Gribrouillon - Freehand Drawing on Online Maps

For many years I've recommended Scribble Maps as a no-account-required alternative to Google's My Maps. Scribble Maps lets create freehand drawings on digital maps. Today, thanks to Maps Mania, I learned about another tool for making freehand drawings on digital maps. That tool is called Gribroullion.

Using Gribroullion is a straight-forward process. Simply go to the site then search for an area of the world map that you want to draw on. You can zoom in or out as much as you like. Once you've settled on a map view just click one of the drawing tools at the bottom of the map and start drawing. You can change the color and thickness of the lines that you draw on the map. You can also change the base map on which you draw. When your map drawing is completed you can share it by clicking on the airplane icon in the upper, right corner of the map. A URL and a QR code for your map is provided when you click on the airplane icon.

Applications for Education
Gribroullion could be a good tool to use in an elementary school setting to have students circle, highlight, and label a series of places on a map. The lack of a registration requirement should make it easy to quickly get students started using Gribroullion.

On a related note, here's my tutorial on how to use Scribble Maps.

Quillionz - Quiz and Discussion Questions Automatically Generated from Documents

Quillionz is a neat service that uses AI to automatically generate questions from documents that you provide. Enter a block of text of at least 300 words up to 3,000 words and Quillionz will create quiz questions based on the key elements of that text. When I first tried Quillionz last summer it only generated multiple choice and fill-in-the-blank questions with corresponding answers. Today, Quillionz will also create open-ended discussion questions and supply some suggested responses to those questions. Quillionz calls these open-ended questions "interpretive" questions.

To use Quillionz sign up for a free account and then in your Quillionz dashboard click "new content." To the "new content" you can add text by typing or pasting in a passage of text. Your passage must be at least 300 words and no more than 3,000 words. After your text is in place Quillionz give your document a title and select a "domain" for it. "Domain" is the term that Quillionz uses for what most of us would call a subject or topic. The option to enter a custom domain is a new feature since the last time that I wrote about Quillionz. After you have done that, Quillionz will generate a set of keywords or tags that you can select as focus terms for your questions.

Based the text that you supplied, the keywords you've chosen, and the domain/ subject you've chosen Quillionz will generate a set of fill-in-the-blank, multiple choice, and discussion questions for you. You can approve, delete, or edit any of the suggested questions. When you're happy with the list of questions you can save them as a text document, print them, or export them to Quillionz's companion service Quilli Quiz. Quilli Quiz is a flashcard service.

Here's the video that I published last year to demonstrate how to use Quillionz.



Disclosure: Quillionz is currently running a banner advertising campaign on FreeTech4Teachers.com