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Publishing Newsletters with Google Drawings
“My 5th grade team has set up a template in Drawings for students to edit weekly and create a newsletter to send home to families. We also load this student newsletter to our 5th grade website. This writing for publication allows students to collaborate on one document and learn to be reflective about their learning. They tend to synthesize the information as well as think ahead to new learning that will take place. The students ‘interview’ the teacher about what the week ahead has in store for them. We have just started this powerful new practice and the students can't wait for their turn to publish the 5th grade newsletter for families. We are very happy with our decision to let the students be in charge of the newsletter this year!” - Susan Hellard, @MrsHellardFCPS Teacher Feedback with Google Jamboard & Keep "Use Google Jamboard and Google Keep to give students feedback. Students add teachers to a Jam. Teachers can then use built in emojis (or other Jamboard tools such as handwriting recognition and the ability to add images) to give feedback. Teachers can then save the Jam frame as an image in Google Keep. They can annotate the image further but better yet, they can use the Keep mobile app to add transcribed audio feedback. Teachers simply add students as collaborators in the Keep note to share the feedback. Further, teachers can organize notes by created Google Keep labels for each assignment and each student." - Tom Mullaney, @tomemullaney
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From Google:
If you're an educator who knows how to use Google tools in the classroom, this certification proves your proficiency. In this unit you will learn:
Technology can help classrooms be more like real-world environments and better prepare students to enter an increasingly connected and globally-competitive workforce. Questions to ask myself:
I have always been interested in technology. From the day I owned a Spectrum 48k when I was 8 years old to studying computer science and working for 12 years in various computers, teachnology has always been a big part of my life. Technology quite simply entertains and engages me.
In my job as a teacher. Being a globally connected citizen allows me to tap into teaching resources and other brains from all over the world to help me devise lessons that will engage and inspire my students.
3D Printing, Flipped Learning, STEM learning, Blended learning, Robotics Now that I have finished the Postgraduate in Applied Practice in Digital & Collaborative learning, my next mission is to become a Google Certified Educator.
Three years ago I introduced Google Apps for Education into our school. This I did solely on my own with no outside help, which was a challenge to say the least! I set up the Google domain, re-created the school website in Google Sites and started introducing the teachers to Google Apps for Education. I did this gradually so as not to overload the teachers with too much learning too soon. The final step was to move us all to Gmail which I did in conjunction with our support partners New Era just before the end of last term. In summary our school is now regularly using the following tools:
I want to be a Google Certified Educator for a number of reasons:
The certification path that I am going to follow is:
In this blog I am going to reflect on each lesson and detail the learning that took place in each lesson. Each blog post will relate to each lesson. Classroom
Classroom is designed to help teachers create and collect assignments without having to waste effort (and paper!) printing things out. Classroom includes time-saving features like the ability to make a copy of a Google Doc for every student with one click, see who has or hasn't completed an assignment, and provide direct, real-time feedback. It also automatically creates Drive folders for each assignment, class, and student to help keep everyone organized and free up your time for other things. If you have Google Apps for Education, but can’t access Classroom, ask your admin to enable it! Docs The most popular feature of Google Docs is the ability for multiple students to edit the same document at the same time. In class, students can use Google Docs to create collaborative stories. Each student rotates through the document and adds another short paragraph to take the story further along. Other users can be added with permissions that allow them to comment and make suggested edits. Peer writing can be workshopped. As students work through the comments and suggestions, they are able to reply, resolve, accept, or reject what others have suggested. This gets them thinking about their writing at a higher level. Images and graphics can be added to Google Docs as well. Users can even personalize their fonts using Google Web Fonts and do some basic image editing, all from within the document itself. Forms One way to make concepts relevant to students is to have them collect their own data. Google Forms can make use of a variety of question types to gather information in an organized manner. Forms can also be customized and personalized. All responses are automatically collected in a Google Sheet, which makes data analysis easier. Some teachers even use Google Forms to quiz their students. Slides Presentations and speaking are a big part of many curriculum areas across all grade levels. Google Slides can be used to organize information to be shared in engaging and creative ways. You can add graphics to slides using the Insert Images option. Students can also collaborate on the same slide deck and use different themes and master slide templates to ensure consistency. Slides don’t have to be just about presentations, either. Consider adding hyperlinks within a slide deck and have users run through the presentation on their own computers. You can link to external sites or even to other slides within the same presentation to give an interactive experience. Youtube Using playlists in YouTube, you can save groups of videos on the same topic. If you are studying the human brain, create a list of videos to get students engaged in the lesson. It’s easy to add videos to a playlist while you watch them. Some teachers create differentiated playlists: one for students who need more review, and one for students who want to explore more and extend their knowledge. Google Search Being able to search and find information is probably one of the most valuable skills today. You can find relevant, timely, high-quality content online if you know effective search strategies. Using search operators or advanced search settings can be a great place to start. Consider sending students on a quest using Google Search and the A Google A Day website. They’ll have fun trying to answer questions and will develop their search skills at the same time. I know and use all of these apps (aside from Classroom) everyday but at this point am wondering how well I use them and am excited to learn more about these apps. I had never heard of the Google A Day website either so will start looking at this as an independent activity maybe? Questions to consider:
Lesson Ideas based on these questions: I was watching morning television with my daughter and I realized that sometimes the laws of science are broken in cartoons. You see characters defying gravity, having unbelievable strength, or super powers. She was totally engaged and laughing, especially when something unexpected happened. That got me thinking about my science lesson. What if I found a few clips where the science concepts we were studying had been “broken”? Like when a character runs off the edge of a cliff and hangs there for a couple of seconds before gravity takes effect. Is it possible to “not fall?” Or when a superhero can breathe underwater – what does he need to make that possible? At the beginning of each unit I start with Cartoon Science to get the kids talking about what we’ll be studying. A lot of times they end up talking about what we’ll be studying without even realizing it. I like to get my science students talking with their parents about what we are doing in class. I also want them to understand that “science is everywhere,” but that a lot of times we take it for granted or don’t realize it. Our students were given the task to go out and take pictures of people or the world around them that were using simple machines like levers, pulleys, and inclined planes. Over the course of a few days, they got photos of kids playing on the playground, the pulleys used to draw curtains closed, and people changing a car tire. We put these together into a slideshow using YouTube editor. Students shared the link with their parents, who then left comments about the science around them. Graphic organizers are a big part of my class. I love how students can create visual representations of the storyline of a book that we are reading. From our class blog, students can click on a link to make a copy of the graphic organizer template that I have created using Google Drawings. They can fill in the components of the story arc with text or images. Their final drawing is then embedded on their personal Google Site along with a written piece about the book. Students then get creative and brainstorm what the story would be like if one of the points of the story arc was altered. How would the rest of the story play out? Our students have their own Blogger blogs that we use as a learning portfolio and writing journal. One of the first things they ask is how they can customize it to make it their own. Using Google Drawings, they can create a custom logo that represents themselves. Some insert their own photos from Drive, others search for Creative Commons images using Google Image Search, and a few found great stock images right within the “insert image” dialog box. They love the crop and image-adjustment tools as well. This year the recoloring settings were a hit with their school profile pictures… who doesn’t like to see themselves with green skin? I’ve been using Google Forms for a while now with my middle-school students in our health unit. They have been collecting data from their family members on the types and amounts of food consumed over a month period. It’s always motivating to students if they can have a real audience to share their learning with. This year we’ve created a class Google Site. Students each have a page where they add their data that was collected in a Google Form. We’ve set it up so that they can only edit their own page. What’s great is that they can embed a graph from their Google Sheet directly into the Google Sites page. This is a live graph, so if the data changes, it is automatically updated in their site. We have thrown away the physical textbook in my class. Now I have students work together to build a Google Site that acts as our class text. During each unit we assign roles so that each kid has a task that they need to look out for. Students find the information they want using Google Search, and then add it to their section of the site. Students also embed YouTube videos that support the content, along with an Announcements page that acts as a mini-blog. Google Sites is a great way to collect and display information from a variety of sources. |
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