Music, Doodles, and Forms - The Week in Review

Good evening from Maine where I am getting ready to watch the Patriots play their first playoff game on their way to the Super Bowl. Before I enjoy the game and some delicious chili, I have this week's post popular posts to share with you. This week's list features some Google Slides and Forms tricks, some math resources, and Microsoft Forms.


Here are this week's most popular posts:
1. Free Music to Use In Google Slides Presentations
2. Doodle 4 Google is Back for 2018
3. 25 G Suite Add-ons & Chrome Extensions for Teachers & Students
4. How to Quickly Copy Questions from One Google Form to Another
5. g(Math) Has Been Deleted - Try These Three Alternatives
6. 10 Good Resources for Math Teachers and Students
7. Three Things I Like About Microsoft Forms

Online Professional Development

The 2018 Practical Ed Tech Coaching Group will had its first webinar on Tuesday afternoon, but you can still join until the end of the month.  And you can start Teaching History With Technology or G Suite for Teachers at any time.

Book Me for Your Conference

I’ve given keynotes at conferences from Australia to Alaska for groups of all sizes from 50 to 2,000+. My keynotes focus on providing teachers and school administrators with practical ways to use technology to create better learning experiences for all students. I like to shine the light on others and so I often share examples of great work done by others as well as my own. Click here to book me today.

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

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

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

MySimpleShow offers a great way to create animated videos for free.
Metaverse enables anyone to create amazing things.
Kids Discover provides fantastic tools for helping kids discover new information. 

University of Maryland Baltimore County offers a great program on instructional design.

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.

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

Eight Lessons in Teaching History With Technology

A couple of month ago I launched an on-demand version of my popular Teaching History With Technology course. So far more than 50 people have completed the course. The question that almost everyone asks before they enroll in the course is, "what's covered in the course?" That's a fair question to ask so I published the following outline of the eight lessons in the course.

• Lesson 1 - Search Strategies for History Students
• Lesson 1b - saving and sharing search results.

• Lesson 2 - Using technology to help students analyze historical/ primary source documents.
• Lesson 2b - Making artifacts interactive.

• Lesson 3 - Hosting online history discussions
• The importance of structure and expectations.

• Lesson 4 - Using audio in history lessons.
• Recording history with students
• Hearing history

• Lesson 5 - Creating multimedia timelines with students.
• Simple to complex options for every grade level.

• Lesson 6 - Creating multimedia maps
• Google Maps and Earth are not your only options.

• Lesson 7 - Creating videos and teaching with video.
• Student creations and teacher creations.

• Lesson 8 - Making and using virtual tours.
• Virtual Reality tours, Augmented Reality tours, and online virtual tours.

The eight lessons in Teaching History With Technology are delivered via email. Each lesson contains at least one how-to video (20-30 minutes) and a suggested activity to use in your classroom. Click here to get started today!

5 Add-ons I'm Utilizing More Often in 2018

Add-ons can provide a lot of additional functionality to Google Forms, Sheets, Slides, and Docs. In some cases using the right Add-on can save you a lot of time on completing routine tasks. Other times they make Forms, Sheets, Slides, and Docs do things that they could not otherwise do for you. Here are five Add-ons that I'm going to be utilizing more often in 2018.

Certify'em
Certify'em makes it possible to not only give students their grades right away, it also issues them a certificate for passing a quiz created in Google Forms. To use Certify'em properly you should install it and enable it before creating your quiz in Google Forms. When you enable Certify'em on a Form it will populate a couple of required fields in your Form and ask you to specify a minimum passing score. Complete those fields then write your quiz and set an answer key just as you would for any other quiz that you build in Google Forms. When students complete the quiz they will automatically receive PDF certificate in their email inboxes if they have passed the quiz.

Certify'em was developed by the same person who developed the extremely popular Flubaroo Add-on for Google Sheets.

Unsplash
The selection of Google Slides Add-ons is fairly limited at this point, but there are some good ones for teachers and students within that small collection. One of those is the Unsplash Photos Add-on. This Add-on gives you instant access to Unsplash's collection of free, royalty-free photographs. In the following video I demonstrate how to add the Add-on to your Google Slides, how to use Unsplash Photos, and I explain the licensing of Unsplash Photos.


Audio Player for Google Slides
Audio Player for Google Slides is a free Add-on that will enable you to play music in the background of your Google Slides presentation. It will work with any audio file that you have stored in your Google Drive account. To use Audio Player for Google Slides simply activate the Add-on then choose that audio file that you want to have played in the background of your presentation. You can specify an start and end time for your file. It is also possible to have your audio file loop continuously throughout your presentation.

Form Recycler
formRecycler is a free Google Forms Add-on that makes it easy to reuse questions from one Google Form into another form. When you have the formRecycler Add-on installed you can access all of your existing Google Forms and then pick questions from one of those existing Forms to use in a new form. You can use formRecycler multiple times on the same form and thereby include questions from multiple existing forms in your new form.

Photo Slideshow
Photo Slideshow is a free Add-on that makes it quick and easy to import an entire Google Photos or Google Drive folder into Google Slides. Once you have installed the Add-on just select either Google Photos or Google Drive and then choose the folder of images that you want to have displayed in a slideshow. Each image in the folder will automatically be placed on a slide.

Learn more about Add-ons for G Suite products in my on-demand course, G Suite for Teachers. 

Twitter Moments - One Storify Alternative

Earlier this week someone emailed me looking for an alternative to Storify which is shutting down and no longer accepting submissions.  Moving forward, one way to create collections of Tweets about a topic is to use Twitter's Moments feature. I have a video about how to create Twitter Moments.


In May Storify will be removing all content. You can download your content as HTML until then.  Alan Levine has developed a tool for extracting embedded Storify links. He's also published an extensive blog post on what to do with your Storify content (warning, there is a lot of coding talk in the post). 

Applications for Education
Creating Twitter Moments could be a good way to organize a collection of Tweets about an event at your school. Another way to use Twitter Moments is to create a collection of Tweets about a current events topic that your students are studying.