NotablePDF: The app that Mr. Diercks spoke about

Cloud-based PDF Viewer and Annotation

Download Chrome Extension

Are you using other browsers? Start using our web app now click here

Experimenting with something new

Below please find links for an example of an assignment I am experimenting with this week.  Most of this would represent substitution on the SAMR model but it does move in the direction of augmentation.  The major difference is that students are finding their own resources to answer our essential questions rather than depending on the materials that I provide.  This has broadened our experience because we can now see multiple resources that answer a common question and discuss the relevance and quality of one resource over another.  Finally, students have created something new that they can share, access and add to as our study of imperialism in Africa continues.

Imperialism in Africa Assignment

Google Classroom:  Gold 1

Student Work View in Google Classroom

Student Work Example

10 Google Slides activities to add awesome to classes

From Matt at Ditch That Textbook

Google Slides lets students collaborate and display ideas effectively. Create animation, story books, video galleries and more. (Flickr / college.library)

At one point, creating a PowerPoint presentation to show to the class was cutting-edge classroom technology.

Those days are gone, and now, online presentations enable so much more for students.

Google Slides, the Google Apps solution to PowerPoint, opens this classroom staple up to vast possibilities. With real-time collaboration, connection to other Google Apps and the ability to embed presentations in websites, students can do so much more than “make a PowerPoint.”

Here are some ideas to harness the Google Slides greatness in your classroom. (Note: “Google Slides” is the name of the app, but “presentations” are what you create in Google Slides.)

1. Shared presentations: This is one of my top five go-to techy classroom techniques. It’s easy, it’s quick and it connects students’ work. Create a Google presentation and then create a slide for every student in the class. Share the presentation with students (with a link or by e-mail … use the blue “Share” button) and assign each student a slide number. Students can use it as a quick “do now” activity, as an exit ticket or other type of formative assessment. They can also use the search when inserting images to find a picture relevant to the topic at hand. When finished, let them scroll through other students’ slides (and add comments!) or display on a projector.

2. Screencast videos: Google Slides is the key that makes for great screencast videos. (Screencast = recording video of your screen with audio from a microphone to create a video presentation.) Use a screencasting tool. I like Snagit for the Chrome browser … install the extensionAND the app to make it work. Students can create a presentation in Google Slides and then record themselves presenting it. Snagit uploads the video directly to their Google Drive account, so the video can be shared with a link or embedded on a website.

3. Animation: This is a great hack (i.e. non-traditional use) of Google Slides that could take some time to complete but yield amazing results. Check out this video, where the creators made an impressive animation with 450 slides in a Google Slides presentation just by clicking through the slides quickly.

4. Global shared presentation: The shared presentation in No. 1 doesn’t have to stay in the confines of your classroom. By sharing that presentation by link or e-mail with classes in your city, country or beyond, fun and meaningful interactions can occur in real time. Find a class to share learning (Twitter or Google Plus are great for this … see how I’ve done it on this conference session page). Then start sharing insights together — reports on the weather, photos of surroundings, reactions to content learned in class, etc. When students see someone else making changes to a presentation in real time from another part of the world, it’s a real “It’s a Small World After All” moment!

5. Story books: With Creative Commons photos at their disposal, students can create great story books using Google Slides. Find these images by inserting an image and clicking “Search,” or go directly to search.creativecommons.org to copy and paste images over. (Make sure they’re giving attribution and a link to the original image!) Images can drive the story or vice versa. Students write and create, and when finished, they can share their storybooks or embed them in a class website.

6. Vocab alive: Turn vocabulary lists into an engaging, meaningful learning activity with Slides and images. Using the same tactics for finding photos from No. 5, students can illustrate their vocabulary lists with beautiful Creative Commons images. Connections in the brain with new words are stronger if they’re paired with an image. Those presentations can be displayed for class or saved for personal study.

7. Integrate other Apps in Slides: The various Google Apps can support each other. When creating a presentation in Slides, students can create an image in Google Drawings and copy it into a Google Slides presentation. This also works for charts created in Google Sheets. Add some data to a spreadsheet and create a chart, which can also be copied into a presentation.

8. Virtual tours with Google Earth: Google Earth’s street view is a visually stunning experience, giving users a first-person view of life from the streets of cities around the globe. Google Earth is great for giving virtual tours, but there’s a simpler and faster version of it. Take screenshots of scenes from Google Earth and paste them in a Google Slides presentation. Add a title and/or some text description. With lots of slides, a virtual tour can happen quickly and meaningfully.

9. Video galleries: Sometimes, a quick video is all it takes to make an idea clear. Students can find useful videos on YouTube (or other video sites) and embed those videos in a presentation to create a collection of visual ideas. YouTube videos are pulled in simply by inserting a video. Other videos can’t be embedded like YouTube videos, but there are options. Make a quick screenshot from a video and link it to a video (on School Tube, Teacher Tube or another site) by clicking the link button in the toolbar.

10. Quick blog: Blogging is a useful reflective activity that can generate a lot of online conversation among students. A quick, simple version of blogging can be created in a Google presentation. Create a shared presentation (see No. 1 above), and have students write a short “blog post” in their slides. They can even add images (see No. 5 above). When complete, students can read each other’s writing and write comments on them using the comment button in the toolbar. Conversations stay grouped together when students reply to each other using the “reply” button. This creates meaningful conversation with very little prep time.

How to Combine Tech Tools to Create Globally Connected Classrooms

From Edudemic:

1. Twitter and Mystery Skype

If you don’t already have a classroom Twitter account, you should create one today. Twitter is a fantastic tool for connecting directly with public figures whose work you may be studying, like authors or political figures. You’d be surprised how many times you can get personal responses from influential figures.

One great way to enhance your use of Twitter is to follow the #mysteryskype hashtag, which lists other teachers from around the world who are eager to connect with sister classrooms abroad. Together, you can set up a time for your classrooms to Skype with each other. Mystery Skype suggests you play a game of 20 questions to guess where the other classroom is located.

Before your Skype meeting, students should come up with questions to ask, like those provided here. Some teachers like to assign jobs to students, such as call greeters, answer loggers, bloggers, and photographers. If the classroom you connect with is far away, and you can’t Skype during school hours, you have the option to leave video message. You could extend the game over the course of a few days or weeks. Once the game is over, your students will have new, international friends to connect with on future projects.

2. Google Hangouts and Kahoot:

While Mystery Skype is a great way to find a sister classroom, the Google Hangout tool is more robust and comes with more fun add-ons, like sound effects and screen animation. It can also host multiple classrooms for bigger meetings, and you can even archive sessions on YouTube through Hangouts On Air, so absent students and parents can catch up on the day’s action.

While you can use Hangouts simply to chat with foreign pals (that’s educational on its own!), you will take your time together even further by playing an educational-based game on a platform like Kahoot while you do so. Kahoot allows teachers to create quizzes, questions, discussions, and surveys, which students can answer using any device. In both global classrooms, the Kahoot game can be projected onto a screen, while all students can join the game with their devices and play against each other individually or as teams as they race to the top of the leader board. You could even pair your students with other students in the sister classroom – a great idea for teaching students how to collaborate across cultures and time zones.

Kahoot has a simple, drag and drop interface for quiz and survey making, so you can encourage students to collaborate in creating their own Kahoot games. International teams can use Google Hangouts to meet and design quizzes for others or challenge each other to complete the Kahoot game they’ve created. Now that’s truly global collaboration!

Desmos Graphing Calculator

 From Edudemic:

Why should students pay for an expensive graphing calculator when they’ve got this popular online tool, available via its own site and through the Chrome store? The Desmos calculator helps students easily plot complex graphs, storing the results in Google Drive. And of course, it’s that Drive storage that makes collaborative math projects so easy. With a click of a button, students can share their work, whether they’d like their partners to edit the graph or they’re trying to explain a key issue over Google Hangouts. Functions can be dyed different colors, and there are numerous settings for labels and settings.

Math teacher Kristen Eckhoff provides an excellent tutorial here:

WeVideo: For Group Projects

From Edudemic:

For students who are looking to create a video for their group project, WeVideo is an easy to use platform for creating and editing movies. While it does function as a standalone site, it is also a Chrome extension app, and footage can be imported directly from Google Drive. Unlike other video editors, WeVideo has an intuitive user interface and can be directly integrated with social media apps for easy sharing. And because footage is stored either on Google Drive or on the WeVideo website, multiple students can edit video at one time, so students can begin a project together in the library and finish work in their separate living rooms at home.

Another nice feature: WeVideo allows users to choose an editing setting that suits their proficiency. Options range from a simplistic storyboard editor with instant themes like “Noir” or “Classic,” to highly advanced editing tools. It is easy to add captions, sync footage with a soundtrack and edit clips just by dragging and clicking. For a more in-depth guide on how to use WeVideo with Google Drive, we highly recommend the below tutorial:

CommonLit - Thematic Discussion Questions Paired With Interesting Texts

From Free Technology for Teachers

The other day I received an email from Michelle Brown at Harvard University. Her email was about a new organization called Commonlit. Commonlit is an organization that is building sets of thematic discussion questions to use in conjunction with upper elementary school and middle school students.

Here's how Commonlit works. As a teacher I select a theme such as love, social change & revolution, or friendship & loyalty. Then within my chosen theme I select a discussion question. The choice of a discussion question will lead me to a set of passages for my students to read to support classroom discussion. For example, when I selected the question, "what drives a person to betray?" in the friendship & loyalty theme I was then able to choose the text of The Donkey, the Fox, and the Lion from Aesop's Fables. Commonlit provided me with a PDF of the text to download for free.

Applications for Education
Commonlit's thematic questions could be quite helpful in getting students interested in reading. I've always found that if I can get students engrossed in a conversation around a big question, I then have a much easier time getting them to read materials related to the conversation. My students tend to want to read so that they can find more ideas to bring into their arguments in the classroom conversation.