Skip to main content

Google Classroom and Emojis

I am taking an online course called Classy Graphics with Tony Vincent. This is the first time I have taken an online course for fun. I heard about the course by following Tony Vincent on Twitter. When he tweeted about the course I didn't allow myself to think about it and just jumped in.  It is a six week course and cost $100. I am only in my first week, as of this writing, but I have already learned so much and my hesitation over spending $100 of my own money is a thing of the past! The class is worth it...I am looking at it as in depth instruction on how to practically use the Google Drawings tool. Professionally it will help me with future questions and training ideas and personally it might help motivate me to start making pretty things to share with teachers.

Probably my biggest takeaway this week in the course is Tony's use of bullets in Google Classroom. I had read his post about it awhile ago but didn't really think anything of it until I saw it in action and now I am OBSESSED. It really does make assignments more fun. The screen shot below is me putting it in action in my sample class I use for training purposes.


It is super easy. Per Tony I used https://emojipedia.org to find the emojis I want and then I simple copy and paste it in the text of the assignment and topic. The emojis are limited so you do have to use your imagination, or at least different keywords, to find something you want.

Why use emojis? I think this graphic from Tony's website sums it up nicely.


I definitely want to try some of the other ideas mentioned in his blog post like using it in my Google Drive to identify folders. I also like the idea of emoji story generating. Definitely start with adding emojis into Google Classroom first. Once you see how easy it is it might motivate you to try adding emojis elsewhere.




Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Digital Citizen Cards

This project idea came from a monthly challenge put out by Adobe Express. We have the free EDU version deployed in our district and I thought this might be fun to try with a class. I liked that there was a prize element where the students could win a classroom set of hero cards  and it tied in with Digital Citizenship Week (October 17-21).  I teamed up with an elementary technology lab teacher and we decided to try it with one fifth grade class.  We looked over the available templates and decided we liked the layout of the 6-8 template the best (because they had to list advice for staying safe online).  One of the best things about these Adobe monthly challenge templates is that they can be modified. The revised template can then be sent to students via a link or through Google Classroom.  All the templates for this challenge Adobe gives you a sample template with sample wording but we wanted students to come up with their own wording. Neither one of us was ke...
Post a Comment
Read more

Random Idea - Website Domain Name

For the past two years I have purchased a yearly subscription to a stand alone website (School World) which I love. I did this because our district was using a very nonuser friendly website for its teachers and I was tired of not being able to do what I want with the website they had given me. I got the idea of a separate website from one of my son's teachers who had done the same thing years ago, she used a different teacher website then School World but it was the same principle. The yearly subscription rate for my own website was $35 and was extremely reasonable. I simply provided a link on my district website to my new site. The district did not have a problem with this. Several teachers were doing it. I am one of these "don't ask...don't tell" teachers so even if there was a problem I wasn't going to find out about it :) Last year the rest of the fourth grade team purchased subscriptions to the site as well. We also purchased our own domain names throug...
1 comment
Read more

Picture of the Day - Activity

I attended a training class and a science coach shared an activity that he does with his students to help them differentiate between observations, inferences, and predictions. He puts a picture on the interactive white board as a warm up (he gets the pictures from a variety of sources but uses National Geographic's Picture of the Day a lot). The picture above is from the National Geographic site. He has the students make five observations. Then he makes the students make five inferences. Finally he has the students make five predictions. He does this every day and it really drives home the difference between those three key inquiry vocabulary terms. I've done this activity with both my sixth and fourth grade science classes and the students really got into it and became proficient at telling me the difference between those terms.
13 comments
Read more