Google Books Ngram Viewer Overview

The Google Books Ngram Viewer is a search tool that displays when and how often a term appears in books indexed by Google Books. By using the Ngram Viewer you can discover when a term starts to appear in literature, how often a term appears, and when a term loses popularity in literature. In the video embedded below I provide an overview of how to use the Ngram Viewer.


Thanks to Dr. Lynn Burlbaw at Texas A&M University for sharing some of his Ngram Viewer examples with us earlier this summer at the Practical Ed Tech Summer Camp.

Two Crash Courses on Classic Literature

A few years ago John Green started a Crash Course series on classic literature. The early episodes featured Hamlet, The Great Gatsby, and The Odyssey amongst about a dozen other works. That series is embedded below.


This summer John Green began publishing a new set of Crash Course literature videos. The new series includes videos about Huckleberry Finn, Lord of the Flies, and 100 Years of Solitude. The new series is included in an oddly constructed playlist that for some unclear reason includes videos about physics, the Olympics, and gaming. Sort through the playlist and you'll find the literature lessons.


All of these videos include Green's commentary on the stories along with the summaries of key points in the plots. Much like Cliff Notes, watching these videos is not a replacement for actually reading the stories. You may also want to remind your students that Green's opinions about the stories are just that, opinions.

How to Enable Automatic Grading in Flubaroo for Google Sheets

The Flubaroo Add-on for Google Sheets is a powerful tool for quickly grading multiple choice and short answer quizzes created with Google Forms. Flubaroo has been around for years and has a bunch of features that are often overlooked by teachers. One of those features is the option to have quizzes automatically scored and grades returned to students as soon as they complete a quiz. With the autograde feature enabled your students don't have to wait for you to run Flubaroo before they get their grades. In the video embedded below I demonstrate how to enable automatic grading in the Flubaroo Add-on for Google Sheets.


Read this article for an explanation of how using Flubaroo is different from using the quizzes feature in Google Forms.