When you compose a long document in Google Documents it's helpful to add page numbers as you go. That's been possible in Google Docs for quite a while. It has also been possible to create a table of contents in your Google Documents for quite a while. But until today you couldn't use page numbers in your table of contents in Google Docs.
As announced earlier today on the G Suite Updates blog, you can now create a table of contents that includes page numbers in Google Documents. To do so, select the numbered option in "table of contents" in the "insert" drop-down menu.
This feature appeared today in one of my Google Accounts and not in two others. If you don't see it right away, give it a couple of days and it should appear.
Applications for Education
This isn't a huge update to Google Documents, but it could prove to be helpful to high school and college students who are composing long reports in Google Docs. It could also be helpful to their teachers or peers who want to jump to a specific section of a report.
Choose My Plate is a USDA website designed to promote healthy eating. Throughout the site you can find tips on creating and maintaining a healthy lifestyle. You will also find plenty of recipes to try at home. One great collection of recipes is found in the form of a PDF called Kids' "State Dinner" Cookbook (link opens a PDF).
Kids' "State Dinner" Cookbook features 50 recipes submitted by students in all 50 states. In the cookbook you will find recipes like Wrapped Alaska Denali Style
and Spinach Smoothie, Fit to Run Boston Marathon
Cod-Potato Cake, and Super Stuffed Squash. All recipes are healthy and can introduce families to new foods.
On a related note, Kids.gov offers a selection of videos about healthy eating. Some of those videos feature easy-to-make, healthy snacks. See an example below.
Applications for Education
The Kids' "State Dinner" Cookbook and Kids.gov video recipes could be good resources for health education teachers to add to their list of resources that introduce students to ideas for healthy eating. Home economics teachers looking for recipes to use with their students might also find the cookbook useful.
Earlier this week I had a chat with a teacher about the role of formative assessments in his classroom. As most of my conversations about education do, our chat eventually drifted into the various formative assessment tools that we've tried over the years. One thing that I've always tried to do when selecting formative assessment tools is to make sure that students can quickly access the assessment activity. One way that I've done this is by embedded the activities directly into my classroom blogs. Here are five tools that can be used to place quick, formative assessments into your classroom blog.
Formative:
Since this post is about formative assessment tools it makes sense to start with one that is actually called Formative. Formative offers an nice way to create multiple choice, open-response, and image-based quizzes. The image-based quizzes that you create in Formative can be embedded into your classroom blog where your students can then answer the questions in the quiz. In my video embedded below I demonstrate how to create the quiz, how to embed it into your blog, and I show you a student's perspective of the quiz as embedded into a blog.
Vizia: Vizia is a free tool for creating video-based quizzes. It can be used to create a short activity designed to help you determine if your students understand a concept or concepts demonstrated in a video lesson.
TodaysMeet: TodaysMeet is a free backchannel tool that I've used for years. One of the ways that I've used it is to simply ask my students to respond to a couple of questions that I have posted in the backchannel. I'll also use TodaysMeet rooms to have students ask me questions. You can embed TodaysMeet rooms into your blog or website. In the video embedded below I demonstrate how you can do that.
Dotstorming: Dotstorming is a great platform for having students post ideas and vote on their favorite ideas. One of the ways that you could use Dotstorming is to post set of answer choices for your students and have them vote for the answer that they think is correct. Dotstorming activity boards can be embedded into blog posts and webpages.
Google Forms:
For many readers of this blog, Google Forms is the obvious choice for creating simple formative assessments to embed into a blog or website. The following playlist of videos can help you get started with Google Forms.
