Now You Can Schedule Exit Tickets in Ziplet

Ziplet is one of my favorite tools for hosting online exit ticket activities. There are two features of it that make it great in my book. The first is a large catalog of interesting, premade questions that you can select and use in your activities. Second, Ziplet lets you toggle between having students respond anonymously or with their real names. Furthermore, you can reply to individual students even when they are participating in a group activity. 

Ziplet recently added another helpful feature for teachers. That feature, as stated in the title of the post, is the ability to schedule your exit ticket questions to appear on a future date and time. Additionally, those who subscribe to Ziplet's paid plan (I don't) can schedule their exit tickets to appear on a repeating schedule. 

Applications for Education
Ziplet's new scheduling feature could prove to be helpful in making for a smooth closing activity for a class. Instead of having to scramble to get an exit ticket posted I can schedule it at the beginning of the day or even the beginning of the week and have it appear at the end of class.

Learn more about Ziplet by watching this short video overview of how it works.

Three Ways to Create Video Lessons With Your Existing Slides

Last week I hosted a webinar about creating videos for asynchronous instruction. One of the points that I made in the webinar was that you don't need to start from scratch every time you want to record a new lesson. In fact, one of the easiest ways to get started is to record over a few of your existing slides. In this new video I demonstrate three methods for doing that. 

In the following video you'll learn how to quickly create video lessons with Canva slides, Google Slides, and PowerPoint slides. 

It's important to remember that you're better off creating a few short videos than one long video. That's why I recommend starting with just a few slides. 

Webinars for Your School or Organization

If you're interested in having me host a webinar for your school or organization, send me an email at richard (at) byrne.media

Some of the topics I can cover in a webinar for you include:

• Making and teaching with video.
• Fun with formative assessment.
• Google Earth & Maps for social studies and more.
• Developing digital portfolios.
• Copyright for the classroom (United States-based).

Five Frequently Forgotten Google Docs Features

Perhaps it's just me, but do you ever feel like you've been using Google Docs for so long that you forget about the basics until you need them? For example, the other day when a friend asked me about options for sharing a Google Doc with someone who didn't use Google Docs I completely blanked for a minute before suggesting a couple of options. The incident inspired me to create this short video highlighting five frequently forgotten Google Docs features. 

In the video embedded above I highlight the following five features and why they're helpful in classroom settings.

• Revision history.
• This is great for keeping track of which students made changes to documents. This is handy for reverting back to a previous version of a document if a student accidentally deletes something that shouldn't have been removed. 
  
  
• Page Set-up.
• This is where you can change the page orientation, set custom margins, change the page background color, and even create a "pageless" document. 
  
  
• View full screen. 
• Like the name says, you can use this to view your document without any of the editing tools being displayed. This is helpful for showing a distraction-free version of your document in your classroom. 
  
  
• Download as...
• This lets you save your Google Document as a PDF, a Word document, a RTF,  an ePub, and a few other common document formats. 
  
  
• Publish to the Web.
• Use this option to publish your document as a simple stand-alone web page.