Friday, September 25, 2020

Friday Matinee: How to be an Effective Blended Teacher


Good afternoon!  It's almost the weekend and time for the Friday Matinee.  This week I'm sharing a video with you that is focused on K-12, but there's a lot of great ideas for teaching effectively in a hybrid learning environment.  I suggest that you watch at least the first half of the video.


Emma Pass, the presenter on this webinar, is currently writing a book called The Hybrid Teacher and she's shared a lot of information in a PDF with excerpts from the book. 

She mentions several of the Google tools that she uses with her students, but she also uses PadletFlipgrid (which was actually developed for higher ed), and Parlay.  Each of these are great tools for teaching remotelly.  I've never used Parlay and found this blog post as a great place to get started with it.

This is one of the premier edtech conferences to attend and this year it is virtual and FREE.  I highly suggest that you register and try to attend just one session a day.  I think you'll find that your mind will be blown! ðŸ¤¯

❓ Another resource I thought I would share is from Jake Miller and is a collection of technology tutorial links for teachers with another collection for students and parents.  

Friday, September 18, 2020

Friday Matinee: Using Pear Deck for Engagement & Formative Assessment


It actually feels like fall outside and it looks like it is going to be a great weekend to do something outside.  If you have a little time either over the weekend or sometime next week, take a look at
 Pear Deck.  It works with Google Slides (or PowerPoint) to help you add active learning and formative assessment to your presentations with learners of all ages.  There's a free and paid version of Pear Deck and I suggest you start with the basic free version.  You can add interactive questions, polls, quizzes, and formative assessments right into your presentation.  You can control the pace of the class so that everyone (including those who are attending on Zoom) will be on the same slide at the same time.  Or you can enable your students to work through the presentation on their own.  Let's take a look by checking out these links:





And there's lots of tutorials and blog posts on the Pear Deck website!

Friday, September 11, 2020

Friday Matinee: Using EDpuzzle to Improve Video Engagement

Want to know who watched a video you posted as an assignment?  EDpuzzle is an online program that allows you to create interactive video lessons by embedding questions and comments into videos from YouTube, Khan Academy, National Geographic, TED Talks, and more.  When these videos are assigned through EDpuzzle, you can see how much time a student spent on the video and how well they did on the questions.  It even gives you superpowers that prevent your students from skipping right to the questions!

The basic, free plan allows you to create 20 videos and share them with your class as an assignment.  To learn more about how to use EDpuzzle, I'm including a playlist of 8 videos, but you can skip #7 on integrating EDpuzzle with Google Classroom.  Want to know how much the students learned about a topic?  Let THEM create an EDpuzzle as a student project.


Want more information on using it with Canvas?  Go here and click on Using EDpuzzle With Canvas.

This app is being used by K-12 schools and universities for online learning.  You can even add screencasts you create.

Friday, September 4, 2020

Friday Matinee: Using Google Slides: Jigsaw Activity



 
It's Friday - and it's a long weekend!  That gives you plenty of time to create a Jigsaw activity to use with your class in the near future.  What is a Jigsaw activity?  It breaks your students into groups and your topic into pieces, allowing for each group to work on a given subtopic.  The students then bring their part of the topic puzzle back to the group to put it all together.  You can use the attached Google Slides Jigsaw file as a template to create your own Jigsaw activity.  The video shows you how to edit the file and make it your own. 

The Jigsaw template: http://bit.ly/SlidesJigsaw

The video on how to edit the template:  https://youtu.be/MGTwR2HtX3c

This activity can easily be used during remote learning!  All of your students can edit the file at the same time and communicate with their group using messaging or a video call.  Be aware though that if they are going this during class time that they will have to move to different places to not have audio feedback from multiple microphones and still maintain their social distancing.