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The Latest in Tech, Tools and Toys for Teachers.  Lesson Plans, Classroom resources and ideas for busy teachers.  iPad Apps and Android Apps for teachers and students.

Six ways to teach smarter with Google Forms

To the uninitiated Google Forms might seem like a poor cousin to the spreadsheet, presentation and word processing apps on offer, as it doesn’t fit the model of the traditional Office Suite.

Google Forms however opens up a whole collection of new teaching learning opportunities through it’s capacity to accumulate custom data in large quantities and then represent that data instantaneously in either a number of graphical or text based formats.

Teachers around the Globe are tapping in to this resource to make their job easier and find out a great deal more about their students with reliance on technology as simple as a mobile phone.

Here are some ways in which Google forms are being used by teachers.

Create an online reading record

Put a link on your class blog to an online reading record.  You don’t really need to make it too different from your paper based reading log such as name, title of book, pages read and comments.  It will save some paper and printing costs and be available as a digital format when writing reports.

Brainstorming with Wordle.

Got a class full of students who you want to focus on a specific point of view?  Create a simple task such as this.  “Separated by  a comma write down three words which you think sum up the message of “The Great Gatsby”.  You have 1 minute to do so.

Pop up a link for them to access and answer on their mobile device.  Then simply copy and paste all the responses into Wordle and you have a class focus on the topic in a beautiful easy to read and share format.

Create a classroom test.

Create form that has multiple choice or short answer questions to a topic you have been learning in class.  You can quickly view the spreadsheet to save correction time.  See the Video below for a tutorial.

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Assignment tracker.

When students say they have saved a piece of work such as an assignment to a website or school server get them save the hyperlink to the location of the file on a google form so you don’t have to waste time looking for it and assuming it is there.

Spelling Tests

It doesn’t get much simpler than this.  Create a form with name and ten or so short text boxes for students to type in their weekly spelling words.

Prior Learning Assessment form

Create a Google Form asking a few simple questions about the topic you are intending to teach.  It will give you a great insight into where to start and direct your teaching. 

This may have taken a session on it’s own to do in the past.

 

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101 ideas for using technology in the classroom

Sometimes it is difficult to put the technology in your classroom into an educational context.  This document contains many ideas for using a PC or mac in education.  

Unfortunately much of it was written prior to the uprise of the iPad so there is no reference to it but nonetheless there is plenty of relevant content for teachers and students. 

Many of the ideas come from the Victorian department of Education, Australia and can be downloaded here. 

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5 Google Docs Tutorial Videos for Busy Teachers

Google Gooru is a great site for teachers to check out if they need to know more about integrating Google into their workflow and accessing all of those great collaboration tools which exist within Google Apps.

Below are 5 well organised tutorials that will make your understanding of Google Docs greater and allow you get more out of this great suite of tools.

Enjoy.

How to transfer ownership of a Google Doc

Learn how to transfer ownership of a Doc as a user or an admin. An ownership transfer can be performed as a user within Google Drive, while Admins can perform this task in the Google Apps Control Panel, or by using a 3rd party tool. In this video we highlight FlashPanel.

Introduction to Google Plus Circles

Google Plus Circles are one of the best ways to share and receive social content with the right people. A staple of G+, Circles allow you to segment your friends, family and co-workers into easy to manage groups.

For example, if you’d like to share an interesting article with people you work with, you can set-up a circle with all of your important contacts.

How to Print Your Google Calendar

Posted on: May 03, 2012 | 42 comments

Gooru Tip - Maximize the video player and adjust video quality for optimal viewing!

Printing your Google Calendar is super easy. All you have to do is:

  1. Go to the More dropdown in the top right
  2. Click print
  3. You’ll have two options – print or save as .pdf
  4. You’ll have multiple formatting options, including the orientation of the calendar (portrait or landscape)
  5. You can show or not show events that you have declined
  6. You can choose black and white if you are printing in black and white, for better contrast
  7. Hit print or save as .pdf and you’re done!

How to add your template to the Template Gallery


1. Open up Google Drive

2. Check off the Google Doc that you’d like to save as your template

3. Click “More” on the top

4. Select “Submit to template gallery”

Adding a table of Contents to a Google Doc


In this video, I show you how to add a table of contents to a Google Doc in two different ways. One way is by changing the specified text to “headlines” and then inserting a Table of Contents, which automatically creates links to your headlines. The other way is by making your headlines into bookmarks and then inserting links to your bookmarks at the beginning of the document.

The fact that you can create a table of contents on a Doc is one of the many benefits of using Google Docs and the fact that it is all on the internet. Once you watch this video, you’ll see how easy it is to add a table of contents to any Google Doc.

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