How to Quickly Duplicate and Sort Jamboard Pages

Jamboard has a lot of handy features and neat uses for in-person and online instruction. I recently outlined a bunch of them in this blog post. This afternoon someone emailed me looking for help with duplicating pages within a Jamboard. Like a lot of things, it's easier to show how to do it than it is to write how to do it. I made this short video to show how you can quickly duplicate, re-use, and sort pages or frames within a Jamboard. 

Applications for Education

Duplicating a page within a Jamboard is helpful when you want to have multiple pages that look the same but you want students to complete a different activity on each one of those pages. For example, I might want to use the same outline map of New England on three pages then one page have students label the states, on the second page have them label capitals, and on the third page label state nicknames.

Here's how to create and distribute Jamboard templates. 

This post originally appeared on FreeTech4Teachers.com. If you see it elsewhere, it has been used without permission. Sites that steal my (Richard Byrne's) work include CloudComputin, Today Headline, and 711Web.

How to Score Google Forms Questions That Have Multiple Correct Responses

This afternoon I answered an email from a reader who was having a little trouble with Google Forms. She was trying to create a quiz in which some of the questions had multiple correct responses for students to select. For example, "select from this list the names of the people who have walked on the moon." 

To create a question or prompt in Google Forms that has multiple correct responses you need to use "checkboxes" question type. Multiple choice will not work because Google Forms will only allow one selection. By using checkboxes you can have students make multiple selections in response to the question. 

When using the checkbox question type your students can select multiple correct responses to a prompt like, "select the names of the people who have walked on the moon." When you do that you'll find that Google Forms will not give partial credit to a student who selects one correct name and one incorrect name. Therefore, you'll need to change the settings on your Google Form to "release scores after review" instead of the default "release scores immediately" in the form settings. Then you'll have to manually score the question(s) that ask students to make multiple selections. 

In the video that is embedded below I demonstrate the process that I've outlined above for creating and scoring Google Forms questions that have multiple correct responses.  

On a related note, here are five Google Forms features every teacher should know. 

This post originally appeared on FreeTech4Teachers.com. If you see it elsewhere, it has been used without permission. Sites that steal my (Richard Byrne's) work include CloudComputin, Today Headline, and 711Web.

Spark Interest in Local History With These Digital Newspaper Archives

When I was a kid I did yard work for an elderly widow who had stacks of old newspapers magazines that she and her husband collected. Knowing that history was my strongest subject in school, she always had a new, old newspaper (and a glass of fruit juice) for me whenever I came over to rake leaves, shovel snow, or mow the lawn. Looking at those old newspapers always sparked my curiosity about buildings, landmarks, and people in my hometown. One of those sparks of curiosity led me to figuring out who my favorite fishing pond was named after. 

The point of sharing that little story is that looking at old newspapers can inspire students to dive into a little local history research and gain a bit of knowledge about the formation of their communities as they know them today. To that end, here are three good places for students to browse through the digital archives of old newspapers. 

Chronicling America is digitized newspaper archive hosted by the Library of Congress. The Chronicling America collection contains more than 2,600 digitized copies of newspapers printed in the United States between 1789 and 1963. You can search through the collection according to date, state in which the newspaper was published, and keyword.

In the Google Newspaper Archive you will find hundreds of digitized copies of newspapers printed around the world. In the archive you fill find newspapers published in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. In this video I provide a demonstration of how to search Google's Newspaper Archive. 

Last fall the Library of Congress launched a new search tool called Newspaper Navigator. Newspaper Navigator is an index of 1.5 million images published in newspapers between 1900 and 1963. You can search Newspaper Navigator by keyword and then narrow your results by date and or the U.S. state in which the newspaper was published. There is a highly detailed tutorial on how to use the LOC's Newspaper Navigator right on its search page. In general, the Newspaper Navigator is easy to use. That said, it's important to note that the search results are based on the tags associated with the images in the newspapers as opposed to the words on the pages themselves.

By the way, here's the story of my favorite childhood fishing pond. 

This post originally appeared on FreeTech4Teachers.com. If you see it elsewhere, it has been used without permission. Sites that steal my (Richard Byrne's) work include CloudComputin, Today Headline, and 711Web.

Bibcitation's New Chrome Extension Makes It Easy to Create Citations

A few weeks ago I published an overview of seven free tools that help students create bibliographies. Bibcitation was one of the tools in that list. This week Bibcitation introduced a new Chrome extension that makes it easier than ever for students to cite webpages and build bibliographies. 

Bibcitation's Chrome extension will generate a citation for any webpage that a student needs to include in his or her bibliography. To do that students simply have to click on the Bibcitation extension while viewing a webpage and select the citation style that they want to use. Students can then copy the text for the citation with just one click and paste it wherever they need to use it. Students can also click the "Add to Bibcitation.com" button within the extension to send the citation directly to the bibliographies they're working on. 

Applications for Education
One of the things that I have always liked about Bibcitation is that it provides support for dozens of citation styles in addition to the standard MLA and APA formats. Bibcitation is also easy to edit if students do find a mistake with the formatting. Finally, Bibcitation doesn't require students to register in order to use it. Completed Bibliographies can be downloaded as a document, as a BibTex file, or as HTML.

This post originally appeared on FreeTech4Teachers.com. If you see it elsewhere, it has been used without permission. Sites that steal my (Richard Byrne's) work include CloudComputin, Today Headline, and 711Web.

How to Add Audio to TeacherMade Activities - And Integrate Google Classroom

Disclosure: TeacherMade is an advertiser on FreeTech4Teachers.com

As I wrote last week, TeacherMade recently introduced a bunch of new features for turning your PDFs and Word documents into online activities for your students. When I looked at the list of new features the two that stood out to me were adding audio to PDFs and integrating Google Classroom into my TeacherMade account. 

As I demonstrate in this video, adding audio to TeacherMade activities can be a good way to make directions more accessible to students. It's also a good way to add audio-based prompts. 

Integrating Google Classroom into my TeacherMade account makes it easier for students to quickly find the activities I've created for students. Furthermore, it makes it easy to add automatically scored TeacherMade assignments into my Google Classroom records. Those features are also demonstrated in the video that is embedded below.