How to Add Spoken Audio to Google Slides

The Practical Ed Tech Tip of the Week that I published yesterday was about adding music to Google Slides. In the twelve hours since that tip was published a bunch of people have asked about adding spoken words to slides. The process is a little more involved than just adding music, but it's the same basic process. In the following video I explain how I add spoken audio to Google Slides.

How to Create Short Answer Activities in Socrative

Socrative is one of the original and best platforms for creating quiz games to be played in your classroom on Chromebooks, laptops, and mobile devices. One of the best aspects of Socrative is that unlike Kahoot, Socrative lets you create games in which students have to type answers instead of just picking a multiple choice response option. In the following video I demonstrate how to create short answer activities in Socrative. The video also shows a student's perspective of a short answer activity.



I be covering Socrative, Kahoot, and other neat formative assessment tools in next Tuesday's webinar, Fun With Formative Assessments. 

How Formatically Helps Students Format Essays in MLA Style

A couple of weeks ago I shared a new tool designed by college students to help other students properly format essays in MLA format. That tool is called Formatically. I've had a few people send me questions about how it works. It essentially gives students a template in Word format that they can then use to write their essays in. In the following short video I demonstrate how to use Formatically.

PD Webinar - Fun With Formative Assessments

As good teachers know, gauging your students' understanding of the topics you teach is a process that involves discussion, a bit of intuition, and some formative assessment activities. In this webinar you will learn how to use free tech tools to create and conduct fun, engaging, and informative formative assessments. Whether you teach elementary school, middle school, or high school, you will come away from this webinar with fun formative assessment activities that you can do tomorrow.

Fun Formative Assessments addresses the needs of teachers who don't have computers or tablets for every student. And teachers who do have laptops, Chromebooks, or tablets for every student will learn some new ways to have students use those too.

Fun Formative Assessments will be held live at 4pm Eastern Time on March 28th. Register today! A recording will be available if you cannot attend the live session. The cost for this webinar is $20 which includes the live webinar, a copy of the recording, and a PD certificate.

Five Things You Can Learn In This Webinar:
1. What makes a formative assessment valuable to you while also fun for students.
2. How to create fun formative assessments for classrooms that aren't 1:1.
3. Why you should leverage students' picture-taking habits for formative assessment.
4. Development of engaging formative assessment activities that use a variety of question formats.
5. How to include students in the creation of formative assessments.

Register Today!

This webinar will be held live on March 28th at 4pm EST.

Please check here other live webinars.

Richard, why isn't this webinar free? I explained the answer in this video. 

The Week in Review - The Most Popular Posts

Good morning from Maine where it is a great day for a walk in the woods. On a walk earlier this week the signs of spring were all around us as we saw frozen streams starting to melt and more birds than we've seen in months including a Great Horned Owl. Here's a little video that I made on our walk. Of course, the next day we had two inches of fresh snow fall. That's life in Maine and I wouldn't have it any other way. Wherever you are this weekend, I hope that it's a great one for you.

Here are this week's most popular posts:
1. How to Add Music to Google Slides
2. Hone Geography Skills With These Fun Games
3. Madmagz - Collaboratively Create Online Magazines
4. Yes, You Can Restrict Messages in G Suite
5. Use Socrative to Create Quiz Games That Accept Short Answers
6. YouTube Is Removing Annotations Option - Try This Instead
7. Three Audio Slideshow Projects for Teaching Basic Video Production

Join me this summer for the Practical Ed Tech Chromebook Camp or the Practical Ed Tech BYOD Camp. Early registration and group discounts are available.

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

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

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

QuickKey saves teachers tons of time when scoring formative assessments.

WriteReader is a fantastic multimedia writing tool for elementary school students.

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.

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

My Simpleshow provides a great way to create explanatory videos.