A couple of weeks ago I published a tutorial on how to create an image-based quiz on Formative. The image-based quizzes that you create in Formative can be embedded into your classroom blog where your students can then answer the questions in the quiz. In my video embedded below I demonstrate how to create the quiz, how to embed it into your blog, and I show you a student's perspective of the quiz as embedded into a blog.
Applications for Education
I am a proponent of using classroom blogs as online hubs for digital activities like image-based quizzes. Putting the Formative quiz in your classroom blog means that you don't have to try to direct all of your students to a link or a classroom code. Instead, you can just direct them to your classroom blog where they can find all of the activities and resources that they need for your class.
The "make a copy" function in Google Drive is one of the features that I frequently use when teaching multiple sections of a course. Selecting "make a copy" from the "File" menu in Google Docs, Slides, and Sheets allows me to quickly duplicate an item to use in multiple courses. Until this week I always had to go back into My Drive to then place my duplicated files into the folders for each course. This week Google made that process easier. Now when I copy Documents, Sheets, or Slides I can immediately choose the folder into which the copy should should be placed.
Applications for Education
This update to Google Drive isn't going to change the way you teach or the way the that your students use Google Documents. This update is helpful for those of us who teach multiple sections of the same course and often re-use documents from one section to the next. I've already used the new folder choice option three times this week as I prepare materials for a class I'm teaching in the fall.
This evening while picking up pizza for dinner I ran into one of my old assistant principals who told me about the road trip that he just completed with his family. They went on a tour of national parks in Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Wyoming, and Montana. Listening to him reminded me of a nice resource for learning about U.S. national parks.
From Yellowstone to Bryce Canyon to Acadia the United States is full of national parks that showcase wonderful geology. The National Park Service has organized all of the parks and their geological features on one Tour of Park Geology page. The Tour of Park Geology highlights fifteen geological features including fossils, caves, shorelines, and plate tectonics. Click on any feature on the Tour of Park Geology page to jump to more information about that feature and the park(s) that contain that feature.
This morning during the Practical Ed Tech Chromebook Camp I shared some of my favorite strategies and ideas for helping students improve their online research skills. The slides that I used today were an updated version of slides that I have previously shared here on Free Technology for Teachers. The latest version is of the slides is embedded below.
Creative Commons licensing makes many photos available for re-use that we otherwise could not use. The trouble is properly citing Creative Commons licensed works can sometimes be a confusing, multistep process. ImageCodr aims to make that process easier.
ImageCodr generates properly formatted Creative Commons attributions for images that you find on Flickr. Once you've found a Flickr image that you want to use just paste its URL into the ImageCodr code generator to get a properly formatted image code with Creative Commons attribution.
Applications for Education ImageCodr could be a good tool for students to use when they're adding images to blog posts. ImageCodr gives students all of the code and attributions necessary for using a Creative Commons image found on Flickr in their blog posts.
