Jul 122022
 

Permalink: http://bit.ly/googlesheetsninja

Ninja icon

You’ve used Google Forms to quickly collect data. The automatic summaries and charts are great, but what’s next? How can you see beyond simple averages and totals to make better decisions and gain true insights? In this session we will learn more about some powerful features in Forms and Sheets like data validation, data filters, and pivot tables. We’ll also take a look at some useful add-ons that will allow you to do some amazing things for any classroom. Read more if you’d like to learn more, or follow along if you are in my session today! Continue reading »

Aug 062018
 

Permalink: bit.ly/GSuiteBBQ


G Suite BBQ Image

Thanks for joining us today to grill up some learning and knowledge with some basic G Suite Apps. I want to know what YOU want and need to learn, so let’s start off with a quick little Google Form. Please mark a few topics under each Google Tool that you would like to know more about and dig a little deeper into.

Google Docs & Drive BBQ Survey

For your reference down the road, please refer to a few helpful posts on my site on G Suite Tools:

Jul 112018
 
Utah Rural Schools Association (URSA) logoThank you so much for joining me for one (or more) of my sessions at the 2018 URSA Conference. All of the presentation information, links and resources for my sessions are linked from this page (and from the URSA tab above). If you have any questions or comments during or after the conference, you can connect with me @sedcclint on Twitter or on my Facebook Page. Use the #URSA18 hashtag on Twitter to join the Conference conversation.

Wednesday, July 11
  • 3:40 pm: Slice and Dice Data Like a Ninja: Advanced Google Forms and Sheets, ED 339 
    • You’ve used Google Forms to quickly collect data. The automatic summaries and charts are great, but what’s next? How can you see beyond simple averages and totals to make better decisions and gain true insights? Join me to learn more about some powerful features in Forms and Sheets like data validation, data filters, and pivot tables. We’ll also take a look at some useful add-ons that will allow you to do some amazing things for any classroom.
Thursday, July 12
  • 11:35 am: Playground: LocoXtreme Robots & micro:bit, Sharwan Smith Student Center, Brian Head A & B (repeats)
  • 1:30 pm: Playground: LocoXtreme Robots & micro:bit, Sharwan Smith Student Center, Brian Head A & B (repeat)
Friday, July 13
  • 9:00 am: Reach the 4 C’s of 21st Century Learning with HyperDocs, GC 306
    • We all want our students to be creative, collaborative, communicators and critical thinkers, but are you enabling your students to learn this way? HyperDocs just might help get you there. HyperDocs are to worksheets as what Instagram is to passing notes in class. They are interactive, visually engaging Google Docs that allow students explore and engage in topics in depth, and at their own pace. Join me today to learn more about using and crafting HyperDocs for your students, and make the jump to hyperspace with your instruction!
  • 10:10 am: Keep It Together With Google Keep, GC 306
    • You may not have heard of Google Keep, but you NEED to know about it. Keep is an incredible and easy to use tool for organizing all of the bits of information busy educators tend to collect whenever, wherever, that always seems to get lost. Keep allows you to bring together notes, links, photos – really anything you can grab with your computer, tablet and phone! Beyond gathering and organizing your digital ‘stuff,’ you can share your notes, collaborate with others, set reminders… even drag-n-drop text and photos into your Google Docs! Join me today and make Google Keep an integral part of your daily workflow.
Jul 142016
 

Permalink: http://goo.gl/F7ayZK

Google Classroom IconDoes your district use Google Apps for Education (GAFE) for email, Docs and Drive? Do you have access to Chromebooks in your classroom? Do you use Google Docs with your students on a weekly basis? Then this is the session for you!

We will dive deep into Google Classroom. Classroom is Google’s version of an LMS (Learning Management System) that is designed to work incredibly well with teachers and schools who are using the Google Apps for Education platform. It has many features similar to Canvas, but it is entirely free to use. If you are in a district who is using Google Tools and you are using Google Docs to collect student work, Classroom is what you need. We will also take time to dig deep into some of the great features and tools available to you and your students in Google Docs for research, revision, dictation and more.

Here are the links and resources you’ll need for our session today:

Jul 012016
 

At the ISTE 2016 Conference in Denver this week, Google announced a few new tools for teachers using Google Classroom and Chromebooks that will make life much easier and better.

First, Google has added a new Chrome app for teachers called Google Cast for Education, which allows students to broadcast their Chromebook screens to the teacher’s computer, WITHOUT the need for any extra hardware or stuff to buy. No more trying in vein to get a Chromecast or Apple TV to work in your classroom! If your computer is hooked up to your projector/interactive white board, then any student’s screen can be shared with you and the rest of the class! Alternatively, you can “cast” your screen to an individual student for some one-on-one help (if the student is running the Google Cast for Education app).

  • To get started, teachers need the Google Cast for Education Chrome app. GAFE Admins can pre-install this for all of the teachers in their domain.
  • Your students need the Google Cast extension. GAFE Admins can do the same for this student extension.
  • If you are trying this out before school starts in August/September, make sure to get the Google Cast (Beta) extension.

Second, a feature that I have been telling teachers was coming for a while (my bets have paid off!). Google has added the ability to create quizzes with grading and feedback features in Google Forms. No more messing with add-ons to do quick quizzes! It’s completely supported in Classroom, so you can now build your quizzes in Forms and assign them in Classroom. When students submit the form, it’s automatically graded and turned in. Learn how to make quizzes now (YouTube).

If you’d like to keep up with what Google is doing for Education, make sure to follow the Google for Education blog.

Let me know @sedcclint on Twitter, or leave a comment below, if you have tried either of these new tools and how they are (or will be) helping you in your Google-ified classroom. I’ve been using both of these tools today, and they are terrific!

Nov 202013
 

Google Forms is an amazing tool. Before it came along, getting and organizing data from lots of different people was not an easy task, or you had to pay a service like SurveyMonkey some dough if you wanted to ask more than 10 questions. With the continual iteration that is Google, Docs and other services are always getting better, right? Well, not in all cases…

After you have set up a Google Form, it’s not very clear how to get to that data as Google has it now. It used to be that when you created a Form, a corresponding Spreadsheet was created for the results. I guess not everyone liked that. They just wanted the form to summarize the results, and in a lot of survey type cases, that’s all you need. If you want the actual data, now you have to set up a spreadsheet for each form.

Here’s how…

1. Find your form in your Drive and open it to edit it.
2. Click ‘Choose response destination’ near the top of the Form window:
GForm_Responses_1
3. In the window that appears, keep ‘New spreadsheet’ selected, give your spreadsheet a good name, and click ‘Create’:
GForm_Responses_2
4. This will take you back to editing your Form. Now, in the place of ‘Choose response destination’ you’ll see ‘View Responses’. Clicking this will open up the results in the spreadsheet you just created in a new window/tab.
GForm_Responses_3
5. Also, you’ll now see a document in your Drive for your Form, and a new Spreadsheet with the good name you gave it. ;):
GForm_Responses_4
May 032012
 

Permalink: http://goo.gl/kltfg

Yesterday, Google facilitated the Education On Air Conference, a virtual conference for educators focused on and around Google Apps for Education, featuring their master teachers. I sat in on a few sessions – Managing Digital Portfolios w/ Google Tools from Kern Kelley, and The Paperless Classroom with Google Docs from Eric Curts. Both sessions were great, and both spelled out and reinforced a great process or workflow for teachers and students to easily and successfully use Google Docs for every day work, for group projects, and for digital portfolios.

I have a few teachers that have gone down this road of using Google Docs exclusively for student work, and their Docs/Drive inboxes have exploded with student work – and has been a struggle for them to manage. What I learned yesterday, and what I’ll outline below will make their lives easier, and will help me make the lives of the teachers that will follow this path much easier from the start.

Here’s the bullet points for success, and then I’ll explain each in detail below:

  • Digitize student work, and store it all in Google Docs/Drive
  • Students create collections or folders for their work, and share that folder with their teachers.
  • Teachers create collections or folders for documents to share with students
  • Teachers create an ‘Assignment Hand-In’ Form for students to submit both information about the assignment as well as the link to the assignment.

With this workflow in place, it’s fast and seamless for students to turn in their work, and for teachers to manage and grade the mountain of student work.

Now, let’s see how it all works…

Digitize Student Work

No matter what a student does, it needs to end up in a digital form, and then saved in their Google Docs/Drive space. All of your students will obviously need a Gmail account – either directly from Google or through a school/district Google Apps domain.

Digitization is a breeze for any sort of document, presentation or spreadsheet by working directly in Google Docs, but what about math homework or artwork? Enter the cell phone camera or a web-cam connected to an accessible computer! Students snap a photo of the work, and save that file in Google Drive/Docs. If it’s a skill in PE, acting in a play, or any other physical activity, capture a video and upload it to YouTube. Anyting that a student does can be quickly and easily digitized with the right tools.

Student Folders/Collections

With all of their work available in Google Docs, students will have a complete record of their own learning. Their best work can/should eventually end up in a Digital Portfolio, but let’s just stick with the Paperless Classroom workflow for now. Students create a folder or collection for each of their subjects (which can be later organized by school year) with a standard naming scheme: Subject/Period – Last, First or something similar. Then, they share this folder with their teacher with edit rights. Now, when it comes time to ‘hand in’ their homework, all they need to do is to drag the file/document from their Google Docs list to the appropriate folder. Since the folder is shared, the file is automatically shared with the teacher!

On the teacher end, they can organize these shared folders in Google Docs however they’d like – by school year, subject, or period. Just create a folder, and drag the shared student folders into it – since you used a naming convention, it’s all automatically organized alphabetically by the subject or student name. No more long, long, long list of student work!

Folders/Collections for Teachers

Obviously, teachers often need to hand out assignments or documents to students. To help make this instant and paperless, teachers should make two folders to share with their students.

The first is a ‘Hand Out’ folder with View Only rights. Here’s where you’ll put documents and/or assignment templates for students to access and view – and you don’t need to share it with EVERY student EVERY time. If it’s an assignment template, the students can use ‘File –> Save a copy’ to save the assignment outline to their own Google Docs to edit. Make sure that if you do share a document this way that students rename it from ‘Copy of Assignment 1’ to ‘Last, First Assignment 1’ to make viewing/grading easier later.

The other folder is a folder that will contain editible documents for collaborative papers and presentations that you’d like all of your students to be able to access and edit. Share it with your students with their email addresses, and give full Edit rights. Now, any document that is in that folder, students will automatically have access to!

Assignment Hand-In Form

This last step is an extra step for your students, but it is the last piece to really making management and grading easy for teachers. Create a new Form in Google Docs with the following items:

  • Class Period or Subject (You can make a new form for each class, or use a ‘choose from a list’ question type for this for all of your classes)
  • Quarter/Semester (optional)
  • Last Name
  • First Name (If you teach elementary, you may want to add all of your students in a ‘choose from a list’ question type)
  • Assignment Title/Name (Can be a text type, or a ‘choose from a list’ type if you are that organized)
  • Link/URL for the Assignment

Assignment link/URL? Students can publish their work with a copule of clicks so that anyone with the link can access the document. They do this by clicking on the big blue ‘Share’ button on the top right of every Google Doc. The document will list ‘Private’ for access, and the student below as the owner. Click the ‘Change..’ link next to Private, and choose ‘Anyone with the link’ and save.

Students will still need to ‘turn in’ the assignment by adding it to their shared class/subject folder with you, so why you need the assignment link in this form? The form will allow you to sort the contents by any of the fields or questions asked, and the link will allow you to quickly access that assignment right in the form spreadsheet – without needing to go to each students folder, finding the correct assignment, and opening it up.

With the Assignment Hand-In spreadsheet, you can sort by name, assignment, class – whatever to group the work as you like, access the student’s work with a single click to make your comments or edits, close the assignment and instantly access the next one. You can even add in your own information in the cells to the right with notes, grades or scores – as long as you don’t add columns to the left or change the information gained from the form, you’ll be fine.

This form/spreadsheet brings this whole process and workflow together and wraps it with a bow.

Student Digital Portfolios

With all student work digitized, available and easily shared in Google Docs/Drive, the creation or showcase of a student’s best work is now a relatively simple task. Using free online tools such as Google Sites or Posterous, student can share and link to their very best work for this year and for the school years to come. This portfolio can not only serve as a showcase for students, parents, and teachers but could also be quite useful when student apply for a job or attempt to get into the college of their choosing. All of the hard work of collecting and organizing student work is done naturally in th
e process outlined above. All that is left is to identify the students best and linking to it on their own web site.

Going Paperless with Google Docs PowerPoint:

Going Paperless with Google Docs Presentation in PDF:

 

Again, I have to thank the fine folks who presented at the Google Education On Air Conference. Below are links to the resources and information that they shared with myself and the other conference attendees to help them both make Student Digital Portfolios something easy to accomplish and to get us to the promised land of the Paperless Classroom.

Feb 082012
 

google-docs-logo.jpg

Welcome to our session today on Google Spreadsheets and Forms! We’ll be using the Google Spreadsheets Overview page for our session notes and agenda. Any other specific resources or answers to questions that come up during our session today I’ll note below. You can always get back to the agenda/notes page when you are using a Google Doc or Spreadsheet by clicking on the ‘Help’ menu and selecting ‘Google Docs Help Center’ as highlighted in the image below.

Screen_shot_2012-02-06_at_11