Aim to Be Awesome, Not Perfect

In the GSuite world of education, every app has it place: Forms to collect data, Drawings for graphic design, Sites for sharing information, and Slides for just about everything. Where does that leave Sheets? I know a lot of people use it for data collection and analysis - and that is awesome. But Sheets can be used with students too! Christine Pinto has blogged about using Sheets with her Kindergartners - you can find all of those here . Her ideas are great! Pixel Art is also really fun! Eric Curts has blogged about it here  and you can find all his Google Sheets resources here . He also has some really good ideas for using Sheets with students. I have also used Sheets for some activities for a digital breakout. You can see an example if you click on the link or picture below. I use conditionally formatting to change the cells' background color, generally for a color lock in the digital breakout.  Another option is Mystery Pictures. I was inspired by something sh...

This week I got the opportunity to present whole-group professional development to the teachers on my campus. I know that we have a lot of different levels of technology savvy, so I wanted to differentiate. My focus was on student creation (since we are working toward becoming a Fine Arts Academy) and my goal was for everyone to learn at least one new assessment idea for their class. In order to reach everyone, and give them something they could reference,  I created a Google Site.  For the beginners, I created a Google basics section. This group had their own space. It had stations with checklists for some of the basic productivity skills in Google Calendar, Drive, Gmail and Docs. Teachers would go to whichever station they felt they needed help with. There were instructional videos and step-by-step instructions, all of which was also included on the site. I was very fortunate that two of our campus instructional coaches offered to be the facilitators for those stations. I...

So how do you get started with Google Apps for Education? One way to get started is to use Google Forms for a simple formative assessment.  Take a worksheet and turn it in to a Google Form. Copy the information into each question box and copy the answer choices into the form as well. Below are pictures of the worksheet and the Google Form. You can set the form as a quiz and it will grade it for you!  Once kids are done, Google Forms will give you data about the responses.  You can even open the data in Google Sheets to review! 

I am working on Google Certified Educator Level 2 Certification. Due to this, I have made time to play with some Google Add-ons and here on my thoughts on a couple. First, I played with Flubaroo.  I have heard a lot about it and have had it on my "to-do" list for a long time - but with teaching and life, I never got a chance to really look at it. I was pretty impressed with it.  I wish I had learned about it before - it would have made my life a lot easier. Next,  I learned about Doc to Form. It is cool, but is a lot like copying and pasting from a Google Doc to Google Form.  Having both in the same tab is nice though. The last one I played with is Yet Another Mail Merge.  I like that I could import my Google contacts into the sheet and that it  listed all my drafts that I could select as my template.  The test email feature was pretty useful too.  The box that popped up asking for $ so I could email more recipents was a little surprise - I ...

It's been a long time since I have posted anything.. but I am hoping that will change. I am in a new role - Instructional Technology Specialist - so I am learning more really cool stuff that technology. I am also learning how to fix almost anything.  I also recently got my Level 1 Google Educator Certification. Here are some cool things I learned how to do recently: How to import a .csv file into Google calendar - handy for those weird repeating items (like alternating block schedules) How to create charts in Google Sheets (it's in the Insert Menu, not what I was expecting) How to make an awesome Harry Potter wand  How to use Pikochart  (very cool for infographics and presentations!