Notebooking, Teaching, and Technology

Most digital reading options. Newsela , Readworks , Epic , and DOGOnews all have ways to filter content for the holiday season (these are all either free or have free components that would work in the classroom). Ask students to filter by "Christmas" or "Holiday" to find funny, inspirational, thoughtful, and informational reading pieces specifically geared for this time of year. Students can give you summaries and note any common themes between reading passages, as well as make personal connections. Pair a holiday article with a summarizing lesson that I modified from the Read, Write, Think website years ago called: Get the Gist: A Summarizing Activity for Any Content Area . I created a Google Document that you can assign students in Google Classroom (or you can export it as a Word document). You will need to make a copy of it before you assign. Simply click on "file" and "make a copy" or click on "file" "download"...

Tonight I am having fun making Bitmoji Valentines for an upcoming staff training that happens to fall on February 14th. I used the Bitmoji extension in Google Chrome and put it together in Google Drawings. I could insert a 2x4 table into Drawings to get my dimensions set for printing (I printed four to a piece of card stock). I used the Google add on "Magic Rainbow Unicorn" to make the word "magical" rainbow colored. The add on only works in Google Docs but I cut and paste my words into my Google Drawings.template. I bought the lollipops on Amazon but I am not sure I would recommend it. A lot of them were broken in the shipping process...which was packaged really poorly. I really wanted the twisty lollipops and couldn't think of any place in town that would sell them. There are several Bitmoji characters that would have worked for Valentine's Day cards. Here were my runner up ideas: If you plan on making Valentines for your staff or studen...

Looking for a fun back-to-school activity to kick off the New Year? Try this digital Google Drawings goals template . The idea is to take the numbers in 2019 and use them as both numbers AND letters to create four goals for the new year.  Students would identify: 2 things they would like to do, try, or read 0 ne thing they would like to accomplish or stop doing something they would like to 1 earn (personal or school) and someplace they would like to 9 o, get or give this coming year You may want to have students sketch out their ideas on scratch paper before they open up the template in Google Drawings. I had a couple of my friends try out the template and here is what they came up with: This is great activity to introduce students to some Google Drawing tools that could be used later in the year to create content posters. Layers of the Atmosphere Poster Google Drawings I made a video  explaining the project in gre...

I liked the idea of having students create fake Instagram posts but really hadn't got past the "idea" phase. Last week in my Classy Graphics course with Tony Vincent he had us working with pictures and gave us free reign on the assignment. I used several of the techniques he taught us to FINALLY create a sample Instagram post that could be easily duplicated by students. I used Google Drawings, which is an under utilized tool in our district, to create the final product. This is a great activity to showcase several "how to's" in Google Drawings. I also used Pixlr to edit a photo of myself to remove the background I was standing in front of. I made a "how to" video as well as the simple screen shot "how to" . The video is a little more in-depth for any teacher wanting to try it out first. If you wanted students to make an Instagram post you might want to make a more specific video for your students to reference back to, particular...

I have been enjoying using the new Google Sites for creating websites with students. It is much simpler to use than its predecessor and the students like learning how to create a website without any hassle. We are a Google Apps For Education district so all students have access to the GSuite of creation tools in their Google Drive. For this project I created a sample website to model the expectations and to give students a reference point in case they needed something to refer back to. I choose the book Me and The Pumpkin Queen. This project was done with a fourth and fifth grade book club group. Prior to starting the book the teacher had me come in and explain the technology component of their club. I showed them my sample site and walked them through how to set up their sites. During that meeting they started the outline of their site by making the home page and all the sub-headers across the top. Under the chapters tab they created sub-pages with a grouping of chapters. Eve...

I love the idea of Blackout Poetry. The basic premise is using existing text and finding words within the text to create a poem...then blacking out what you don't need. There are many internet posts, pictures, and videos on creating Blackout Poetry for those interested in looking into this cool genre. Many years ago I tried it with a Girl Scout troop of fourth and fifth graders and they found the concept difficult..and I have to admit that I probably didn't do a good job of explaining it. I tried a variation of it using magazines where students cut out words and created a poem using their "found" words. That went a little better (maybe because they can tangibly rearrange the words?). Anyway...I haven't had much of an opportunity to work with students and poetry in several years and then this video came across my Pinterest feed and I got excited about using technology with blackout poetry. The video was super easy to follow and I created a blacko...

I often make presentations and want to share my resources with teachers. I tend to put a lot of speaker notes on my google slides and I wanted the participants to have access to them but I didn't want them edit my original document. In the past I just put a STOP slide first and gave instructions on how to make a copy so they didn't unintentionally write over the master document. At a conference I was at this summer a teacher said there was a way to force users to make a copy. After a short internet search I came across this blog post -  force users to make a copy of a Google doc  on a website called Shake Up Learning . It was exactly what I needed! As an added bonus..the blog is really good and focuses on all things Google in education (I would definitely recommend following or subscribing). I also follow the owner Kasey Bell on twitter as well @shakeuplearning.