I see this problem reported a lot recently. When teachers present their screen to students they see a large notification that they are presenting and lose the tile view of their students. Check out this super fast 1 minute video for an easy fix.
Here are some digital resources to help you cover Black History Month with your students.
Here is a research project that you can assign to your students in Google Classroom. When I made this project I tried to include some lesser covered and very important Black Americans from history. My students always enjoyed diving deeper than Martin Luther King Jr and Rosa Parks with this assignment.
Download Here
From the United States Library of Congress, here is their African American History Month website. The Audio and Video menu includes some fascinating interviews from the American Archive of Public Broadcasting. The For Teachers page includes primary sources as well as lessons and activities to go with them.
Here are some resources curated by the George Lucas Educational Foundation. The “More Than A Mapp” app featured on this page makes history more relevant by showing students where these events occurred in an interactive multimedia map on their device.
Here are some lessons and activities from Education World. The Under Ground Rail Road T.O.U.R. provides resources and lesson plans to help students explore what the UGRR was and that there was no train or tunnels involved.
These are a collection of links to the “Best African American History Apps and Websites” according to Commonsense.org
The link for Slavery at Monticello allows students explore the life of a slave on one of histories most important people and biggest hypocrites, Thomas Jefferson’s, Monticello estate.
Elementary Teachers, do you need some safe a reliable search options for your students to look up definitions or synonyms? These are especially helpful tools when working on writing and your students are trying to make sure they use the correct words or are trying to expand their vocabulary. Below are a couple of quick websites you can share with your students. Some of these allow you to search for definitions at different difficulty levels. Some have visual dictionaries, some even have games built in to learn about words and spelling.
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/
https://learnersdictionary.com/
Here is a cool and easy digital white board tool for you to use when teaching your class. You can use this live in class or in Google Meets. Whiteboard.chat has some really great features like different lined templates and backgrounds including graphs, music sheet, Grids, and more.
You can sign in with Google. You can share your whiteboard with a QR code, hyper link, or a class code. Scroll through the features below to see it it peaks your interest. I will dive in and create a video shortly.
A QR code generator has been built into the Chrome Web Browser. Have you spotted that new feature up in the Omni box (Address bar)? If you need to share a website as a QR code, you simply click in the omni box then click the little QR code icon and it will pop up the QR code for that webpage. Click Download and it saves the QR code as an image in your Downloads folder. It even names it after the website so you can be sure which file you are looking for later instead of the name being some long line of random letters and numbers. This is a fantastically accessible and easy tool to use.
We are going to explore some digital resources and activites for Valentine’s Day.
First off a fun and easy idea, read a Valentine’s Day book over Google Meet to your students. Ask engaging questions and have discussions just as you would in class. Here are some Valentine’s Books.
Have a virtual costume contest. Get your students to dress up for Valentines day in a creative homemade costume or simply theme dressing.
Have your students create an art project for a virtual show and tell. Here are some art project ideas. I like the cardboard roll heart stamp. Have students create a string of heart shape garland with each heart highlighting a person that they love.
Another idea might be to have students decorate their virtual learning space with valentine’s decorations. Creating those decorations while chatting together in break out rooms can be a great activity.
Instead of passing out Valentine’s cards to little mailboxes in class Create a post in your Google Classroom stream for each of your students. Then have your class repy to each post with something that they appreciate about that person. Of course start off those replies yourself with great modeling of what you are looking for.
Turn Secret Santa into a Secret Valentine guessing game with Flipgrid. Assign each student another student who is their Secret Valentine. Create a FlipGrid where students reply with cryptic clues about who their Secret Valentine is. Students need to reply to each video response with a guess of who that person’s secret Valentine is.
Tell Valentines Day Jokes!
Google Slides poem project. Create a Collaborative Google Slide or Jamboard and share it with your class. Have each student create a slide for themselves and write a poem on their slide. You can give them as much freedom to create as you want or give them a specific words to make acrostic poems from.
Share a fun video of Valentine’s Day facts. You can broadcast it live over Google Meet or post it as an assignment in Google Classroom and ask students to respond to a critical thinking video based on the video
I have had several questions lately on how to share your doc cam through Google Meets. I made a super quick 1 minute video on how to do that. Pro-Tip when it looks backward to you on your screen, don’t worry it does not look backward to the students.
Here is a Google Slides matching drag and drop activity designed for Google Classroom. Students will click and drag each president to the corresponding correct description. This activity covers presidents James Buchanan, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, and Ulysses S Grant
Here is a drag and drop Google Slides activity designed to be posted in Google Classroom. Students will drag each president, identified by name and image, to the correct corresponding description. This activity covers the first eight president of the United States. George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren
Classroomscreen.com is a very useful classroom management tool. It is super simple to use and set up.
I know that as a teacher, student, and even as a parent it can be annoying to have old assignments listed for a student that were posted before the student was added. This can cause confusion for everyone. There is no quick box to uncheck in the settings to fix this problem but I have found a solution. I would consider it more of an “Advanced User” sort of strategy but it could be very beneficial if you are willing to take on the task.
This would be incredibly wordy to explain in writing so let’s just take a quick look at this video walkthrough. Special thanks to Mr. Stellpflug for asking such a relevant and challenging question. Let’s hook him up with a prize.
Automagical claims to be able to take a PDF, Doc, or Slides file and convert it into a Google Form with no copy pasting. Sounds too good to be true so let’s check it out.
This turned out to work well for a Multiple choice activity from a Google Doc that was just straight down the page with no extra formatting. I did not have success with fill in the blank activities nor Google Slides, or a .pdf.
In my opinion ClassKick or Teachermade.com would be a much better alternative to making activities digital and gradable. Unless you just have to have it in Google Forms.
Pebble Go is a kid friendly and kid safe research tool . Students easily access Pebble Go with a school wide username and password. Pebble Go offers resources covering the topics of Animals, Science, Health, Social Studies, and Biographies.
You can use Pebble Go to get your littles learning to research on the internet in a safe way.
Pebble Go is NOT Free and starts at $1,300 a year for a campus. Check it out and talk to your principal to see if it is something your campus could benefit from.
Camscanner will snap a picture of a printed document and turn it into a digital document. The Camscanner app will remove the background and keep only your document. It uses OCR technology to recognize text and convert it to an editable format. It will also translate text into 40 different languages. Camscanners app syncs up across all of your devices so you always have access to your documents.
This looks like a very useful tool for capturing old worksheets to assign them digitally or to capture student work for submission.
Award winning K-5 Online reading Resource. This tool is great for students to practice reading and improve their literacy skills. Students have access to a large easy to navigate library of eBooks offered at 29 different levels.
Students can listen and read long with the eBooks while the words being read are highlighted. Students can move through books at their own pace and explore the resources available to ensure better comprehension.
Students can record themselves reading to practice and demonstrate fluency. Raz-Kids also provides book quizzes to check for comprehension. As students pass comprehension quizzes they advanced to higher reading levels.
There is also a teacher portal to monitor student progress and results.
After the two week free trial a subscription to Raz-Kids does cost $120 per classroom.
Is something missing from a website that you know should be there. Perhaps you have recently updated your website or Google Classroom and the changes aren’t showing up for your students. Sometimes you can hit F5 a dozen times and it won’t update. That is just refreshing the page from the browser’s cache. Next time try Ctr-F5. have your students press Ctrl and F5 to skip the browser cache and refresh the page straight from the website server.
Recently I had time to go through all of the new badge applications received since 18 November through 11 January. That means it is time for an update on innovation badge rankings.
Let’s start with the big one, campus ranking for SY 2020-2021
Lacy nudged ahead of Lowe to 69 badges.
Godwin closed the gap on Clark by moving up to 43 badges.
Canup ROCKETED straight into 7th place with their first badges of the year.
Smith grew their lead over Southard and Harper bringing their badge total to 23.
| 1 | Lacy Elementary | 69 |
| 2 | Lowe Elementary | 64 |
| 3 | Clark Middle | 48 |
| 4 | Godwin Elementary | 43 |
| 5 | Smith Elementary | 23 |
| 6 | Princeton High School | 15 |
| 7 | Canup Early Childhood Center | 13 |
| 8 | Southard Middle | 7 |
| 9 | Harper Elementary | 3 |
Big shout out to Mrs. Nantz and Mrs. Rojas for putting Canup Early Childhood Center on the board!
Mrs. Nantz brought in 11 new badges. Mrs. Hargrove brings her 52 badges over from Lowe as the campus leader at Canup. That will be a hard number to beat.
Clark Middle School has some big performers on campus. Mrs. Wood has 28 badges. Mrs. Smith is catching up with 26 badges. Mrs. Lawrence has an impressive 18 badges. Did you know that Mrs. Charles, one of the Principals, is a badge leader on her campus with 17! How many badges does your principal have?
Godwin Elementary’s biggest badge earner is Mrs. Pate with 24 badges! Mrs. Woodard has 22. Mrs. Turner has 20 badges. New this year and pushing up quickly through the panther pack at Godwin are Mrs. Guerra and Mrs. Vargas who might be challenging for the lead by the end of this year.
Harper Elementary is still being led by Mrs. Schroeder, last year’s grand prize winner, with 30 badges. Mrs. Coburn and Mrs. Cormack have brought new badge contributions this year.
Lacy Elementary is always a Titan in the badge competition. Lacy has 21 teachers who have completed their badge chart and have moved on to extension charts. 8 of those teachers have completed an extension chart! Three of those 8 have complete 2 extension charts and lead their campus badge totals; Mrs. Limon at 38, Mrs. Dillard at 40, and Mrs. O’Quin now conveniently at 41, claiming the top spot.
Lowe’s Legendary Badge efforts always Impress. Lowe matches Lacy’s 21 teachers with complete charts. Speaking of Impressive, Mrs. Coffee’s 61 badges must be the district high performance. Mrs. Walker is working toward her with 42 badges and Mrs. Bedell also has an impressive 35 badges.
Princeton High School has brought in 15 badges for this new school year. Mrs. Summers dominates the high school with 25 badges. Mrs. Fielding is catching up with an honorable 18. Right behind her is Mrs. Mansfield with 16 badges.
Smith Elementary School is led by Mrs. James and quickly closing the gap is Mrs. K McCord with 21 badges and Mrs. M McCord with 18.
Southard Middle School has a new leader this year, Mrs. Dierolf has worked her way up to 23 badges! Mrs. Hart is right behind her with 20 Badges. Mrs. Lyons and Mrs. Caldera both have a beyond respectable 15 badges each.
Today we were joined by Mrs. Nelson, the secondary Math Instructional Coach here at Princeton ISD. Mrs. Nelson shared some of her experiences with Doceri and walks us through setting it up, how to operate it, and how to use your new tool in class. If you already have Doceri and want to skip ahead to applying what you know about it in class jump to 5:37. While we use math in this example video this tool is very useful for all subjects.
We have talked about Google Classroom custom banner images before. Let’s kick it up a notch though, have you ever considered changing your Google Classroom banner image often if not daily? It is a neat little way to keep the interest of your students and encourage those virtual students to check in daily out of curiosity and anticipation. You can include significant notifications in the Banner image, Lesson based images, Holiday themes, Ask anticipatory critical thinking questions based on the new banner image, or include clues to an assignment, etc. What other ideas can you share with us about how to use this idea?
I created a Google Slide show of templates that you can edit for your classroom.
Has Google Classroom made your Google drive a disaster with student copies of files? Hold on hopefully it isn’t as bad as you think it is. Take two minutes and check this out. Hopefully it clears things up for you.