Asking questions, polling, surveys, they are all viable and used within the classroom, but how can teachers easily and effectively create these? One specific tool is the Google Form, or GForm. Found within the GAFE environment. It is really a quick way to create and continue a conversation with your students, parents, and community.
Students and teachers love visuals, they love pictures, so why not combine story creation with some random photos? What fun!
Teachers can easily model this via Five Card Flickr or even print off visuals and have small groups of students choose 5 of them. Or use another source like 2Learn Image Gallery, Discovery Education images, images within LearnAlberta.
So how do you play?
With Five Card Flickr, students are “dealt” five random photos for each draw. Their task is them to select each one to build a set of images, that grouped together, tell a story in pictures. Once this is complete, add a title and brief explanation. If you are online in Five Card Flickr, save the story there!
If you are in the GAFE environment, why not send a group of students to a specific site to grab 5 photos and insert them into a Google Document? Or have them use the Research Tool which also adds the citation from the photos selected. From there you can keep the images in a certain order, title it and type up a brief explanation (I usually say to have one sentence per image). Students can either type, Voice Type or use RW4GC VoiceNote to provide the title and explanation.
Using Adobe Voice iOS app or YouTube Capture app, students can even make a video. See an example below:
Classroom Uses
introduce a new topic
finalize what has been learned
random photos to work on literacy skills
a different way to connect with Current Events
collaborative storytelling that can then be combined to create class storybooks
have each students choose one photo (make sure they are all different), create a sentence and then have them group together as five individuals to see how they could fit their current image and sentence into a story.
One of my favorite tools is Pear Deck because it allows a teacher to use any PowerPoint, Google Presentation, or PDF and incorporate different student activities to check for understanding and engagement. Pear Deck is free for students and teachers (freemium) and it fully integrates with Google Apps for Education, especially connecting directly with Google Classroom.
You can sign in/create your Pear Deck account with your GAFE account. Start to create a new interactive lesson by selecting “New Deck” and then create a slideshow from scratch or import a PowerPoint, Google Presentation, or PDF. You can easily go through and edit the slides by adding free response (text), free response (number), and multiple choice questions within the slide.
Introduction to Pear Deck
Check out how you can use it with GClassroom
And Student Takeaways are a phenomenal way to have “notes” stay with them in their GDrive
This is day two of this week’s 5×5 learning. Another online formative assessment tool that I really like to use in K-12 classrooms is the infectious online tool, Kahoot.
Below Megan shares how to create your own Kahoot questions, however you can also take a look at the thousands of Kahoot Quizzes already created and edit from those ones. It’s quite an exciting assessment tool, very competitive. Each student or a small group of students will need access to a WiFi-connected device in order to participate.
Teachers go to https://getkahoot.com/ in order to get started. And students will go to kahoot.it (this will be shown on your quiz while students are signing in). I remind staff and students to use their first name when joining the quiz (no need for any silly names or I will delete them from playing).
This week I’ll be showcasing various online formative assessment tools that can be used in the classroom. 5×5 refers to the 5 minutes of time you’ll need to read and check out the tool for each of the following 5 days. Have fun, try them out, share with students and colleagues.
Sometimes you just want to ask a quick question to your students. It’s very easy with Answer Garden. Teachers just need to create a question or input a topic on the website and then students respond via any online device.
Watch the video tutorial below to see how easy it is:
Day 5 sees you either finishing your CYOA and then sharing it online or if you have completed it, taking a look at a few other ways that CYOA can influence learning in a different manner:
Museums from around the world are now showcasing their wares virtually. Why not have students create their own Virtual Museums of their learning on a specific topic/subject? For example:
Day 4 of 5 has you taking your plan, understanding how linking within GSlides works and putting it all together!
Make it a simple adventure that you individually create OR have fun with a few friends/classmates/colleagues and collaboratively come up with a fantastic adventure!
You can start with a brand new GSlides presentation or you can copy the Linking Slides example from HERE.
Once you’ve finished, feel free to share your adventure by adding it to the comment section below.
Day 3 of 5 will get your “linking” google muscles all worked up.
Open up a new GSlides and then watch the Linking Slides in Google Presentations video below. Take a moment to practice linking at least two slides. It’s pretty simple once you look at your plan.
Day 2 of 5 – get your game face on and plan out an adventure!
Yes, today is the day to storm your brain cells, write down all your ideas. Use whatever means to do this. It could be a quick write using poster paper, a placemat, post-it notes, padlet, educreations, google drawings (example 1, example 2, lucid chart, gliffy or even sketchnoting.
Now separate your ideas into some different choices of adventure. Take time either today or tomorrow to develop more of these choices.
This is the first of five days that concentrate on developing Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOS) stories.
The original CYOA from the 1980’s was a series of children’s books where each story allowed students to make a choice as to how the story would play out. Nowadays, these can continue to be found in print copies at your local public and school libraries while new adventures are found virtually like Assassin’s Creed, Coldplay Ink, and Dragon Age Inquisition.
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