Monday, October 30, 2017

What's New in Google - October 2017

Catch up on everything new in G Suite for Education from October 2017, and see great ideas and resources!

Below is the recorded video from our October 2017 Google User Meeting, along with the meeting agenda and all the awesome resources and G Suite updates from the last month. This includes 24 new Google updates and 41 Google resources for your class.

The monthly meetings are hosted by the Google Educator Group of Ohio, but are open to anyone from any location. The purpose of these meetings is to:
  • Connect Google-using educators
  • Share the latest Google Apps news and features
  • Provide tutorials, demonstrations, and how-to’s
  • Share best practices of how Google Apps is being used within schools
  • Ask questions and get answers
The video from the meeting is recorded and available for later viewing for those who cannot attend or connect live. See below to view the recorded video, agenda, and all the resources from the October 2017 meeting:

Sunday, October 29, 2017

Using Android Apps on Chromebooks

One of the best new features for Chromebooks is the ability to run Android apps. In addition to all of the things Chromebooks can already access and run, such as web sites, web apps, and web extensions, many Chromebooks can now also run Android apps, opening the door to a vast amount of new learning tools for students.

However, to be able to run these Android apps, there are certain requirements to meet and steps to take. In this blog post we will take a look at what is needed to accomplish this, both for personal Chromebooks and for those managed by a school. In a later post, we will build on this to take a look at many examples of great Android apps to use in the classroom.

Sunday, October 22, 2017

Seven Summarization Tools for Students

When students go to read an article online, it can be helpful to start with a simpler, shorter, summarized version.

Having a summarized version of an article can help student comprehension in several ways:

  • It can serve as an advanced organizer to help the students know the main ideas to look for in the full article.
  • It can provide the student with the key points of the article, if they struggle with pulling out this information themselves.
  • It can be a replacement for the full article for a struggling student who wants to read the same article as other students but would benefit from a shorter version.

Thankfully there are many summarization tools available online for students to use. Most all of these tools work by analyzing the full article, using algorithms to weigh the relative importance of each word and sentence in the text, and then pulling out what is determined to be the most critical information.

See below for a list of seven such tools. Most of these are Chrome Web Extensions, but the list also includes a bookmark tool and a website.

Tuesday, October 17, 2017

Google Tour Builder for any Subject

Google Tour Builder is one of my favorite lesser-known Google tools. If you are a frequent reader of this blog, you have probably seen me mention it a number of times including posts such as "Hipster Google" and "Create your own Lit Trips". After doing several posts on different aspects of the tool, I figured it was time to give it the full treatment of a video training webinar.

For those not familiar with the tool, Google Tour Builder allows you and your students to create virtual tours on a map, including locations, images, videos, descriptions, hyperlinks, and more. These tours can be used in any subject area such as retelling the events from a novel, tracing the locations of a historical event, visiting different biomes or landforms around the world, and more. Tours can be viewed by others in Tour Builder, or even imported into Google Earth for a full 3D experience.

See below for my 1-hour video training webinar on "Google Tour Builder for any Subject". In addition you will find links to all of the resources mentioned in the video.

Thursday, October 5, 2017

24 Tips for Google Forms Quizzes

Google Forms has come along way over the last few years! First it received a major face lift from "Old Forms" to "New Forms", and then it got the Quiz feature to auto-grade online assessments, and now Google continues to add new options and features each month.

So much has changed over the last few years, I thought it was time to make a new version of my webinar on "Google Forms for Online Assessments". In my new training I cover (at least) 24 tips and tricks for getting the most out of the new features in Google Forms for when you make online quizzes for your students. These include questions with multiple right answers, open-ended questions, extra credit, assistive tech tools for students taking the quiz, importing scores into Classroom, and much more.

See below for a full list of the 24 tips that get covered in the webinar. You will also find the recorded video from the training which you can watch to see each and every one of these tips demonstrated for you. Even if you have been using Forms for a while, I hope you learn something new!

Tuesday, October 3, 2017

Multiple Correct Answers in Google Form Quizzes

One of the most popular uses for Google Forms is creating online assessments for students. It is a quick, easy, and powerful way to create auto-grading quizzes. As with all Google tools, new features are continually being added, making Forms even more versatile for assessment.

Recently I came across an update for Forms (at least it was new to me) that allows teachers to create "Short Answer" questions which can support more than one correct answer. In the past you needed to use an additional tool, such as the Flubaroo add-on for Sheets, to be able to accept more than one right answer, but now you can do that with Google Form's built-in quiz feature.

See below for directions on how this works, and how you may want to take advantage of this neat option.

Sunday, October 1, 2017

What's New in Google - September 2017

Catch up on everything new in G Suite for Education from September 2017, and see great ideas and resources!

Below is the recorded video from our September 2017 Google User Meeting, along with the meeting agenda and all the awesome resources and G Suite updates from the last month. This includes 28 new Google updates and 32 Google resources for your class.

The monthly meetings are hosted by the Google Educator Group of Ohio, but are open to anyone from any location. The purpose of these meetings is to:
  • Connect Google-using educators
  • Share the latest Google Apps news and features
  • Provide tutorials, demonstrations, and how-to’s
  • Share best practices of how Google Apps is being used within schools
  • Ask questions and get answers
The video from the meeting is recorded and available for later viewing for those who cannot attend or connect live. See below to view the recorded video, agenda, and all the resources from the September 2017 meeting: