All posts by edtechmrbrown

This is one of the coolest things ever! Storyboardthat.com is an awesome tool that your students can use to create comic strips to tell a story or explain a concept. Making comic strips is always a fun and engaging activity for students and now you can kick those up a notch with this tool. As a non artistic person myself I LOVED making a comic with Storyboardthat because I didn’t have to stress out about my drawing skills and I was still able to create the scenes I wanted. It does sync with Google Classroom.

There is a 14 day free trial and it does connect to Google Classroom so maybe you can have your students complete a comic strip this week before break and take advantage of that free trial.

Let’s take a quick look at how it works.

Genially is a tool that you can use to create exciting and engaging animated presentations, infographics, animations, and more. Let’s take a quick look at Genially, it’s features, and what we get for free.

Check out this super cool activity I made for your students. On the first part they must conclude which cities are which on the westward expansion map. Then they need to drag and drop the NFL teams to the correct cities on the map. In the second part students demonstrate their knowledge of the areas of territorial expansion by analyzing the location of these cities and interpreting which territory each team comes from.

No they are not the team logos you are used to. In order to avoid any copyright infringement I did make my own little logos for each team.

This activity would also be great in a Digital Interactive Notebook or even printed and used as a cut and paste interactive notebook activity.

Kaizena is a Google Docs and Slides Add-on. Kaizena’s big feature is Voice Comments. Kaizena lets you record feedback verbally to digital assignments and some teachers claim it saves them 40% of their time when grading. I can see this being an extra big help for ELAR teachers who need to respond to written compositions.

https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/app/kaizena/354175553078?pann=cwsdp&hl=en

The first step we need to take is to put that Power Point file in your Google Drive.
From your Google Drive (https://drive.google.com/drive/my-drive) Select New File Upload

Next find your PowerPoint file on your PC. Click to select it then click Open.

In the bottom right corner of the screen it will tell you that it is uploading and will let you know when it is complete.

Click on the file when complete, in the bottom right corner. It will open as a PowerPoint .PPTX file

Then go to File and “Open as a Google Slide”

That just made a separate Google Slides copy of the file in your Google Drive. Which will open in a new tab.

This is a question I see a lot and it is a very easy answer.
In the bottom right corner of your screen you click Present Now.

Then select “A Tab”. Notice that it even says this is best for videos.

Click the tab that you want to share. Then click Share.

When you are done you click the blue stop button in the top right of that tab.

You should recommend that your audience change their view layout to Spotlight so it will remain focused on the presented tab.

I now have two 360 VR Cameras that you and your students can use to create interactive digital projects.

These cameras export .jpg and .mp4 files that are ready to be edited with no extra stitching work required.

Have your students create and demonstrate their knowledge by capturing 360 images and adding interactive elements such as text labels, embed other websites, links to outside websites, YouTube videos, etc.

You could also have students find 360 images online from other sources to make projects from.

The example above was made with ThingLink. ThingLink however is not free anymore.
Alternatively I found Lapentor.com which will let your students make and share 10 projects for free. The example below I made with Lapentor.

Obviously and on the most basic level images can be of places or things that students need to label and explain. They could be the inside of a factory, The skyline or birds eye view of a city, a Battlefield, or a location from a reading passage or novel, a map of political borders or regions. Images could be of weather, landforms, or an ecosystem. Have students capture a 360 image of a location in your school and label it, perhaps sections in the library, or important things to know in the cafeteria. Have students take a 360 image of the playground and then explain how and what types of force are being used or affecting the areas of play. These are great hyperdoc ideas for 2D images as well.

Teachermade is hands down the coolest most useful tool I have found this year. If you need a way to convert your traditional worksheets to online digital versions that can be graded automatically…. Look no further! This is the absolute best option I have seen for that.

You could have students use this tool to annotate reading activities, answer multiple choice, fill in the blank, matching, T/F, Drop down, Check Box, and more while having TeacherMade do the grading for you. You could create new activities from scratch with this tool as well. If you are used to ClassKick this is better because you can change the size of the answer boxes as well as the number of choices.

It connects to Google Classroom and it is FREE!

I played around exploring it for a couple hours today rebuilding some old assignments into digital versions. I compressed all of that down to a 12 minute video. Go ahead and pull up teachermade.com and follow along with me as we learn how it works.

We now have a 360 camera that you can use with your students. Here is an example project I made with the camera and ThingLink. Hopefully this inspires some ideas your students can create to learn and demonstrate their knowledge.

How and why to change the background in Google Meets. We also stumble across the raise hand feature and explore it.

Plickers Quick Assessment

December 2, 2019|Alwayslearning, Assessment, EdTech, ELAR, Elementary, Math, Review, Science, Secondary, Social Studies, SPED, Tools

Plickers is a great way to use technology to gather data and check for understanding.  Your students do not need to have a device.  They will get a card that they will hold up to answer multiple choice answers.  Every students card is different to they can’t be influenced or copy each others answers.  Check out the videos below to learn more about Plickers.  If you would like for me to stop by during your conference period one day and help you get Plickers up and running, I would be happy to do that.  I would also like to join your class on your first day of using Plickers to help that roll out go smoothly.  

This a quick introduction to what Plickers can do.  The second video is a more detailed tutorial about setting up Plickers.

https://vocaroo.com/

Vocaroo is a simple and quick to use web based recording tool that you can use to record audio clips with your microphone. Your recordings can be hosted online or downloaded to your computer.

https://www.playfactile.com/

Factile is an online Jeopardy style game website. You can make your own games or search and use the games already available. It looks plenty usable in the free version. The paid version has some pretty cool features as well.

How Much Land? Is one of my favorite activities! Kids get seriously engaged in this activity. In the activity students learn about the process to divide out land in an Anglo Empresario colony in Mexican and Spanish Tejas. This activity uses group work, kinesthetic dice rolling, math computation, and map skills.

I meet the students at the door and hand them a copy of a land deed as they are coming through the door. There are 4 different deeds so I just print as many copies of those four as I will need and keep them in a shuffled order. When the lesson starts(after going over directions and expectations) students find other members of their colony and group together. They then use the document to determine how much land they get based on the stipulations in the empresario grant, which are actual requirements from 1800’s Tejas. They then claim their plot of land on the map of their colony.

Let’s digitize and oldie but a goodie. Creating Trading cards was always one of my favorite unit review projects in class.

Below is a template I made in Google Slides to assign a trading card project to your students. This can be done in person by printing or digitally through Google Classroom. All you have to do is change the directions to meet your class and print or assign.

Trading cards can be made for all kinds of content areas including art, ELAR, science, and math. You can have students make cards about concepts, formulas, famous people, places, or things, in your content area. Make visual Vocabulary trading cards with the word and an image on the front and definition on the back.

Full Complete Video of How to create a test in Aware, Create the questions, How to set up the layout, Test Key, and Share the test under Administration. Below I will post sections of the video for quick reference.

Have you ever started a file download in your Chrome browser, got distracted while waiting for it, only to comeback and it is nowhere to be found at the bottom of your Chrome browser window?
Well fret no more, simply press ctrl-J to open up a tab with your download history on it.

Copy and paste the URL for the YouTube video that you want to play in a separate popup window.
Paste that URL into your embed or link code.
After the word “watch” and before the “?” insert “_popup” to the code.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1PhYOAHgwk
https://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=A1PhYOAHgwk

https://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=A1PhYOAHgwk

www.EdTechMrBrown.com Podcast notes Episode 005 Friday 6 November 2020

Fast4Friday
https://edtechmrbrown.com/quick-tips/ https://edtechmrbrown.com/powtoon/ https://edtechmrbrown.com/pear-deck/

Padlet with Mrs. Bodie https://padlet.com/

And a new Tool/Game, Quizalize, that can be played live in class or assigned as homework and even be used as a test https://edtechmrbrown.com/quizalize/