The Week in Review - The Most Popular Posts

Good evening from Maine where I'm relaxing after a long, fun, and tiring week at the ISTE 2016 conference. It was energizing to be around so many passionate educators. At the same time there never seems to be enough time to soak up all of the learning opportunities at ISTE.

A happy belated Canada Day to my friends to the north. And a happy Independence Day to my fellow Americans. I am spending the long weekend with friends at their lakeside camp ("camp" in Maine refers to what most people would call a cabin). Wherever you are this weekend, I hope that you get time to relax too.

Here are this week's most popular posts:
1. Google Forms Can Now Automatically Grade Quizzes Without an Add-on
2. Google Cast for Education Gets Your Students on the Same Page
3. The Best Ways to Use Padlet - Examples from Teachers
4. How to Blend Images in Google Slides
5. The Classroom Bookshelf - A Blog of Literature Lesson Ideas
6. 7 Word Summary of ISTE 2016
7. Connect Your Classroom Through SeeSaw Connected Blogs

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

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

Buncee offers a great tool for creating visual stories. 

GeoQuiz - A Talking Map Quiz

There is certainly not a shortage of map quiz on games on the Internet. GeoGuessr and Spacehopper have been two of my favorites for a long time. Now I have another to add to my list of favorites. That addition comes in the form of GeoQuiz.

GeoQuiz is a map game that shows you a placemarker on a map. Once the placemarker appears you have to speak or type the name of the country in which the marker was placed. The object of the game is to identify as many countries as possible within 60 seconds.

In my testing of GeoQuiz I had to be sure to enunciate when I said the name of a country. GeoQuiz did a good job of recognizing what I was trying to say, most of the time. Be sure to use the Chrome web browser and enable microphone access in order to play the game.

Applications for Education
GeoQuiz could be a good game for students to play to review their knowledge of the locations of countries around the world. The option to speak a name rather than type it might give some students the opportunity to prove that they know more than they could actually demonstrate by typing.

H/T to Maps Mania. 

Flubaroo Compared to the New Google Forms Auto-grading Feature

On Monday Google Forms received an update that allows you to create automatically graded multiple choice and true/false quizzes. To do this just go into your Form's settings menu and select "quizzes." You can then specify point values for each multiple choice question in your Form. In that same menu you can enter answer explanations. The quizzes setting also gives you the option of letting students see their scores immediately after completing a quiz. The quizzes setting is convenient, but it is not as feature-laden as the Google Sheets Add-on called Flubaroo.

Flubaroo offers the option to grade fill-in-the-blank/ short answer questions. Additionally, you can use Flubaroo to accept more than one correct answer for each of the questions on your quiz. That is a great option when the answer to your question has multiple correct spellings (tsar and czar). Awarding partial credit for an answer is an option that Flubaroo offers too.

Flubaroo will let you send grades to students via email or by sharing in Google Docs immediately after they have completed a quiz or at a later time of your choosing. Printing grade summaries from Flubaroo is easier than it is in Google Forms at this time.

Applications for Education
The automatic quiz grading in Google Forms is handy for quickly giving your students a summary of what they know about a topic before you teach a lesson. Flubaroo is a good tool for when you are giving a more comprehensive assessment and want to be able to use a wider variety of scoring and reporting tools.