Now You Can Sync Your Google Classroom Roster With Quick Key

Quick Key is a free app that turns your iPhone or Android phone into a bubble sheet scanner. It has two parts to it that when combined make it very easy for you to quickly grade multiple choice and true/false quizzes. This week Quick Key introduced the option to sync your Google Classroom rosters to your Quick Key account.

Here are the basics of how Quick Key works; create your quiz on the Quick Key website then print and distribute a bubble sheet. After your students have completed the bubble sheet you simply scan the sheets with your iPhone or Android phone and the grading is done for you. From the app you can send grades to the classes that you have created on the Quick Key website. If you enter students’ email addresses into your class rosters on Quick Key, you can have grades emailed to students. Google Classroom users can sync their rosters with Quick Key for distribution of grades. Watch the video below to learn more about Quick Key's Google Classroom integration.

Quick Key: Sync Rosters with Google Classroom from Quick Key on Vimeo.

Applications for Education
Tools like Quick Key don't directly change the way that we teach, but they can give us more time to actually teach and build relationships with students instead of spending time manually grading tests and quizzes.

How to Use Google Slides to Crop and Filter Images

This week Google made the Nik collection free to all users. The Nik collection is a set of plug-ins for desktop editing tools like Photoshop and Aperture. While those tools are powerful they are probably more than most of need for editing images that we'll put into slideshows, collages, or documents. Google Slides and Google Documents have image editing tools built into them. Those tools are more than adequate for most classroom uses of images. In the video embedded below I demonstrate how to use the image cropping and filter tools in Google Slides.



Learn more Google Drive tips and tricks in the new section of Getting Going With GAFE starting on April 5th.

H/T to Lifehacker for the news about Nik.

The Week in Review - 50 Million Page Views

Good afternoon from sunny Woodstock, Maine where my dogs and I have just returned from a great morning of walking in the woods. The end of winter and beginning of spring is referred to as "mud season" around here and my boys made sure to find all the mud that they could walk and roll in. Wherever you are this weekend, I hope that you make time for some fun things too.

This week FreeTech4Teachers.com reached a new milestone. I only look at the blog traffic on Saturday so it was a surprise to me to see that at some point in the last week FreeTech4Teachers.com passed 50 million all-time page views. It still boggles my mind that so many people have visited and continue to visit this blog that I started as a side project nearly nine years ago. Thank you to everyone that has visited, followed, and referred your friends over the years. This would keep going without you.

Here are this week's most popular posts:
1. Six Tools for Creating Videos on Chromebooks
2. 5 Ideas for Using Google Sites in Your Classroom
3. A Nice Set of Animated Science Lessons for Children
4. JoeZoo Express Makes It Easy to Grade in Google Docs
5. More Than 40 Alternatives to YouTube
6. Gauging Your Distraction - A Game to Show Students the Dangers of Texting While Driving
7. 5 Great Writing Activities from Read Write Think

Professional Development Opportunities!

There will be two Practical Ed Tech Summer Camps this year. There will be one tailored to schools that have 1:1 Chromebook programs and one for everyone else. Both Practical Ed Tech Summer Camps will be held in July. You can learn more about them here. Discounted early registration is available now. The Practical Ed Tech Summer Camp has sold out every year for the last three years.

Would you like to have me speak at your school or conference?

Click here to learn about my professional development services. 

Please visit the official advertisers that help keep this blog going.

Practical Ed Tech is the brand through which I offer PD webinars.

BoomWriter provides a fantastic tool for creating writing lessons. 

Cloudschool is a great online LMS and course creation tool. 

Google Forms in the Classroom is a good book on all things Google Forms. 

Storyboard That is my go-to tool for creating storyboards and cartoon stories.

Discovery Education & Wilkes University offer online courses for earning Master's degrees in Instructional Media.

PrepFactory offers a great place for students to prepare for SAT and ACT tests.

The University of Maryland Baltimore County offers graduate programs for teachers.

Boise State University offers a 100% online program in educational technology.

EdTechTeacher is hosting host workshops in six cities in the U.S. in the summer.