Back in April I featured a neat creative writing tool called The Most Dangerous Writing App. Since then The Most Dangerous Writing App has changed to The Most Dangerous Writing Prompts. The service now includes 500 writing prompts to help you get started on your next great work of creative writing.
The concept of The Most Dangerous Writing Prompts is the same as it was when it was called The Most Dangerous Writing App. You have to write for a minimum amount of time or minimum words without stopping for more than a few seconds or all of your work is lost. If you do reach the minimum (you choose what the minimum is), you can download your writing as a Word doc to continue the writing and editing process.
Watch my new video below to learn how to use The Most Dangerous Writing Prompts.
For the last week my Facebook feed has been filled with posts from friends who are celebrating the last day(s) of the school year. This is a good time to set a vacation responder in your email. If you use Gmail (either consumer or G Suite for Education), watch my video below to learn how you can set an automatic vacation responder.
Applications for Education
Even though you might be on summer vacation, there are parents and students who might email you and except a response just as quickly as during the school year. Setting a polite vacation responder message can remind those parents or students that you might not be available to respond as quickly as they would like.
Whether it's to indulge our favorite hobbies, to get some chores done around the house (my lawn can stop growing any minute now), or to spend more time on the fun parts of teaching, we all need a little more time. I can't give you more time, but I can help you be more efficient in completing tasks associated with our jobs. If you use G Suite for Education, try the following five time-saving tips.
Use a Comment Bank in Google Classroom
If you use Google Classroom to give Google Docs, Slides, or Sheets assignments to your students, create and use a comment bank to speed up the process of giving feedback to your students. Watch my video below to learn how to do this.
Use Google Keep to Add Comments to Students' Work
Google Classroom is great for giving feedback on final drafts of students' work. But if you don't use Google Classroom or you want to give students feedback on early drafts of their work, then the following method of using Google Keep to add comments to your students' Docs, Slides, and Sheets can be a time-saver.
Use Canned Responses in Your Email
Do you find yourself answering the same emailed questions over and over again? If so, you need to try using canned responses in your email. Canned responses allow you to draft messages that you can save and insert into responses over and over again. Watch my video to learn how to enable canned responses in Gmail (G Suite for Edu mail).
Self-grading Quizzes
If you give multiple choice, true/false, or short-answer quizzes use automatic grading options that are available to you in Google Forms. In the following video I demonstrate how to create a self-grading quiz in Google Forms.
Set Default Point Values and Requirements in Google Forms
Almost everyone who has made created a Google Form has at one time or another forgotten to set a point value for a quiz question or forgot to require a response to a survey question. You can avoid doing that and having to go back and fix the error by creating default point values and a default question requirement for all of your Google Forms. Watch my video below to learn how to do that.
Reactions is a YouTube channel that I've mentioned in a handful of posts in the past. The channel is produced by PBS Digital Studios and the American Chemical Society. All of the videos on the channel include chemistry lessons based on ordinary, everyday parts of life like food and beverages. In fact, Reactions has a playlist of sixty-six videos that teach short lessons about the chemistry of food and beverages. Some highlights from that playlist include 3 Egg-cellently Weird Science Experiments, Why is Pizza so Good? and Why Does Stinky Cheese Stink? And who hasn't looked in the refrigerator and wondered Can I Still Eat This? All for of those videos are embedded below.
Applications for Education
All four of the above videos as well as dozens of others in the Food Chemistry playlist could be great to use to help students see how science, specifically chemistry, is a part of everyday life.
If you want to use these videos as part of flipped lesson or a classroom discussion, consider using EDpuzzle or Classhook. I have video tutorials for both of those services embedded below.
Over the last couple of days I've seen a lot of summer reading lists floating around on Twitter. If you're starting to acquire your summer reading books, before you hit "buy now" on Amazon, search on WorldCat to see if a library in your area has a copy of the book that you want to read. WorldCat lets you search for a book then enter your zip code to see a list of the libraries in your area that have a copy available to borrow. In the following video I provide a demonstration of how to use WorldCat.org to find books in the libraries in your area.
Applications for Education
WorldCat.org is great not only for finding a copy of a book that you want to read this summer, it's also great for students who are conducting research on Google Books. When students find a book through Google Books they can then use WorldCat to locate the libraries in their area that have copies available to borrow.
