Weekly Geekly
February 19, 2016
Tool of the Week- Nearpod
Most of you already know about Nearpod, but did you know that Nearpod has added a “Field Trip” feature that allows you to pull in VR/360 videos.
You can add a “Field Trip” to your Nearpod presentation and then ask them questions about what they observed.
To do this:
Go to Nearpod and in a presentation choose to add a slide.
Choose “Add Content”
One of the options is “Field Trip”.
When you publish and then run it the kids can do the 360 degree look at the field trip location.
ISTE Standard of the Week
And that brings us the end of the ISTE standards. What should you take away from this exercise? There is no standard about a specific technology at all. The standards are all about how students use technology to find and evaluate information, create original work, collaborate with others, communicate, and think critically. Basically all of those skills that you want students to be doing in your classes anyway. We just want them to be able to do it both with and without the technology component.
You can find a printable version of the ISTE Standards for Students here.
Cyber Safety- Make your kids log out!
Think about it. A kid's Google account is their email and a huge chunk of their work.
On a Chromebook, students should click their picture in the lower right and log out.
On A PC, shutting down takes longer, but if students don't wait for the whole computer to shut down, and they close the lid before it is done, the next student will not be able to login without rebooting. In the end, this will waste more of your time as a teacher than if they shut down correctly the first time!
On an iPad, students should check TWO places to be sure they are logged out of Google. They need to check any Google App that they used (and there are a bunch- drive, docs, slides, sheets, classroom) and they need to check in the browser to be sure they have logged out as well.
On the Galaxy Tabs, students may need to log out of the browser in addition to removing their account from the device.
So have the kids log out at the end of each class, and save them some heartache and save you some time!
Tip of the Week- A different kind of quick assessment
Or, what if you have a dyslexic student who would prefer to answer your questions out loud instead of typing or writing the whole thing.
If you have an idea for a quick activity that involves them creating a quick video or audio file, let them do it with BYOD or on one of our devices and then submit it via classroom.
Now, any video that is a huge process where they have to write a script and create a bunch of content- you will need more time for that. But for a simpler task, Google Classroom has made the one day video project a reality!
Fun Activity- Mad Libs
Step 2: Create a Google form. Tell it to automatically collect usernames. The questions should ask for things like Nouns, Adjectives, Adverbs, etc.
Step 3: Open your form, click on responses at the top and tell it to create a spreadsheet of your results
Step 4: Open the results spreadsheet and Install the Autocrat Add-On
Step 4: Use autocrat to automate the process of collect the responses, building the Mad Lib page, and emailing back to the submitter.
Tip of the Week- Google Forms
- In the top right, click on the gear to do your form settings.
- to get the URL of the form so you can send it out, click the eyeball at the top right, then grab the address from the address bar at the top.
- to change the picture, click on the artist palette at the top, then choose the picture icon
- and if you want to go back to the old way of looking at forms, click on the running man at the bottom left of the screen :)
Follow Friday
I am also going to tell you that you NEED to follow Ashley Gilliam (@gilleytweet). She is the instructor for the Digital Fluency Academy from Region X and she is amazing. She has a great perspective because of where she is and her tweets highlight all sorts of cool tools that you will love.