QT Collaborative Story Activity

Create a Collaborative Story with your students.  Start the story for your students with a good prompting line then have them continue the story one at a time.

This is an awesome and simple idea.  You can create a Google Doc with the first line already on there to get them started.  Maybe even include a table with a column for the students name to keep them in a rotation.

Or create a Google Slides presentation with the first line on the first slide.  Follow that with lots of blank slides for students to add their lines to.  Maybe even add student names to each slide so there is no confusion over who goes next.  With the slides option you could even have students go back and add illustrations to someone else’s slide.  This will also leave you with a fun presentation of the story to click through when it is done.

Here are some templates to get you started.  Make yourself a copy.  Type your students names into the template then copy paste the table/slides a few times as needed.

You could even get started with my Dragon Story example.

Build Better Gimkits

Let’s learn the best and fastest way to build good Gimkit Games. We will create using Flashcards which we will upload one group at a time, being sure to keep similar question types grouped together.
It’s quick. It’s easy. Check it out!

Slides Template Activities for Everyone

https://www.theresawills.com/templates

This website provides more than 30 slides templates that are set up for use in many content areas as well as generic templates for any content area. There are some pretty good and ready to go useful templates worth checking out.

I think the Would You Rather slide could be a fun warm up activity especially if you change the questions to something related to your lesson for the day. You could use options that include being able to understand a concept or work out a formula. Then as the lesson progresses they realize they might have made a different choice knowing what they know now.

QT Virtual Kinder Tips

Here are quite a few great tips and ideas for you Virtual Kinder teachers.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/kindergartenteachersclub/permalink/1632395393607346

QT Approve YouTube Videos for Students

If you are sharing a YouTube video with your students make sure to approve it ahead of time for ISD students, after previewing it of course. You can do that by clicking the “Approve” button under the video on the right hand side. This will help your students avoid issues when trying to access the video.

QT Chromebook Split Screen

Not mine, this is borrowed from the internet but it’s a good quick tip

Emoji Quick Key Shortcut

You can press Windows + the period (.) to launch an emoji menu to insert emojis into text fields. This works on most any program. You can use emojis to spice up your assignment names or to indicate something about an assignment.

Post Nouns and Verbs Google Slides Activity for Google Classroom

Simple and fun activity that helps students understand Nouns and Verbs as well as how to identify them in a sentence. This activity is made in Google Slides and can be assigned in Google Classroom to be completed digitally.

Login Issues with Google

Are yours or your students Google Forms submissions not coming through? Are they seemingly disappearing into the ether? Are you frustrated beyond belief? Don’t panic. I have not run into a case of this yet where one of these four tips didn’t fix the problem. These login issues can effect more than just Google Forms.

1 Don’t use a cell phone to complete it (Google Forms pulls the main personal gmail account as the ID and blocks it.) Or login to the cell phone as a brand new user with only the school @princetonisd.net gmail.

2 Logout all the way out of the Chromebook and log back in with their school account through ClassLink.  They are sometimes logged in with a personal gmail account first or on a siblings login and just open a new browser, which won’t work.

3 I also have seen this caused by students in a Google Classroom with a personal Gmail and not their school Gmail.

4 If it is on a PC computer they need to watch this video to learn how to create their own school only browser launcher.

 https://youtu.be/HQOHyaUjf28

How To Make Drag and Drop Activity in Google Slides

How to make a simple drag and drop activity in Google Slides. How to take a slide activity that you made. Save the directions and other elements you don’t want changed as an image. How to make those the background image and combine with the manipulative elements you want students to be able to drag and drop.

ClassKick Update

With special guest Mrs. Nelson, we jump back into ClassKick for an update based on experiences teachers have been having with ClassKick. We cover creating folders to organize your assignments, locking rosters to keep them clean and correct, sharing activities with your fellow teachers, and take a look at activity grades.  If you don’t yet use ClassKick and need to learn more about it you can find my previous ClassKick video here.  

Google Forms Turn off Responses

Sometimes you might need to turn off your Google form to stop it from accepting new responses. Perhaps the assignment needed to be done by a specific time and you do not want to allow late submissions. Google Classroom won’t let you do that you have to make that change in Google Forms.

First step will be to go to the responses tab.

Then simply toggle off the “Accepting responses” option.

You can always turn that back on at anytime if you need to.

Customize Email Signature

Customize your Gmail Signature

Have you ever wanted to add a list of your life’s accomplishments after your name in your email signature? Do you want to add all of those abbreviations from your degrees as well? maybe you want to represent with school spirit or Holiday cheer in your email signature. Below are the steps for making that happen.

Got to settings

Then click See All Settings

Then scroll down that general tab until you reach the signature section.

There you can edit your current signature or create a new one. You can have multiple signatures and switch between them as needed. Perhaps you want to support your team or include holiday cheer in different email signatures.

After making your changes be sure to scroll down to the bottom of the settings menu and save the changes.

Help for Parents and Virtual Students

Too Many Google Classroom Emails?

Google Calendar Gone Crazy?

Clean Up Classwork Stream

Is your Google Classroom Classwork tab crowded and unorganized? That can lead to confusion for students and cause emails and phone calls from parents.
Let’s look at how to clean up those old assignments and get them out of the way.

You can learn more about creating google Classroom topics here:

Learn how I added the emojis to Topic titles here:

Topic Titles in Google Classroom

I discovered a very cool thing this week when poking around in Google Classrooms working on fixes. A couple of you wonderful teachers have little images as a part of your topic titles and I want to share that wondrous ability with everyone.

You simply visit an emoticon website like this one http://getemoji.com/
Then highlight the emoji you want to use, copy it, and paste it in your Google Classroom Topic Title! No tricks or secret codes. Just a simple Copy and Paste. You can rename existing topics to add images.

BIG Thanks to Mrs. Lafond and Mrs. Brown for bringing this to my attention.

Shared with me and Starred in Google Drive

You might be noticing that your “Shared with Me” section of Google Drive has gone crazy with copies of every thing you have assigned to students in Google Classroom and every Google Classroom you are a teacher on.
Once you locate that file you needed in there through the search bar, add it to your Starred files to find it faster in the future.
Check out the screen grabs below to preview that process.

Project Chronos Post

This lesson includes explaining what a time capsule is with videos for both elementary and secondary levels. It includes class discussion about artifacts found in a time capsule. Included are ideas to collaborate the project cross curricular, student direction, as well as a rubric for grading and explaining student expectations.