Archives January 2023

Here is a cool little activity that employs students in an upholstery shop helping to calculate the area of items to be custom covered. This activity has a video introduction. It is made in Google slides. The activity has an interactive element with a ruler the student will use to take measurements of the seats. After completing the math to calculate the area students type the answer in the space provided on each slide.

Check out the intro video below and preview the problems presented to students.

Here is a wonderfully updated Pro-version of Ninja in the middle. This version really kicks up the challenge by incorporating decimals, fractions, and negative numbers. This might be ideal for 5th grade and up. It was requested by a 6th grade math teacher.

Want to check out the original Ninja in the Middle activity?

Here is another Teachermade activity. I took a regular old multiple choice test review and turned it into a more engaging interactive activity which uses drag and drop, hotspots, multi select, and more. This activity requires students to have the basic recall level of knowledge and to apply that knowledge on each of these activities.

This activity is wonderful, if I do say so myself. I had a wonderful time custom creating all of the example advertisements for students to analyze and sort. This activity has students drag and drop advertising vocabulary terms to match them with the correct definition. It then asks students to sort ads based on Ethos, Pathos, and Logos as well as some of the defined strategies. This activity is in Teachermade and is intended to be assigned individually to your students but could also be a fun whole group activity depending on your students abilities. Now I need to go find some Honey Badger cologne….

Here is a matching activity over animal and plant adaptations, the material from the 4th six weeks in 7th grade science. This activity is in TeacherMade and must be assigned to your students to complete digitally.

Here is a digital activity for your 5th grade US history teachers. It teaches about significant contributors to technology and innovation from the 19th and 20th centuries. It is a self grading activity in TeacherMade and designed to be completed individually by students on Chromebooks. This activity uses new item type questions including multi select, drag and drop, hot spot, two part question, and more. I absolutely love this activity and think it will be a blast for your teachers and students.

5.22(A) identify the accomplishments of notable individuals in the fields of science and technology such as Benjamin Franklin, Eli Whitney, John Deere, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, George Washington Carver, the Wright Brothers, and Neil Armstrong

5.22(C)^ explain how scientific discoveries and technological innovations in the fields of medicine, communication, and transportation have benefited individuals and society in the United States

Here is an interactive Google Slides math activity for your students. This activity is inspired by the Hope Scope YouTube channel that my daughter watches all the time. Your students will complete division activities by figuring out how to help Hope resell her amazing finds from returns pallets. We are talking on target relevant and useful math application here. Your students should LOVE this activity, I mean for a math activity. It’s still division….
This activity is in Google Slides and designed to be assigned in Google Classroom. It was created at the request of a 4th grade teacher but I am sure would work well for a wide range of grade levels.

Here is an Industrial Revolution quick overview lesson that lays the ground work for some of the most important facts and concepts for later years U.S. History STAAR test. This lesson includes interactive elements for the students including drag and drop, Short answers, and extended constructed response. Students will build a car on an assembly line to reinforce that concept. There is also a shortened simplified version of the Urban Game to teach the growth of cities and the problems associated with Urbanization.

Here is a math activity that asks students to find the area of rectangle and then use that information to figure out other relevant real life questions related to the area. This activity is great for practicing these skills and for teaching the value of this knowledge. This activity is in a Google Form that requires students to reach the correct answer before they can proceed to the next question.

Here is a drag and drop Google Slides activity for your students that asks them to demonstrate their knowledge of the water cycle. This activity has two parts. The first has students order the steps of the water cycle on a graphic organizer. The second part of the activity asks students to use that knowledge to create a visual representation of the water cycle by dragging and dropping the provided images. All of the background images with directions and the manipulatives were created in Canva and imported to Google slides. Below are some examples of how student work could look but there are numerous correct answers for each part. The order of water cycle steps should be consistent in that order but could start at any step.

3rd Grade PSTAAR Review

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4th Grade PSTAAR Review

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5th Grade PSTAAR Review

I have been seeing more and more online lately about AI image generators but I have been hesitant to delve into it. Some of the stuff is so strange and unnatural looking that it can be down right creepy. Then there is the whole possibility of Skynet that makes me irrationally not too excited about it.

However I learned today that Canva.com now has an AI image generator so I decided to go down that rabbit hole. It was fascinating. But before I get into it let’s talk about how we can use it in class. It’s fun but we need some value from it, more than a cool factor.

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I had two ideas this morning and I would love to hear back from you of other ways you come up with to use this new technology.

My first idea was a tool to make beautifying artwork for your teacher created materials. One of the options is for the AI to create an image pattern based on your request. These pattern images could make cool backgrounds. I asked the AI to make a pattern of Google App Logos and got these results. I also asked it to make a pattern image of zoo animals and got the results below. Now this is fun and useful but to truly get the most out of this tool we need to engage students using it so keep scrolling for my next idea.

Notice the unique “zoo animals” that it seems to have fabricated

Math teachers, you could have your students use probability to predict and analyze the patterns they create. Perhaps there is a way to incorporate your TEKS on 3D images with the 3D AI generated images.

My other idea was to have students generate images that can inspire a writing assignment. Students can enter attributes of a character or scene and have the AI generate an image. The images are likely to be wild (but appropriate, there looks to be strong filtering on the search key words) and stretch beyond the students expectations. When I tested this idea I got really neat images back that made my basic preconceived story concepts expand instantly in my imagination.

Let’s take a look at some of the examples below.

Just for fun I then asked the AI to create a drawing of a West Texas oil rig

Then the Pope driving the fastest car in the world

A cat smoking a tobacco pipe

Former Presidents in Various Fake Images

Lastly an army of Angels

I did find out that Canva does limit you to 100 AI generated images per day.