#116 Useful Google in Education posts this week

You can get up and running with Google Classroom in less than 3 minutes. Go to http://classroom.google.com. Click on the plus icon in the upper right and choose “Create class.” Click on the plus icon in the bottom right to add an assignment. Go to the Students tab to get the class code. Share the code with students. So what do you do next? While essentially Google Classroom allows you to assign work and collect it, that is not transforming teaching and learning. As teachers, we are designers of the learning environment. Google Classroom is one tool that can help us design a different learning environment to improve student learning.

Need to split up your data that is in a single cell? This will split it up horizontally. Use transpose to turn that split data vertically. Google Sheets. Where I was doing this was using a rubric. Multiple criteria were entered into a single cell, but this made it difficult to mark each of the items in the list. Click Here if you would like to try out this sample spreadsheet.

Using Private Comments in Google Classroom takes almost no tech skills, yet can be one of the most transformative things you do. I have found my students’ motivation to have increased significantly this semester simply by using Private Comments as the medium for some assignments. What makes this transformation is that comments are now conversations.
Where Are Private Comments? To find Private Comments click on the assignment title for any assignment in the Stream. Notice on the left-hand side of the assessment screen there is a roster. Click on any students name to locate the Private Comments.> quote here

How to plan a Google Earth Scavenger Hunt for students to complete at home.  Includes tips for setting up the assignment on Google Classroom too! Students will be using the Google Earth plug in on Google Maps to find locations linked to in the scavenger hunt. As they find a location, they snip it (or screenshot it) and add it to their Google Slide Show. They also describe what they see and determine where they are by using the various zoom, tilt, and perspective tools. I encourage students to involve parents in their project too!

This is a collection of great posts from Erin Integration - really worth exploring. Tips for integrating Google Apps (Google Slides, Google Classroom, Google Drive, Google Forms & more!) into the classroom.

Take a look at all Erics Curts Google Slides resources freely and generously shared. "All of my resources are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 3.0 United States license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) In short, you can copy, distribute, and adapt these resources as long as you give proper attribution and do not charge for them."

As more schools continue to adopt 1:1 in their buildings, the desire to reduce paper and enable ease of sharing within a students’ and teachers’ workflow has greatly increased. Awhile ago, we published a post that had several Google Apps templates for things like instagram posts, facebook pages, tweets, and more. That has been a very popular post and many of you have requested additional templates for use with things like graphic organizers and popular educational models (Frayer, for instance).

Calendar apps just need to manage appointments and notify us when they're about to start. That's just about it. So perhaps it's not surprising that in the 11 years since Google first launched Google Calendar, it's scarcely changed anything about the app, even as it grew...

Is your Google Drive a mess? Now that we have students doing digital work it gets extra muddy as our Google Drive also is full of student work with the same titles as our original documents. One simple way to find things in Google Drive is to star anything that is worth looking at again. Will you use this next year? Star it.

A new feature makes it easier to assign different things to different students. This allows you to provide challenges for students who are ready to move forward or give students who are into Pokemon a math assignment that uses their game data. Default is All Students - Notice when creating an assignment the default is “All students.”. See more tips...