Links You’ll Love
Loupe Collage is an awesome website that takes your photos and makes them into a shape. You choose the pictures, then you choose the shape, image, or word you would like to shape. You can also use it to make a card. So fun!
Google Slides can be a great resource for creating an interactive eBook. Read more about it here.
Tuzzit is a collaborative mindmapping tool with easy to use templates. You set up the canvas, and then students can join and add text, stamps, images and more.
Links You’ll Love
Like its sister website, haggadot.com, Custom and Craft gives you the tools to create a customized service. Just create an account and click “Create a service,” and begin!
Need to type something quickly in Hebrew? Pop over to Lexilogos for an easy, web-based keyboard.
If you’re looking to learn something new about EdTech and Google Apps, check out ControlAltAchieve. Free webinars are posted as well as blog posts with tips and tricks.
Links You’ll Love
Edsurge has a great opinion piece on raising kids in the age of tech. Stanford Dean of Freshmen Julie Lythcott-Haims offers some surprising thoughts on micromanaging teens’ social media accounts and more.
Quizizz is fun free site where you can generate multiplayer quizzes. Students can participate using mobile devices or laptops.
I love Google forms! If you’re not embracing Google forms, read this post to see why you should!
Did you know that you can use your laptop as a “transmitter” to beam from your iPad to a SMART Board? Just plug your laptop into the SMART Board and use an application called Reflector to mirror what’s on your iPad to your laptop (and therefore the SMART Board). You won’t have the interactive features, but it’s a great way to share what’s on your iPad without having to switch dongles.
Links You’ll Love
Pear Deck is a formative assessment tool/presentation tool/student participation tool that you run from within your Chrome browser, or from a tablet. It’s similar to NearPod and can use existing Google slide presentations to create interactive lessons.
QR codes! Flipped classrooms! Comics and games! The presentations from last week’s Google On Air conference are available on YouTube.
Here are some great suggestions for keeping your Google drive nice and tidy.
Here’s a great article about helping students read images. So much of what our students see online is image-intense these days – it’s important to help them with this skill! Check it out.
Google’s news archive is terrific if you want to search through newspaper archives. Start here and you can search by topic or you can browse by newspaper. This is a great primary search tool!
Here’s a great video that’s worth fifteen minutes of your time. Did you know that you could connect a Google document with more than one folder? HOW COOL IS THAT? This video is a great explanation of how folders work in Google Drive and in Google Mail. There’s some useful information about understand how shared folders work, too.
Project procrastination. We’ve all done it. Here’s a good article about how to help your students avoid it.
Links You’ll Love
Here’s a conference that you don’t have to travel to attend, don’t need to fight crowds, don’t have to eat mediocre food, don’t have to pay for, and (best of all) can participate in your PJs! Google is hosting an on air conference called, appropriately, Education on Air on May 8th and 9th. Would I suggest you “tune in” on Shabbat? Of course not! All events will be recorded for viewing after the fact.
Commonlit is a teacher-sourced collection of discussion questions and corresponding texts that you can sort by reading level. For instance, under the question “What are the costs and benefits of technology?” there were quite a few impressive texts from which to choose.
Here’s an interesting article on giving student feedback in the digital world.
If you’re looking for fun math activities for K-6, check out Matific. You choose from Episodes (brief, interactive videos), interactive worksheets, or playlists, which are collections of videos. There are teacher guides with background information and presentation resources as well.
Here’s a thought-provoking article about digital natives and what they’re not learning in school about using the web.
Formative is a website where you can, well, create formative assessments. What’s pretty slick about it is that you can view your students’ answers in real time, grade on the fly, and track progress. It’s available for free.
If you have an hour to spare, check out this terrific webinar from teacher Vicki Davis on Differentiating Instruction with Technology. I was blown away by some of the things she talked about.
Links You’ll Love
If you’re a Google Classroom user, check out this post to learn about some of the updates to this awesome Google app.
When I hear “place mats,” I think of dinner, don’t you? This blog post, though, at discusses place mats as an instructional model used to combine independent thinking with collaboration. The post gives step-by-step instructions to use GAFE to create a collaborative template. Very nice!
I’ve mentioned GoNoodle before, but I wanted to remind you about this great source for movement videos. They’ve added an indoor recess section with videos that last up to 19 minutes. There are Zumba activities, secret handshake partner exercises, and brain boosters for great short movement breaks as well.
Versal is a new platform to create online learning experiences. You can embed video, create quizzes, and add timelines. This is an amazing and robust website. I’m thinking about creating a workshop to explore this over the summer – let me know if you’re interested.
Links You’ll Love
FakeiPhoneText and iFakeText are a simple little websites where you can enter text and the site will render an image that looks like it’s a text. This would be a great way for students to create fake texts between two historical characters. Ifaketext even lets you choose your carrier.
Need an easy way to create an animated video? Check out Explee. You can add images, text, music and voiceovers. Movies export to YouTube or can be downloaded.
Design thinking – tackling a problem at a deep level – is something you can do with your students at any grade level. This article gives some valuable tips on how to do it with iPads.
You know that there have been dozens of times when you thought, “if only I could create a Google form from this Google doc that I have…” If you install the Google add-on Doc to Form, you can do that! Check it out!
Links You’ll Love
The Public Domain Project is another source for free public domain images and media files. Caution – this site also featured images that are available for purchase, so be sure to search using the search bar (not the category links at the top).
Interested in flipping your classroom? Here’s a nice post at with a video and an overview of tools you might find helpful.
Power Google Tip: Let’s say you share a Google document with your students or colleagues, but you want them to make a copy of it and then edit that one. You could certainly use Classroom for this, but here’s a great tip if you just want to do it through Google drive and not use Classroom. See the URL at the top of your document? Send that to your users, but change “edit” at the end to “copy.” You’ll still have to share it so your users can access it, but this way everyone will get a copy of your original in their own drive. See this post for more information.
Links You’ll Love
Power Google Tip: Need to look something up or search for an image while working in Google docs on a computer (not iOS)? This is terrific – go to Tools > Research to open a Research pane. There you can search the dictionary, for an image, among quotes and more. You can even specify that you want to find images that are copyright free. Slick!
Movenote is a slick website where you can easily create movies. You can upload existing content like PDF files or jpgs, or you can record using the computer’s camera. You can link it with your Google account to access your Google drive docs, too. Movies can be shared, downloaded or embedded. There’s a free iOS app, too!
I still have nightmares about the time I was in charge of timing students during a Lag BaOmer relay race. I just couldn’t keep those kids straight! Clearly, I needed the Meeting Monopolizer app, which Daniel shared with me this week. You can read more about this 99 cent wonder here. It was originally designed to track which meeting-goer monopolizes your meetings, but apparently people have found more and more uses for it, including timing relays and tracking class participation.
How to use Google Forms to create a merged product
Like lots of schools, we have a tracking sheet where we, well, track some kids in academic areas, like missing homework, test grades, etc. For some time we have used a PDF document that the teachers filled out electronically. With our move to GAFE. I wanted to create a Google Form that would then merge into a separate document for each child.
With autoCrat I’m able to do just that.
I started with creating what I wanted the finished product to look like. Alternatively, you can start with the form itself. Let’s say we’re tracking a student’s missing homework assignments. The finished document might look like this:
Once you know what you want to communicate, you can create the form requesting the information.
Now, take a look at the headers at the top of the response sheet:
So now you want to add those column headers to the merge file in the appropriate places. The modified merge file looks like this:
So now we’ve entered some data into the Google Sheet via the Google Form, and here’s what the Sheet looks like:
To create the merge, you need to use autoCrat. You can find it here. Once it’s installed, go to Add ons and Launch it.
Choosing a New Merge Job allows you to set parameters like the template to use, the naming convention, and output (PDF or Google Doc). You also need to make sure that the merge tags match your spreadsheet headers. Click on Run merge to create your files.
The only thing I don’t like is that it pulls the date including a timestamp even if I don’t want it, but I’ve remedied that by using timestamp and making sure to format it to date only. But other than that, it works great and now we have PDF files to send to the parents!
About
Debbie Harris is the director of educational technology at the Sager Solomon Schechter Day School in Northbrook, IL. Involved in Jewish education for over thirty years, she has an education degree from Northwestern University with a concentration in instructional media and a master’s degree in professional Jewish studies from Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership. She is skilled in using and teaching desktop publishing, video editing, presentation and animation software; and consults and presents regularly on integrating technology into Judaic studies. Her students podcast, blog, edit video and create claymations. She co-chaired the technology track for CAJE 33 in Vermont, is a SMART Certified Trainer for SMART Notebook, and a 2011 recipient of the Grinspoon-Steinhardt Award for Excellence in Jewish Education.
When not learning, teaching or writing about technology, Debbie likes to sketchnote and craft. She likes to knit, do calligraphy, sew, watercolor, paint fabric and just generally play with fun toys like scrapbooking supplies and anything with texture. Debbie travels to California every summer to paint tallitot with high school aged campers. Finally, she is incredibly proud of her two daughters; Lori, who teaches English at a community college; and Allie, who is the director of the URJ’s Camp Newman in California.
Look for her at:
Debbie Does Desktop
Flickr
Twitter
Diigo
YouTube
Ravelry
Email Debbie here
MuseForJews 