How to Schedule Assignments & Announcements in Google Classroom

Earlier this week Google added a frequently requested feature to Google Classroom. That feature is scheduling of assignments and announcements to appear in your Classroom stream at a later date and time. In the video embedded below I demonstrate how to schedule an assignment in Google Classroom. The video also points out a scheduling mistake that I think a lot of people will make the first few times they attempt to schedule an assignment.


Learn how to get the most out of Google Apps for Education in my online course Getting Going With GAFE. The next class begins on Tuesday.

An Overview of PrepFactory - Free SAT & ACT Prep

PrepFactory is a free service that offers excellent SAT and ACT preparation activities. The site offers free guides to SAT and ACT strategy along with a plenty of review activities to help students sharpen their skills and knowledge before taking the ACT or SAT. In the video embedded below I provide an overview of a student's perspective of PrepFactory.


Applications for Education
One of the better ways to prepare for a test is to review small chunks frequently. PrepFactory provides students with a good review system that breaks SAT and ACT review into bite-sized modules for each of the topics on the tests; each module contains a 3-5 minute video, notes on the video, and a five question video review quiz.

The modules help to identify problem areas for students. PrepFactory also provides tools to allow teachers to manage their classes by keeping track of how many modules their students have completed, and whether or not they've mastered strategy tips and tricks related to the SAT and ACT.

Disclosure: PrepFactory is an advertiser on FreeTech4Teachers.com

How to Add Custom Avatars to ClassDojo

In my previous post I shared the news about ClassDojo's new feedback option. In that post I referenced my YouTube channel having some ClassDojo tutorials. The most popular of those tutorials is How To Use Custom Avatars in ClassDojo. The video is embedded below.


Applications for Education
Using custom avatars in ClassDojo can provide you with two things. First, it can help you learn students' names at the beginning of the year by matching their faces to their names whenever you open ClassDojo. Second, it gives students a sense that they are individuals and not a faceless avatar in your digital classroom.

ClassDojo Introduces a New Feedback Option

ClassDojo is a popular tool for giving students feedback on class participation, behavior, and for keeping parents informed about classroom news. The feedback mechanism for teachers is to award points to students. Today, ClassDojo introduced a new "no points" feedback option. This option allows teachers to confirm that students did something, but doesn't assign a point value to it. This option could be good for keeping track of things like who took a turn as line leader during the week. ClassDojo published a lengthy post on the rationale for adding this new feedback option. I encourage you to read it.

ClassDojo can be used for more than just giving feedback to students. The ClassDojo Class Story feature provides a good way to keep parents informed of the good work that students are doing in your classroom. Watch the following video from my YouTube channel to learn how ClassDojo Class Story works.

Stackup - Create & Track Reading Goals for You and Your Students

Stackup is a new service that aims to help you give students credit for time spent reading quality articles online. On Stackup you can create reading challenges for your students. A challenge could be something like "read international news for 60 minutes this week." After creating the challenge you invite students to join it. Students can join by entering a challenge code on Stackup or you can invite them by email.

To get credit for reading quality articles students have to use the Stackup Chrome extension. When it is enabled the extension tracks how much time students spend on a relevant webpage and how many relevant webpages they've read. In their Stackup dashboards students can see their progress toward completing a challenge and they can share their reading data with you.

Applications for Education
Stackup could be a good tool for high school students to use to prove that they have read content related to topic that they're studying in your classroom. I think the best use of Stackup would be in a social studies class in which students need to follow current events for classroom discussion.