Slides is great and I know I'll use it often.  Check out this video to see Q&A in action https://youtu.be/nFMFXSvlXZY.

Autocrat: Sheets and Docs Playing Together

They say that necessity is the mother of invention. Well, in my case, necessity was the mother of desperation. You see, I recently gave a presentation on Google Classroom to my colleagues. Each of the participants had a Chromebook with which to participate in the session (you'll see why this was a good idea in a second).

At the conclusion of the session, I wanted to send the attendees a certificate of completion but wasn't exactly sure how I could quickly do that. The operative word being "quickly." I didn't want to invest a bunch of time writing their names into each individual document, and then mailing it to each individual, one by one.  Then I remembered "Autocrat."

I had heard of Autocrat some months ago but didn't truly appreciate the power of it until I attended a Google Summit session on Autocrat. I thought, *I could use Autocrat to generate a certificate and email it to the attendees! This is great! I could continue to show the power of Google apps for education long after the session was over!*

To those not familiar with Autocrat, it can best be explained as being a Google Sheets add-on that can take data from a Google Sheet and merge it into a Google Doc.  If you're familiar mail merge, then you get what Autocrat is all about.

At the conclusion of the session, I had asked the attendees to fill out a Google Form on the session (this is where the Chromebooks came in handy). Some of the more important information I could use in order to send the certificates were their names and email addresses. Using that information and Autocrat, I prepared the certificates and wowed my attendees.

One of the cool things was that after telling them how I put together the certificates, many became even more interested in using Google Apps such as Docs and Sheets in their classroom.

If your looking for an easy way to merge information from a Google Sheet into a Google Doc, Autocrat is the way to go!