Engaging Quiet Students with Google Forms

When I was a student (many, many years ago) I dreaded class participation. Now don’t get me wrong… I loved school. I was a straight-A student who excelled in all my subjects, loved to learn, and took the most challenging courses.

I just didn’t like to talk.

You see, from the time I was a little child into my early teen years, I used to have a stutter. Some days were better than others, but one thing that always brought out the stutter was speaking out loud in class. When a teacher asked a question, I most always knew the answer, but was hesitant to raise my hand. And nothing was worse than the teacher having each student in class take turns reading from the chapter in the textbook. The closer it got to me, the more nervous I became, trying to determine which paragraph would fall on me and which words I would undoubtedly stumble over.

And I am sure I was not alone. For a wide variety of reasons, student may be reluctant to speak up and participate in class:

• Perhaps they wrestle with a speech impediment.
• Maybe they fear they do not have the right answer or a valuable contribution.
• Or they just need more time to think before they are ready to answer.
• Or maybe they are shy.

Thankfully today technology provides us with more tools for students to participate in class, share their ideas, and ask questions. One great option is to use Google Forms. See the rest of this blog post below for some ideas on how Forms can not only involve the quiet kids, but improve class engagement for everyone.

Exploring Tangrams with Google Drawings

At some point in your life, probably in school, you have had the chance to play with a tangram puzzle. If somehow you are not familiar with this, a tangram is a popular Chinese puzzle made up of:

• 2 big right triangles
• 1 medium right triangle
• 2 small right triangles
• 1 square
• And 1 parallelogram

The object of tangram puzzles is to create an image by moving, rotating, and flipping the pieces as needed. Common images to make include animals, boats, people, objects, letters, and such.

In schools, tangrams can be a great way for students to learn and explore:

• Problem solving
• Spatial reasoning
• Geometry transformations - moving (translation), turning (rotation), flipping (reflection)
• Fractions
• Creativity - when making their own tangrams

There are lots of ways for students to explore tangrams from physical blocks you can purchase, to virtual tangrams online. One great tool for creating, solving, and exploring tangrams is Google Drawings. It makes it easy to create shapes, and then move, rotate, and flip the shapes as needed.

See below for everything you need to get started using Google Drawings for tangrams. This includes a free blank template with all the tangram pieces already created, a dozen pre-made tangram puzzles to solve, and detailed directions on how to manipulate the shapes using tools in Google Drawings and create your own tangram puzzles.

Comparing Countries with Google Maps

Maps are a powerful tool to help students understand and explore our world. However, maps are never a perfect representation, which can sometimes lead to misunderstandings. For example this could include confusion on how big land masses really are when compared to each other.

A big reason for this is the popularity of the Mercator projection map. This is the map we are used to seeing, which takes the spherical world and lays it out on a flat map. To do this, the map has to stretch out the landmasses as you move further North or South from the equator. As a result, areas such as Antarctica or Greenland end up looking much larger than they really are.

Recently I came across a neat website called “The True Size Of” which is built on top of Google Maps. The site does a great job of helping users compare the real sizes of states and countries, relative to each other. This can help students get a better idea of how large other countries really are and improve their understanding of the world.

See below for a quick overview of how the site works, along with some examples of the comparisons you can make.

11 Ways to Teach Math with Google Drawings

Google Drawings is one of my favorite parts of the Google Drive suite, even though it seems to often get overlooked. Perhaps that is because Google itself hides the Drawings link under the “More” menu in Drive rather than letting it sit at the grown up table with Docs, Sheets, and Slides.

However, I think Drawings deserves much more attention especially in the classroom where it has so many educational uses. These include:

• Graphic organizers - see here
• Desktop publishing - see here 
• Interactive multimedia posters (Googlinks) - see here 

In addition to those ideas, one of my favorite uses for Google Drawings is teaching math. Drawings lends itself very well to mathematics with its shapes, rotations, tables, lines, and much more.

See below for 11 ideas for how to use Google Drawings to teach and learn math. In each case I have included a brief explanation of the idea, a Google Drawing template or example, and Common Core math standards addressed.

New Google Forms Quiz Feature vs Flubaroo

Google Forms has long been a favorite tool for schools, and one of the most popular uses for Forms has always been online assessments. Digital quizzes have many benefits for schools including:

• Automatic grading for quick feedback for teachers and students.
• Easy analysis of the results to determine who needs help and what content needs retaught.
• Use of assistive technology to have text read aloud or zoomed in for easier reading.
• Preparation for high-stakes online tests.
• Savings on paper and printing.
• Easy to update in the future or share with others for collaborative editing.

Google Forms has always made it super easy to create quizzes, send them out to students, and collect all the responses. The only pain point has been how to grade the student submissions.

Thankfully for years we have have the awesome add-on for Google Sheets called Flubaroo. This add-on allows educators to automatically grade the quiz responses as they get submitted from a Google Forms and collected in a Google Sheet. Over time more and more valuable features have been added to Flubaroo to make it a powerful tool for online assessment.

Suddenly though, there is a new option. At ISTE 2016 Google announced that Forms will now natively support the grading of online assessments without the need of an add-on such as Flubaroo. What does this mean for all the schools who have been using Flubaroo for years? Does it still have a place? Do these new features make it obsolete?

For all the details, see the rest of the blog post below for an in depth comparison of what Forms does, what Flubaroo does, and where they are different. Spoiler alert: Don't throw out Flubaroo just yet. Also, I cover a detailed overview of how to use the new Google Forms Quiz feature.

Managing Multiple Google Accounts in Chrome

It is becoming more and more common for someone to have multiple Google accounts.

• You have your personal Gmail account. 
• Then you have your school Google Apps for Education account. 
• Then you also have that Google account for the club/sport/organization you help run.

As a Google Education Trainer, I have lost count of how many accounts I have. Typically I have one, if not two, accounts for every school I work with, as well as dozens of accounts on the domains I run.

So the question is, how do you manage multiple Google accounts?

To make matters worse, there are actually several different options for handling multiple accounts in Chrome. Some are better suited for specific situations, while some are just better in general. How do you know which to use?

See below for options to manage your many Google accounts, when to use which method, and detailed directions on how do each.

KISS and Tech Up

When it comes to technology integration we are often encouraged to think outside of the box, transform education, revolutionize the learning process, and aim for the stars. As noble and well-meaning as this is, sometimes it can have the unintended consequence of impeding the growth of educational technology in schools.

How is that possible?

This last year I had the privilege of working with several teachers over many months on technology integration projects. The plan was to explore SAMR, the 4 C’s, ISTE standards, and technology tools. Then the teachers would create a technology integrated activity for their students.

As we got closer to the date to develop and deliver the lesson, I got variations of the same concern from many of the teachers:

• Is my project big enough?
• Am I using enough technology tools?
• Does this really revolutionize teaching and learning?

The teachers were stressing out that their lessons were not awesome enough to count as real technology integration. They felt intimidated and unsure and reluctant to move forward.

Seeing the problem, I tried to reassure them that they were fine. They just needed to embrace the philosophy of KISS. No, not the makeup-wearing rock band.  What I mean is the phrase “Keep it Simple, Stupid” (or “Sweetie” if you prefer to be nicer).

Read on to see why…