Teaching with Tech... 👨‍🏫 w/ 👩‍💻

Talking heads, not the music group, seem to always go with videos about historical figures.  And while I admire how Ken Burns became the legend using historians to tell the stories, giving authority and weight to facts and ideas, making pictures of the people talk can be so much more fun. Activity Goal: Create a talking head (picture) from an online image using Adobe After Effects.  In this case,  I want Thomas Jefferson to sing a little Edwin Starr. The challenge will be to separate out the vocals so Thomas' lips are matching the lyrics. Could I have used a tool like Babberize ?  Sure, but what's the fun in that? Final Product: Below is the final product: If you're wondering why I selected, "War," it's because I thought it would be cool.  TJ wanted a smaller Navy, didn't believe in having a lot of soldiers, and really wanted to make the government small...like, tiny small.  What he found instead was, a small Navy could not protect American ships or its ci

Creating planned, pre-assigned Zoom breakout groups, especially for larger groups, can be pain.  On the surface, uploading a CSV sheet is a simple task.  But, could the process and organization of groups be better managed? Problem: Creating pre-assigned groups is time consuming and rigid, especially when creating breakout groups for Zoom. Solution: Group Creator is a Google Add-on that keeps an organized collection of classes and groups.  It creates a CSV with a downloadable link and hyperlinks to navigate between the TOC and other sheets. Download: Click Here This is not an approved app, but is safe to run.  Feel free to review the script using Tools>Script editor. Hybrid Tip:  If you are teaching hybrid (1/2 the class at home and the other at school), consider creating class lists with only the students who are at home, or color code the names for the students based off of their at-home/school rotation.   If you use one Zoom for all of your classes, create your class groups,

Hyperlinks can do more than just link documents and sheet pages.  They can also help you to quickly download the content as a CSV, TSV, XLSX or PDF.  Best of all, we can limit the range to be downloaded. Problem: If using a Google Sheet, exporting specific ranges as a PDF, CSV, etc., is difficult or impossible using Google's preselected menu bar. Solution & Skills: We will create one Google Spreadsheet where we utilize the hyperlink function to create download links.  This solution helps with the creation of invoices, grabbing CSV data that can then be uploaded to other programs/web applications. Skills: ✔ Write hyperlink function; ✔ Link to pages within spreadsheet; ✔ Modify link to create CSV, XLSX or PDF files by range. Hyperlink Function: Here's the breakdown of the hyperlink function in Google Sheet: = hyperlink ( "https://www.google.com" , "Google" ) The equal sign tells Google Spreadsheets that we are using the hyperlink function.  Inside the firs

If you have ever created a quiz for mastery, you may have discovered you can have students take the quiz as many times as they want.  As an educator, you can use the number of retakes a evidence of growth or opportunities to provide overall performance gains while also providing short penalties to discourage frequent and rapid retakes.  For example, students can take the quiz as many times as they wish, but for each time they take the quiz, the score is reduced by 2.5%. If you have this information in a spreadsheet, you are golden. In this tutorial, we will create an App Script file to filter out Google Form scores to quickly upload the marks to our SIS or online Gradebook. Problem: If using multiple quizzes in a year where students can retake quizzes, reimplementing formulas to filter the data can be a pain.   Solution & Skills: We will create one Google Spreadsheet where future forms can be pointed.  We will use Apps Script to pull and format the scores, creating a new sheet with

Sometimes a little grade candy is just the motivation teachers need to get students to learn factual information.  Factual information can be easily assessed with a Google Form.  But what if you want to find the max score for each student?  We some finessing and two slick formulas, we can create our list.  Using  GradeTransferer  we can then upload our marks into our gradebook.  I'll be using Aspen.   If you try this, just make sure you have set your quiz to collect the email addresses of the users.  I also recommend having a dropdown with all the student names or two text fields where students can type in their first and last names. Problem: Google Classroom doesn't accept the importation of marks if a user has taken a Google Form quiz more than once.  So, we need a way to find just the highest mark to update our gradebook.  With your Google Form set to allow the users to take the quiz as many times as possible, lets get started. Form should not limit the number of responses.