Arts Education

One of my most popular posts is a comparison of three quizzy webtools - Kahoot, Socrative, and Quizizz. For a long time, I have been meaning to write a similar post about Google rubric add-ons. As my spring break is winding down, this seems like the right time to do it. First, a word or two about rubrics. I am a believer. Big time. There aren't many things that I go all preachy about (I hope), but rubrics are a non-negotiable with me for several reasons. When they are well-designed, they help students understand the expectations of an assignment and how they can improve the skill that is being assessed. Rubrics also can standardize the grading of a particular type of assignment so that all students completing the assignment can expect the same grade no matter who holds the rubric. That said, I love these great Google add-ons that allow teachers to use rubrics in a paperless way. In this post, I will describe three add-ons briefly and compare them in a chart below. I like them all ...

My children have been quick to remind me this week that this is the worst Spring Break ever. Everyone else gets to go somewhere and we are at home. Today, though, we spent a fair amount of time - at home - getting to know Ozobot . I am leading a coding camp for kids going into grades 4, 5, and 6 for a week this summer and the Ozobots will be featured on at least one of the days. In preparation for the camp, I compared several codable robots and Ozobot won out. Here's why. It's plug-n-play right out of the box. My almost ten year old daughter loves art, so I knew Ozo would grab her attention because it follows lines that you can draw with ordinary markers. When the lines change color, the Ozobot's light changes color too. There are many color combinations that cause the Ozobot to spin or turn or flash and so on. Very basic coding with markers and paper. My daughter started with a colored line design, but then created a sign that Ozobot could trace. Here is the video: Then...

Last weekend I mentioned in a post that I had taught a Google class that finished with a "what's the one thing you can't wait to share" Slides show. A couple of the class participants selected shortening URLs as their one thing. A URL is a Uniform Resource Locator or, in regular words, the web address you type to get to a website. A URL shortener allows users to take a long, crazy web address and shorten it down to fewer characters that are easier to type and remember. For teachers, this means we can get down to business faster. In the class, I used the Google URL shortener, goo.gl. Since the class is about Google, I feel compelled to use as many Google tools as possible. There are many other URL shorteners , though, so I thought I would compare a few of my favorites in chart form. As you will see, they all have slightly different attributes. Which one you choose will depend on what you need. Here is a bonus one-sentence "loves me, loves me not" summary of ...

An intriguing email arrived in my inbox this weekend from ck-12.org . If you aren't familiar with ck-12.org , you should take a look, especially if you teach math or science or coach teachers who do. They offer free resources for teachers to use in order to try to personalize and maximize learning for all students. The email this weekend invited me to check out the Limiting Reactant PLIX . Not sure what that was, so I gave it a whirl. PLIX is an acronym for Play Learn Interact Explore. This is the latest addition by ck-12, a set of interactive tasks in math and science. They are sorted by discipline. The math topics include algebra, geometry, probability, statistics, analysis, and calculus. The science topics include Earth science, physical science, life science, biology, chemistry, and physics. Each topic has many interactives; I counted 61 for calculus alone! The lessons within chemistry are numerous and varied. Some are simple and straightforward topics, like accuracy vs precis...

I have written about Nearpod - and how much I love it - many times before. Nearpod is a presentation platform that allows for interactive feedback activities to make lessons engaging for students and teachers. I am a Nearpod Author and Nearpod PioNear (PD Specialist).  As an author, I have written 17 presentations that are available in the Nearpod library - some are free and some cost $3. Some of my lessons are focused on content; others - like the one pictured here - focuses on the process of science with an experiment you can do in your classroom using my provided information or your own materials. This is Nearpod Authors Week, so author's content in the store is 25% off. That's Buy 3, Get 1 Free . If you are a chemistry teacher, you might want to check out my content. If you teach something else, check out all of the amazing resources waiting for you in the content store .

If I were to name my gateway webtool, the tool that got me started in trying anything and staying informed in what is available and useful to educators, it would have to be the social bookmarking service at diigo.com . If you haven't ever heard of or tried diigo , the service allows you to save your bookmarks to the cloud so they are available from any computer on the planet. When you bookmark to the service, you can add tags to make them easy to search and find later and a blurb about why you saved it. As powerful as all that is, diigo goes a step further and also allows users to follow each other and join groups to share bookmarks. When I bookmark, I choose whether I am bookmarking only to my account or sharing my bookmark with one of several groups I have joined. Diigo actually does a whole lot more than facilitate social bookmarking. You can annotate and highlight webpages and PDFs, add sticky notes, and create a pile of things to read later. This is a great service with a robu...

At the end of a two-day Google workshop I teach at a local college, I ask the participants to collaboratively create a presentation where each person makes one slide that shows the thing they can't wait to show someone else. I typically make a slide too because each time I teach the class, I find something new that I really like. This weekend that was the Google Docs Add-on called Highlight Tool . The Highlight Tool was created by a high school student to help a teacher who wanted a better highlighter for Google Docs. When the add-on is installed, the user can select different colors and make a key that shows what each color represents.  Then, while reading, highlighting can be done in several different colors. For example, a paper's thesis could be highlighted in one color and the supporting details could be highlighted in a different color. To try out the highlighter, I started with a Google Docs version of the ISTE NETS-T and highlighted of textual examples of different tea...