Free Technology for Teachers

Saturday, July 2, 2016

The Week in Review - The Most Popular Posts

Good evening from Maine where I'm relaxing after a long, fun, and tiring week at the ISTE 2016 conference. It was energizing to be around so many passionate educators. At the same time there never seems to be enough time to soak up all of the learning opportunities at ISTE.

A happy belated Canada Day to my friends to the north. And a happy Independence Day to my fellow Americans. I am spending the long weekend with friends at their lakeside camp ("camp" in Maine refers to what most people would call a cabin). Wherever you are this weekend, I hope that you get time to relax too.

Here are this week's most popular posts:
1. Google Forms Can Now Automatically Grade Quizzes Without an Add-on
2. Google Cast for Education Gets Your Students on the Same Page
3. The Best Ways to Use Padlet - Examples from Teachers
4. How to Blend Images in Google Slides
5. The Classroom Bookshelf - A Blog of Literature Lesson Ideas
6. 7 Word Summary of ISTE 2016
7. Connect Your Classroom Through SeeSaw Connected Blogs

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Online PD Opportunities With Me

Take a look at the online workshops I'm hosting throughout the spring and summer.

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

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

BoomWriter provides a fantastic tool for creating writing lessons.

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

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.

FrontRow offers adaptive online ELA and Math practice activities.

Teach n Go is a comprehensive platform for teaching online courses.

The University of Maryland Baltimore County offers graduate programs for teachers.

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

EdTechTeacher is hosting host workshops in six cities in the U.S. in the summer.

Buncee offers a great tool for creating visual stories.

GeoQuiz - A Talking Map Quiz

There is certainly not a shortage of map quiz on games on the Internet. GeoGuessr and Spacehopper have been two of my favorites for a long time. Now I have another to add to my list of favorites. That addition comes in the form of GeoQuiz.

GeoQuiz is a map game that shows you a placemarker on a map. Once the placemarker appears you have to speak or type the name of the country in which the marker was placed. The object of the game is to identify as many countries as possible within 60 seconds.

In my testing of GeoQuiz I had to be sure to enunciate when I said the name of a country. GeoQuiz did a good job of recognizing what I was trying to say, most of the time. Be sure to use the Chrome web browser and enable microphone access in order to play the game.

Applications for Education
GeoQuiz could be a good game for students to play to review their knowledge of the locations of countries around the world. The option to speak a name rather than type it might give some students the opportunity to prove that they know more than they could actually demonstrate by typing.

H/T to Maps Mania.

Flubaroo Compared to the New Google Forms Auto-grading Feature

On Monday Google Forms received an update that allows you to create automatically graded multiple choice and true/false quizzes. To do this just go into your Form's settings menu and select "quizzes." You can then specify point values for each multiple choice question in your Form. In that same menu you can enter answer explanations. The quizzes setting also gives you the option of letting students see their scores immediately after completing a quiz. The quizzes setting is convenient, but it is not as feature-laden as the Google Sheets Add-on called Flubaroo.

Flubaroo offers the option to grade fill-in-the-blank/ short answer questions. Additionally, you can use Flubaroo to accept more than one correct answer for each of the questions on your quiz. That is a great option when the answer to your question has multiple correct spellings (tsar and czar). Awarding partial credit for an answer is an option that Flubaroo offers too.

Flubaroo will let you send grades to students via email or by sharing in Google Docs immediately after they have completed a quiz or at a later time of your choosing. Printing grade summaries from Flubaroo is easier than it is in Google Forms at this time.

Applications for Education
The automatic quiz grading in Google Forms is handy for quickly giving your students a summary of what they know about a topic before you teach a lesson. Flubaroo is a good tool for when you are giving a more comprehensive assessment and want to be able to use a wider variety of scoring and reporting tools.

Friday, July 1, 2016

Educational Resources About the Tour de France

My local cycling club. (We won't be
challenging for the Yellow Jersey).

The Tour de France begins on Saturday. Check out this animated video to learn all about the tactics of the race, the logistics of the race, the physiology of riding in the race, and many other interesting facts about the world's most famous bicycle race.

If watching the race (broadcast on NBC Sports in the US) inspires you to get outside and ride a bike, don't forget your helmet. The Brain Injury Alliance of Kentucky offers some good resources about brain injury prevention. One of those resources is a short animated video designed to teach students about the need for wearing a helmet and how to wear helmets when biking or skateboarding. In the video students learn how to pick a helmet and how to properly fit a helmet. Watch the two minute video below.

The Science Behind the Bike is a four part video series from The Open University. The series has a total running length of 33 minutes and is a complement to a larger Open Learn course called The Science Behind Wheeled Sports. The videos and the course are designed to help students understand the physics, the physiology, and the technology that influence the outcome of cycling events.

Sticking with the science of bicycling, Global Cycling Network offers a video addressing the question of whether having a light bike or light body makes the bigger difference in speed on a bike. The video is a bit long, but worth watching for the process and outcome. Ask your students for predictions before jumping to the end.

How is the overall winner of the Tour de France determined? It's not as simple as you might think. In addition to the overall winner's Yellow Jersey there are other prizes awarded in the race. Learn all about how the race times and points are calculated by watching the following video from the Global Cycling Network.

Minute Physics offers two videos about the physics of bicycles. In How Do Bikes Stay Up? we learn how bikes stay upright, how design and weight influences balance, and why bicycles are difficult to balance in reverse.

The Counterintuitive Physics of Turning a Bike explains how we turn bicycles.

Thursday, June 30, 2016

The Month in Review - Heading Home

Good afternoon from an airplane somewhere over upstate New York. I'm my last flight heading from the ISTE 2016 conference. This is also my last flight for a month. June was a fantastically busy month as I had the pleasure and privilege of working with teachers at ten events spread across five states. But now I'm ready to stay home for the next month to play with my dogs, ride my bike, and get ready for the Practical Ed Tech Summer Camps.

As I do on the last day of every month, I have put together a list of the most popular posts of the last 30 days. This month the most popular post was about Google's new grading tool in Google Forms.

Here are this month's most popular posts:
1. Google Forms Can Now Automatically Grade Quizzes Without an Add-on
2. 15 Tools for Teaching History With Technology - A Handout
3. Google Cast for Education Gets Your Students on the Same Page
4. The Best Ways to Use Padlet - Examples from Teachers
5. An Illustrated Mathematics Glossary
6. Three Geography Games Based on Google Maps and Google Earth
7. 7 Blogging Platforms for Teachers Compared and Ranked
8. Click to Spin - A Fun and Free Random Name Picker
9. Ten Good Video Channels for Science Students
10. How to Use the New Version of Padlet