#me just checking out the “improve your creativity skills” course and getting this absolute punch in the face sub-course description 😭

[vero-niche]

you cant say that linkedin learning

[divinationcentral]

Journal.

I have learned one thing in my life: that people will let you down. 

If you cannot learn to trust yourself, life will become very hard...

That includes trusting your own decisions good or bad; vice-versa: good & bad lol... 

We have to learn, in life, that mistakes are reversible. That bad plans can be turned into experiences that teach us what good or better plans are, and what they look like as they reflect in our lives. 

We don’t just give up because we want to, despite how bad we want to. 

Perseverance is an art that has not yet matured to its full potential within me...I find myself defeating my own progress, almost daily, if I can be honest. 

My habits aren’t constructive. Nothing I do from the moment I get up from when I go to sleep is helpful: I don’t sleep on time, I don’t wake up and eat breakfast or at least have something to drink...Nope. I stay up past a time that I’m supposed to go to sleep, knowing full well that if I sleep, it’s going to provide me the adequate amount of sleep I need to wake up refreshed the next day to do things... 

I wake up literally minutes before I have to roll over onto my desk and work. 

Did I have time to use the restroom? Nope. Did I have time to kiss my pet Hermes (she’s a birb) in the morning? Nope. Did I make myself breakfast, go over my emails, or even CHECK my personal Email for any good news? 

NOPE. I woke up, essentially started my day late, woke up starving and feeling sick to my stomach, and just plunged into the day. 

Did I finish it? Yes. Was it to the best of my abilities? No. 

I am not, and I don’t let myself be at full capacity. 

So...in other words: I have not seen who I am when I am at full potential. 

Often I have thought I needed help. And I did. I remember being in a place in my life not too long ago where I needed a crisis intervention (back in September of 2019). 

I couldn’t eat properly, I wouldn’t even function through varying day-to-day tasks...Like sleeping, brushing my teeth, even showering was a huge monumental achievement (and it would hurt, my body was sensitive to everything, touch, rest, lack of sleep, exercise, food...). I couldn’t hold a job down, because my anxiety would cause me to break down on a daily basis, crying and freaking out about work loads or people making fun of me. 

I had traumatic experiences like losing my job and my boss threatening me. I injured my knee and had surgery and was jobless for 6 months before I could start the road to financial recovery... 

In that time, if you’re wondering, what did I do to remedy any of this? 

Well - I scrambled. A lot. I sold personal items to make up money I didn’t have for bills I needed to pay off. I had to find my own attorney to help me with a stupid worker’s compensation case I didn’t want to see through but now have to (yes, I am currently still in the thick of it, and that was back in 2019)…I jumped from customer service job to customer service job because I had to (and I still have a customer service role, that pays okay, but doesn’t exactly let me live the life I wanted), and I tried getting help for my mental instability by joining mental health programs and seeing various clinicians and therapists. 

I jumped from agency to agency before someone hired me. And before I could even consider a job, I had to go through educating myself and gaining a certificate to seem viable to any of these companies (that was while I was jobless and getting medical help for my knee injury). 

In that time I was still trying to heal my injury, and was going from medical facility to medical facility trying to get it to a point where I could have surgery (this took nine months of absolute torture dealing with the insurance company that wouldn’t take responsibility for my injury). 

I kept meeting really unstable people who pretended to be my friends to get what they wanted out of me (which was made only very clear when they decided I was all used up for what they needed me to do: which was be an emotional punching bag of sorts, but offer absolutely no commitment or support to me when I needed it - mind you: I was DISABLED physically, emotionally, AND even financially, and I STILL found it in me to help these people - I wasted my time, my money, my resources, my stability, and not at one point did they go: I am so much better off, this person actually needs me, not the other way around). 

Why did I entertain these people? 

I was so fucking lonely. I had lost all my friends that I had for years because they were terrible for me, and I terrible for them.  I spent the loneliest years of my life not talking to ANYBODY. Being in a laborious job that I felt so worthless doing for five/six years. I developed zero social skills, and I feared everybody. I got myself to a point after finishing all my therapy courses and surgery to jump back into that loop again, unfortunately. 

I also had a shit relationship with an ex who was emotionally and mentally manipulative. Lied all the time and was inconsistent with me, blamed me for being upset about very valid things. And I continued to have bosses who were either crazy, creepy, or just downright mean. 

In none of this tumultuous time did I EVER have a break from advocating for myself or did I ever get the goddamn sleep and rest that I needed (until I was basically blacking out and telling people to leave me alone for just a few moments of my day). It felt like someone was always tugging at me. Saying: Me, me, me - me next PLEASE. 

I had to keep saying: STOP. GO FUCK YOURSELF, only when I finally realized what they were doing to me. 

That isn’t life. 

Every time I sought a few weeks of a break...it was thwarted by the maniacal, cynical people in my life. Throwing their baggage and past experiences onto me. 

Either that or my family was creating new freaking life altering moments in them. 

It was terrible. I couldn’t find the goddamn respite I wanted. 

I never healed emotionally. 

Am I happy? No. No, I am still not happy. 

I got better at managing practically (like my money and being patient with my financial circumstances, and medical procedures, even dealing with unhealthy and unbalanced people, or bad coworkers, and bad freaking receptionists and doctors...see how its still me adapting to these things though?). 

But none of these skills are to the capacity I know I should be in them...I’m not mastering anything. I’m just flailing, trying to get by... 

Steps I’m making taking now to turn my life around? I don’t know. I asked myself seriously one day: What are you doing? Are you really even managing? You can’t even cook yourself a week’s long worth of meals. You wake up and you maybe have breakfast and you have lunch if your family made it...

I realized, even though I’m as financially stable as I can be right now, given my current circumstances - absolutely none of it is going towards making me healthy. 

I waste it. I still waste my time. I still waste my resources, my energy, and my own patience. I continue to entertain negative or bad people in my life. 

Why? I don’t know. What was all that therapy for I wondered lol...and so I keep seeking. Seeking answers to my own instability. 

That said, here is what I decided to do about it. 

I made a list, and I’m sticking by it: 

I’m seeing a psychiatrist. Who is willing to help me figure out the emotional imbalances of what is going on in my head (in terms of chemistry - thankfully she’s really smart lol). 

I’m seeing a bunch of other doctors to figure out how to help me with my current medical conditions. One being that I have two fucked up legs/knees now, because the other is compensating for the left knee surgery I had that made me shorter in one leg! Wee...lol. 

I’m trying to join a nutritional wellness program, and a massage therapy program so I can just...I just need major improvement there. Both because my digestive issues are bad and my pain management is terrible. I don’t know what to cook for myself because everything makes my stomach react AND hurt (I have leftover issues from a bad infection that could have caused me cancer if I didn’t take the medication to clear it in time). 

I blocked and got rid of a lot of negative people. People who just kept pushing their goddamn ideals on me. I’m not you. Stop treating me like I need to fit a mold. I’m fine as I am. I’m happy with who I turned out to be, what I like, and how I spend my time. You don’t need to belittle me to achieve your goals or your dreams. Why not do that to yourself and see how that feels quite frankly - I’m sure you wouldn’t get too far. Why? BECAUSE ITS NOT CONSTRUCTIVE. You continue to waste your time on people when you decide to be petty. And even worse: when you’re petty to yourself. And you throw that crap onto me, because you get tired of treating yourself this way. LEARN. Learn who you are. That’s your responsibility - not mine. 

I paid for a really cheap online art class~ it was discounted c: and it’s just to reset my creativity and my passion for doing art~ because I love to draw. <3 I have always loved to draw. 

I want to work on a few designs for stickers I’d like to start selling~ and even design my own plushie! 

Financially? Idk. I’m still hoping for a miracle lol. But we’ll see. I need my health first. I realized that finally. 

What is my point? 

I didn’t fail me. 

I have never failed me. 

I have always picked myself up, did the work, cried about it later, and STILL pushed me to do something. 

I still asked myself to achieve, even when I really didn’t want to. 

I got up, brushed my teeth, took a shower, and went to all my scary therapy appointments, all of my horrifying doctors visits, and still went to work to get yelled at by people I would never meet who would flat out tell me I was worth nothing. 

It took its toll every day - and I still found the strength to do these things. And I kept changing them, by the way. 

I kept changing jobs. I kept changing friends. I kept changing my financial circumstances. 

I’m finally at a job that allows me more leisure, even if I deal with the one or two petty clients of the day (sometimes its like seven, lets be real lol)…but I learned. 

I taught me. People helped. The right ones did, but because I decided who those people were going to be and who or what I wouldn’t tolerate anymore. 

END OF STORY. 

[unifiedsocialblog]

Writing for Social Media: 7 Tips and Tools

There’s loads of great articles about writing, including writing for social media.

Maybe this will become one of them. Whatever.

However, this piece is different.

You’ll see.

Bonus: Get the step-by-step social media strategy guide with pro tips on how to grow your social media presence.

7 writing tips for social media

…and for any kind of persuasive writing.

Sure, great writing may take talent and innate creativity. And hey, you’ve got something to say, right? No matter your current level of experience or skills. With a little gusto in your writing step, you can make the reader feel something, take an action, or be more informed than before.

A few tips below to show you how.

Suggestion: let loose, try some (or all) of these, and repeat them for a few of your posts. Build those new writing-muscles.

You’ll be amazed at how clear you’ll write, and how you’ll zero-in on your voice.

1. Barf it out

Writers block is a myth. if you wanna balst past it just write out anything in your head, without leaving teh keybord. just keep your fingers typing, looking at the keyboard not the screen, so your brain engages. forget about sentence structure, spelling, punctuation… just keep your fingers moving and p[ower through any blockages. do this for an articel, tech-doc, and kind of writing thingie. Even for a paragraph or three. whenever your stuck just typw. editing will come later. This is a brain excercise, not a make-it-look-just-right process. Editing comes later, but don’t mix the two. It’s never write the first time. but push stuff that’s in your head onto the page, then mnake your 4 or 5 or 6 or 7 edits…. LATER.

Okay, I’m back.

Whenever, I’m ‘stuck’, for any kind of writing… I just type. Every time, something useful appears before my writing-eyes-and-brain.

The same will happen to you, too.

Punch the so-called “writer’s block” right in the gut. It’s bunk.

2. Write to an 8th grader

Not because they are dumb. Because it forces you to write clearly. And to ditch the jargon and terms that eyeballs just gloss over.

“Drive innovation.”

“Become a disruptor.”

And my absolute non-favorite, “Transform your business…”.

Oh please. Some of the most over-used, under-effective statements of all time.

Companies and their writers hide behind these terms every day, all across the web. Statistically speaking, probably you, too. I’m just sayin’.

I don’t know if this intentional or not. But here’s the thing…

Terms and jargon say little, while making you and your biz appear as a commodity. Like many others. Better to do the heavy lifting for the reader. Because they certainly won’t. They’ll stop and leave, versus stay and scroll.

Do the work. Say something real. Practice on your kid, mom, or any outsider to tell your important and useful message.

Your readers will appreciate it. It makes good business sense.

3. Write to the reader

Because no one cares about what you (or I) do. Readers only care what they can get from what you (or I) do.

So then, write from the readers’ perspective. Make them the hero.

A list of features? B-o-r-i-n-g.

Words that paint a picture for how the reader’s life will improve, that’s the ticket.

Sometimes, “standing out” is nothing more than writing from the reader’s point of view. Because most of your competitors don’t.

4. Write with a purpose

And write that purpose at the top of your draft piece.

To keep your mind on the target while you write.

For an email, blog post, white paper, and of course for any social media post—be clear on the purpose.

What action do you want the reader to take?

Click the buy, call, or contact us button?

Or maybe you just want them to feel a certain way. Empathy? Bliss? Informed?

Too often, we humans write to write. Not a problem.

Unless you want to sell your stuff.

Social posts are usually a top-of-mind selling approach. And an opportunity to build, show, and share your brand.

And still, write with a purpose to raise your signal, lessen your noise.

Hey, don’t forget to delete the purpose reminder at the top of your draft.

5. Write to make the reader feel successful

Which is hard to do when reading long paragraphs, without breaks—like single lines and bolded lines.

Lead your reader down the page by breaking up your message.

Short paragraphs. Short sentences. Transition lines. Bullets. Some bolded items, too. Like this one…

Allowing your readers to skim and scan your message is nice.

It helps them feel a series of successes as they move down the page.

The more they read, the more they understand.

Good for everyone, right?

Oh yeah, and questions are good too. They encourage the reader to ‘lean in’, with interest.

What are you doing to help your readers scroll down the page?

Maybe I’ve overdone the short paragraphs in this post. Maybe not. Part of the just-try-it-and-see-for-yourself model. Better ‘too much’ than ‘too little’. You can dial it down later.

6. Write with a hyper-focus

…and with a tomato.

What the…?

Stay with me.

Too often, we look at a piece of work and think, ‘Ah man, I need a bunch of time to do this post.’

There’s a better way.

By defining and going after a small section or piece of your post, document or whatever you’re writing. Right now. Say, in the 15 minutes before your next meeting.

Define a small portion to write (I’m doing this right now for this single section)

Set a tomato timer, that you can hear going tick-tock-tick-tock

Barf it out (like we talked about above)

Make your edits

Finí

Go to your meeting

Progress made. Feels good.

I wrote this section in 17 minutes. You can, too. String a bunch more of these together to complete your writing, iteratively. Without feeling like you have to set aside a load of time in one or two sittings.

I love the Pomodoro Technique for getting anything done with a hyper-focus.

7. Use pictures to enhance the words

I’m not going to say much about this.

Of course, pictures enhance the words.

This piece is about the words.

I don’t want to leave you hanging though. Here’s one of a thousand good reads about adding pictures to your work.

7 writing tools for social media

Opinion: writing for social media is fun. Those writing tips and tricks help me enjoy the process. And so do these writing tools.

1. Session buddy (Chrome extension)

Good for: Reducing browser clutter by restoring windows and tabs for your writing project. In seconds. Cost: Free.

When writing, I usually do web searches to find related content or topics. These often become input into my writing piece. I arrange browser instances and tabs within each instance. Then, place them carefully on the screen to move around as needed.

Now, say I need to work on something else. Fine:

Click on the session buddy icon, in the Chrome toolbar

Name and save the session

Close the all the windows

Now you’re ready for action on a new task. Distraction free. Without any browser clutter.

Then, when it’s time to resume that project:

Click on the session buddy icon

Select and open the named session

Everything like before, instantly

Here’s a list of alternatives. Try and use what works for you.

Bonus: Get the step-by-step social media strategy guide with pro tips on how to grow your social media presence.

Get the free guide right now!

2. Hemingway app

Good for: Writing anything succinctly and clearly. Cost: Free online, $19.99 for the desktop app.

Hemingway app will make you a better writer. Period.

That whole jargon thing I complain about, it all goes away when you write like Ernest did.

Same for long sentences, unnecessary adverbs, superlative adjectives, and passive phrases. And, with hints for alternatives.

Write what you write

Paste it into Hemingway app

Visually see what works, what doesn’t

Make your changes, to do more of what does work

Paste back into your writing piece

Use Hemingway app often to build your writing skills. After a bit you’ll need it less. Though I still use it often to keep me in check. An amazing tool.

3. Markdown

Good for: Writing an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to HTML. Cost: Depends. There’s a load of editors to write your markdown. Some are free, others cost. But not much.

Markdown allows you to write plain text for nearly all your writing projects. Find and choose a Markdown editor, for Windows, Mac or web.

Word, Google Docs, and the others of that same ilk? Oh please.

Feature bloat, complex to use, and limited to a tool. No thanks.

Markdown just works. With a simple WYSIWYG editor for headers, bolding, italics, bullets, highlight, horizontal dividers, and quotes.

Who needs more than that?

And, instantly convert your work to HTML to post on any platform, using their already-in-place CSS formatting.

In other words��� you write text, export as HTML, publish anywhere.

Not sold?

Fine, try it out on your next writing piece. Easy to learn, even easier to use.

Markdown is the only way I write nowadays. Be careful, the same might happen to you. If you’re lucky.

4. ZenPen

Good for: Distraction free writing. Cost: Free.

There’s plenty of clutter in life. ZenPen is one small corner of the distraction-free-universe to help you write without outside interference.

Go to zenpen.io

Type and write

Copy and paste, or download (via markdown, plain text, or html)

Do something beautiful with your new Pulitzer-prize-like content

5. Grammarly

Good for: Making your writing clear, effective, and correct. Cost: Free online

Grammarly promises to keep your social posts on point. It will flag everything from contextual spelling errors to poor word choices. And, the tool integrates with lots of online platforms, including Twitter, Gmail, and Tumblr.

I make up words all the time, and misspell others. Not always a bad thing for getting people’s attention. As long as one is intentional about it.

Use Grammarly to convert the unintentional to the intentional.

6. Pomodoro Technique

Good for: Staying focused, for writing or anything else. Cost: Depends on the specific timer tool you choose. Loads of free ones.

I know, I already mentioned this.

It’s worth another mention.

The Pomodoro Technique is a time management method developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s. It uses a timer to break down work into 25 minute intervals (usually), separated by short breaks. Each interval is known as a pomodoro (Italian for tomato).

Cute, huh?

But Pomodoro is more than cute for getting s&$% done.

I use it all over the place, especially when writing:

Define a section or two to write

Set the timer (for 25 minutes)

Work until it rings (and only on that task)

Put down a checkmark on a piece of paper

Take a short break

Lather, rinse, repeat

Works as a good tracker, too. For instance, four checkmarks = about two hours for the completed effort.

I use an online Pomodoro timer that makes an obvious tick-tock (a kitchen timer works great, too). My wife knows not to interrupt me when in this highly-focused state.

As long as I follow up with her about the ever growing to-do list she came to me for.

7. Dropbox Paper

Good for: Writing and collaborating with others. Cost: Free for the individual or small business. It costs for the enterprise.

Dropbox paper is my main writing, editing, and collaboration tool. Clients dig it, too. I teach them how to use it in one minute.

It looks and reads beautiful

Super-duper easy to write, distraction free (with a simple toolbar that pops up only when text is highlighted)

Works as web content editor, versus a document editor (who needs line breaks anymore?)

Write together with others, real-time

Alert your mates, immediately, with comments off to the side

Export and download in the common formats to publish elsewhere

Not much more to say. Try it yourself. I dare you.

Compose, schedule, and publish your expertly written posts to all the major social media channels—including Instagram—from one dashboard using Hootsuite. Try it free today. 

Get Started

The post Writing for Social Media: 7 Tips and Tools appeared first on Hootsuite Social Media Management.

Writing for Social Media: 7 Tips and Tools published first on https://getfblike.tumblr.com/

[succeedly]

23 GSuite Ideas to Excite Kids About Learning

Eric Curts on episode 214 [A special encore episode] of the 10-Minute Teacher Podcast

From the Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis

Follow @coolcatteacher on Twitter

Eric Curts @ericcurts  teaches us twenty-three ways to use Gsuite tools in our classroom. With ideas for Google Docs, Slides, Sheets, and Drawings for all subjects and ages, you’ll want to scroll down and follow the links in our enhanced show notes.

Today’s episode is sponsored by JAM.com, the perfect last minute holiday gift for your kids or grandkids. The creative courses at Jam.com are project-based, creative and FUN. Use the code COOLCAT50 to get $50 off your course. And remember that you can sign up for a 14 day FREE trial of any course with your child aged 7-16. Drawing. Minecraft. Legos. And more!

Use the code COOLCAT50 for $50 off the cost of the course.

Listen Now

Listen to the show on iTunes or Stitcher

Stream by clicking here.

Transcript of Episode 214: 23 GSuite Ideas to Excite Your Students about Learning with Eric Curts

Download the transcript

VICKI:          It’s back to school and so many of us are getting ready to introduce the G-Suite of tools in the classroom for those of you who don’t know what that is. That’s all these Google tools. And Eric Curts @ericcurts from Control Alt Achieve   and co-leader of their higher Google Educators group has so many fantastic ideas. You’d definitely want to check the transcript and show notes for all of these ideas.

This blog post is being added to 100+ Great Google Classroom Resources for Educators. This resource has a curated list of Gsuite resources, books, and tips.

You’ll definitely want to go to Eric’s website Control Alt Achieve and his YouTube channel.

VICKI:                    So Eric, give us some cool ways that we can use G-Suite to start of the school year with a punch.

ERIC:               What I’m going to take a look at here as we run through these today are just some of the common Google tools that we tend to use but maybe look at them from a different angle and some fun ways they can be used. So why don’t we start off with Google Docs. http://ift.tt/2eKfGZe

Today, Eric goes through some engaging ideas for using 4 of the Gsuite apps:

Google Docs – http://www.http://ift.tt/2eK3OGQ

Google Slides – http://www.http://ift.tt/2gZkjzn

Google Sheets – http://www.http://ift.tt/2eK5Si7

Google Drawings – http://www.http://ift.tt/2gZkmv3

    ERIC:               Most people think of that as Google’s word processing program which obviously it is and that’s a fantastic way for students to write reports and wrote stories on all the normal things. But some fun twists that you can put on this, some folks don’t know that Google Docs support emojis. You can actually insert emojis right from the ‘insert special characters’ menu and it’s going to open up a lot of really fun activities for students.

Idea #1: Write Emoji Stories

Idea #2: Summarize Something You’ve Seen or Read Using Emojis

If you’re looking for a way to get them engaged and excited early on in the year, they can write emoji stories or they can summarize a story or a movie or something they’ve seen recently using emojis.

See: 5 Emoji Activities for Google Docs  where Eric describes how to do all of these emoji activities including the emoji math picture shown below.

Idea #3: Use Emojis to Explain Math Variables

ERIC: They can also incorporate this into math. Yes, I used to be a math teacher so I just have a soft spot for math.

[00:02:00]

Emojis can be a great way to replace variables to bring a better concrete understanding of what you’re doing when solving math problems. And then there’s a lot of other possible neat examples. And like you said in the show notes, there’d be links to all of my blog post that go into the specific details on those. But that’s a fun thing.

Emojis help variables come alive and make sense. See Eric’s blog post on emojis in Google docs to learn how to do this.

Idea #4: Black Out Poetry in Google Docs

ERIC: While still on the topic of docs another neat thing to do is to use the highlight tool but not for highlighting. Let’s turn it on its head and use it to black things out. In Google Docs you can use the highlighting tool to do blackout poetry where students start with some text and then remove all the words except what they want to leave for their found poem, you can also use the exact same tool to do summarization.

Idea #5: Article Summarization with Black Out in Google Docs

It’s a process called text reduction strategy which is typically done with a big black marker and an actual piece of paper or an article, but you can do it in Google Docs as well, you can take an article from one of the many excellent websites like DOGO News, throw that in there and have the students go through and remove everything that’s not critical so that they end up with their summarization of the article. It’s a great way to help move students toward those summarization skills.

Read More: Improve Reading Comprehension with Google Docs “Black Out”

Idea #6: Choose Your Own Adventure Stories

Beyond that, lots of other fun things you can do include creating choose your own adventure stories. Create one for students to work together in a group where they write a story and use hyperlinks inside of the doc to jump to different pages as they write their choose your own adventure stories.

Those are just a couple of Docs ideas.

Read More: Choose Your Own Adventure Stories with Google Docs

Idea #7: Teach Anchors and Hyperlinks

VICKI:          And plus, choose your own adventure, we give you the ability to teach about anchors and teach about hyperlinks. There are so many things you can do with these ideas. I love them, Eric.

A hyperlink links to another web page. (Just go to insert –> Hyperlink.) However, an anchor links within the document. This lets you skip down a long page. I do this an easy way in a long document by making headings. Then, insert a table of contents. The headings automatically become anchors. You can also insert anchors manually.  they are a big time saver for students and teaches on long documents, for example, if you’re writing a book.

ERIC:           Absolutely.

VICKI:          Okay, what’s next?

ERIC:            Sure. Let’s jump over to Google Slides. http://ift.tt/2gZkhrf

A lot of times we think of Google slides as the presentation tool, which of course it is, and there’s nothing wrong with that, please don’t get me wrong. It’s fantastic for kids to just do a presentation. Stand up in front of the class, do a book talk or talk about their explorer or their animal. But there’s a lot of other fun things you can do with slides.

Idea #8: Comic Strips with Google Slides

[00:04:00]

ERIC: One way to do is to create comic strips with Google Slides.   And what you can do is think of each slide as a different panel of the comic strip. And students could then insert clip art and animations and speech bubbles. And when they then published that to the web you’ve got an online animated comic strip, whether it’s to explain a vocab term or science concept or retell part of a story.

Read more: Creative Slide Uses for Students

Idea #9: Create eBooks or Storybooks with Google Slides

In the same vein you can create eBooks or storybooks with Google Slides   where each slide is a page of the eBook and you are allowed to change the page dimensions, it doesn’t have to be the normal landscape. You can make it portrait, you can make a square to make it whatever size book you want.

Read: Google Slides for Student Created Storybooks

Idea #10: Create Stop Motion Animations in Google Slides

Other fun things include stop motion animation. This is a fun trick you can do with slides where basically you just speed up the slide show by hacking the URL just a little bit on the presentation so that you get each slide going by maybe a quarter of a second and you can either take actual photographs using the built-in webcam of your Chromebook or whatever device you have or you can just add images and move them around from one slide to the other.

Read: Stop Motion Animation with Google Slides

Idea #11: Dr. Seus Manipulative Slide Show

But, again, it’s another great creative way for kids to tell stories or express their understanding. Beyond that, some other fun things you can do especially with the little ones – I do have a bunch of manipulative type slide shows. We’ve got a one-fish, two-fish, red-fish, blue-fish sorting activity,   that’s great when you’re doing Dr. Seuss stuff.

Read: “One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish” Sorting with Google Slides

Idea #12 Build a Snowman Creation and Writing Activity with Google Slides

I’ve also got a Build a snowman one.    You may want to hang off on that a little bit further into the winter month, there’s great template that allows students to build their own snowman with a wide collection of eyes and noses and mouths and ears and hats and all sorts of other things. And so they copy and paste those onto their snowman and then there’s a box where they write a little story about what their snowman has done that day or what he’s going to be going off to do.

So lots of real fun things that you could do with slides besides just a traditional presentation.

Read: Build a Snowman with Google Slides

Idea #13: Pixel Art in Google Sheets

VICKI:          Now, all these hacks, you have cute little videos and tutorials and things to help us. So we’re just giving you teachers an overview and then you could pick what you want. So do we have time for another?

[00:06:00]

ERIC:                Sure. Google Sheets  is another fun one. We usually think of Google Sheets as something for math or for doing charts and graphs and it certainly is. Don’t forget that it’s always great for that. But it’s also a great way to do things like pixel art.   I have a template that you can use where you simply put in some letters there and it creates a colored in box for each one of those and you can make pixel art.

Read: Pixel Art Activities for Any Subject with Google Sheets

Idea #14: Random Writing Prompt Generator with Google Sheets

ERIC: Or how about language art with Google Sheets? Absolutely. Sheets are great for randomization.

So I’ve got two templates for random writing prompt generators.  One gives works being randomly put together…

Read: Random Writing Prompt Generator with Google Sheets

Idea #15: Random Emoji Writing Prompt Generator

ERIC:  …another one is random emojis being put together.   And both places, it allows you to generate a whole bunch of random writing prompts that will be great for journal entries, short stories or poems.

Read: Emoji Writing Prompt Generator with Google Sheets

Idea #16: Create Graphic Organizers with Google Drawings

ERIC: Beyond that, if we can still squeeze something in I’ll throw in Google Drawings. http://ift.tt/2gZl5MJ

One of my favorites, I think it’s overlooked a lot of times because it’s kind of hidden down in the menus there but Google Drawings is a great way to do loads of things including graphic organizers…

Read: Language Arts Graphic Organizers with Google Drawings

Idea #17: Create Interactive Posters with Google Drawings (These are like Thinglink)

ERIC: …interactive images which is like ThingLink, people are familiar with that.  You can use Google Drawings to make images and put hyperlinks on that branch out to videos and websites and additional information.

Read: Googlink: Creating Interactive Posters with Google Drawings

Idea #18: Magnetic “Drag and Drop” Poetry

ERIC: Google drawings is a great way for creativity with magnetic poetry, drag and drop poetry.   It’s also fantastic for math.

Read: Eric has two articles on magnetic poetry

Idea #19: Use Manipulatives and Tangrams in Google Drawings

ERIC: A lot of great manipulatives and interactives you can do such as teaching congruent figures and similar figures,  partitioning shapes…

Read: Pattern Block Templates and Activities with Google Drawings

Idea #20: Download Templates to Teach Shapes and Algebra So You Don’t Have to Create Them Yourself

ERIC: we’ve got algebra tile, pattern blocks, lots and lots of templates that I’ve created that you can just hit the ground running with those.

Read: 11 Ways to Teach Math with Google Drawings

Idea #21: Create Greeting Cards Using Google Drawings

ERIC: But Google Drawing also services well as a desktop publishing tool because it really isn’t something built into Google Suite that quite does what Microsoft publisher does. And so Drawings is a nice stand in for that for things like creating greeting cards, I’ve got a couple of templates for that…

Read: How Your Students Can Use Google Drawings to Make Greeting Cards

Idea #22: Make Motivational Posters in Google Drawings

ERIC: as well as making educational, motivational posters.  We’re used to those big black posters with the big picture and word at the bottom with a neat saying. Those can be done for actual motivation topics or you can pick a vocab term of the week and then add an appropriate image to go with it and a definition in your own terms.

Read: Have Students Create Educational “Motivational Posters” with Google Drawings

Idea #23: Explore Templates on Eric’ Site

[00:08:00]

ERIC:                    And all of those again, those templates are all available on the control of the ControlAltAchieve.com website.

Read: Here is an index of templates on Eric’s site. What a fantastic resource!

VICKI:          Teachers, I know your mind is blown but here’s the thing, you’ve all got great ideas, whether it’s emojis for variables in algebra there’s so many ideas. So one of the greatest things to do with kids is to show them something they’ve never seen before. And the best time to do that is in the first week or two of school. Blow their minds.

Follow the links in the show notes and I love Eric website particular because he shows us how to do stuff but also all the free templates. I have been tweeting out and sending out stuff of his all day, the day we’re taping here just because I love it. It’s great resource for G-Suite. And good luck with back to school. And get in there and use these tools and have some fun.

Thank You, Staples, for Sponsoring Episode 112 of the 10-Minute Teacher Podcast!

Staples is my go-to back to school shopping source. Check out http://ift.tt/2vQXj8m for my ten ways to tackle back to school like a pro. And remember to sign up for Staple’s Teacher Rewards for free shipping orders over $14.99 and 5% back. Staple has everything we need in stock all season long and ready to go for school. Go to http://ift.tt/2bpV9ah for more information and great deals. Good luck with back to school

Thank you for listening to the Ten-minute Teacher Podcast. You can download the show notes and see the archive at http://ift.tt/2quX4Nu. Never stop learning.

[End of Audio 0:09:43]

[Transcription created by tranzify.com. Some additional editing has been done to add grammatical, spelling, and punctuation errors. Every attempt has been made to correct spelling. For permissions, please email lisa@coolcatteacher.com]

Bio as Submitted

Eric has been in education for 25 years, and is currently serving as a Technology Integration Specialist for the Stark Portage Area Computer Consortium in Canton, Ohio where he oversees Google Apps for Education implementation, training, and support, as well as online learning and other technology integration initiatives.

Eric is an authorized Google Education Trainer and a Google Certified Innovator and provides Google Apps training to schools, organizations, and conferences throughout Ohio and across the country. He is a co-leader of the Ohio Google Educator Group (GEG) at tiny.cc/geg-ohio and runs the award-winning blog http://ift.tt/1W5EJjQ where all of his Google Apps and edtech resources can be found. Eric is married with four children.

  Disclosure of Material Connection: This is a “sponsored podcast episode.” The company who sponsored it compensated me via a cash payment, gift, or something else of value to include a reference to their product. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I believe will be good for my readers and are from companies I can recommend. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.” This company has no impact on the editorial content of the show.

The post 23 GSuite Ideas to Excite Kids About Learning appeared first on Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis @coolcatteacher helping educators be excellent every day. Meow!

23 GSuite Ideas to Excite Kids About Learning published first on http://ift.tt/2jn9f0m

[strivesy]

23 GSuite Ideas to Excite Kids About Learning

Eric Curts on episode 214 [A special encore episode] of the 10-Minute Teacher Podcast

From the Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis

Follow @coolcatteacher on Twitter

Eric Curts @ericcurts  teaches us twenty-three ways to use Gsuite tools in our classroom. With ideas for Google Docs, Slides, Sheets, and Drawings for all subjects and ages, you’ll want to scroll down and follow the links in our enhanced show notes.

Today’s episode is sponsored by JAM.com, the perfect last minute holiday gift for your kids or grandkids. The creative courses at Jam.com are project-based, creative and FUN. Use the code COOLCAT50 to get $50 off your course. And remember that you can sign up for a 14 day FREE trial of any course with your child aged 7-16. Drawing. Minecraft. Legos. And more!

Use the code COOLCAT50 for $50 off the cost of the course.

Listen Now

Listen to the show on iTunes or Stitcher

Stream by clicking here.

Transcript of Episode 214: 23 GSuite Ideas to Excite Your Students about Learning with Eric Curts

Download the transcript

VICKI:          It’s back to school and so many of us are getting ready to introduce the G-Suite of tools in the classroom for those of you who don’t know what that is. That’s all these Google tools. And Eric Curts @ericcurts from Control Alt Achieve   and co-leader of their higher Google Educators group has so many fantastic ideas. You’d definitely want to check the transcript and show notes for all of these ideas.

This blog post is being added to 100+ Great Google Classroom Resources for Educators. This resource has a curated list of Gsuite resources, books, and tips.

You’ll definitely want to go to Eric’s website Control Alt Achieve and his YouTube channel.

VICKI:                    So Eric, give us some cool ways that we can use G-Suite to start of the school year with a punch.

ERIC:               What I’m going to take a look at here as we run through these today are just some of the common Google tools that we tend to use but maybe look at them from a different angle and some fun ways they can be used. So why don’t we start off with Google Docs. http://ift.tt/2eKfGZe

Today, Eric goes through some engaging ideas for using 4 of the Gsuite apps:

Google Docs – http://www.http://ift.tt/2eK3OGQ

Google Slides – http://www.http://ift.tt/2gZkjzn

Google Sheets – http://www.http://ift.tt/2eK5Si7

Google Drawings – http://www.http://ift.tt/2gZkmv3

    ERIC:               Most people think of that as Google’s word processing program which obviously it is and that’s a fantastic way for students to write reports and wrote stories on all the normal things. But some fun twists that you can put on this, some folks don’t know that Google Docs support emojis. You can actually insert emojis right from the ‘insert special characters’ menu and it’s going to open up a lot of really fun activities for students.

Idea #1: Write Emoji Stories

Idea #2: Summarize Something You’ve Seen or Read Using Emojis

If you’re looking for a way to get them engaged and excited early on in the year, they can write emoji stories or they can summarize a story or a movie or something they’ve seen recently using emojis.

See: 5 Emoji Activities for Google Docs  where Eric describes how to do all of these emoji activities including the emoji math picture shown below.

Idea #3: Use Emojis to Explain Math Variables

ERIC: They can also incorporate this into math. Yes, I used to be a math teacher so I just have a soft spot for math.

[00:02:00]

Emojis can be a great way to replace variables to bring a better concrete understanding of what you’re doing when solving math problems. And then there’s a lot of other possible neat examples. And like you said in the show notes, there’d be links to all of my blog post that go into the specific details on those. But that’s a fun thing.

Emojis help variables come alive and make sense. See Eric’s blog post on emojis in Google docs to learn how to do this.

Idea #4: Black Out Poetry in Google Docs

ERIC: While still on the topic of docs another neat thing to do is to use the highlight tool but not for highlighting. Let’s turn it on its head and use it to black things out. In Google Docs you can use the highlighting tool to do blackout poetry where students start with some text and then remove all the words except what they want to leave for their found poem, you can also use the exact same tool to do summarization.

Idea #5: Article Summarization with Black Out in Google Docs

It’s a process called text reduction strategy which is typically done with a big black marker and an actual piece of paper or an article, but you can do it in Google Docs as well, you can take an article from one of the many excellent websites like DOGO News, throw that in there and have the students go through and remove everything that’s not critical so that they end up with their summarization of the article. It’s a great way to help move students toward those summarization skills.

Read More: Improve Reading Comprehension with Google Docs “Black Out”

Idea #6: Choose Your Own Adventure Stories

Beyond that, lots of other fun things you can do include creating choose your own adventure stories. Create one for students to work together in a group where they write a story and use hyperlinks inside of the doc to jump to different pages as they write their choose your own adventure stories.

Those are just a couple of Docs ideas.

Read More: Choose Your Own Adventure Stories with Google Docs

Idea #7: Teach Anchors and Hyperlinks

VICKI:          And plus, choose your own adventure, we give you the ability to teach about anchors and teach about hyperlinks. There are so many things you can do with these ideas. I love them, Eric.

A hyperlink links to another web page. (Just go to insert –> Hyperlink.) However, an anchor links within the document. This lets you skip down a long page. I do this an easy way in a long document by making headings. Then, insert a table of contents. The headings automatically become anchors. You can also insert anchors manually.  they are a big time saver for students and teaches on long documents, for example, if you’re writing a book.

ERIC:           Absolutely.

VICKI:          Okay, what’s next?

ERIC:            Sure. Let’s jump over to Google Slides. http://ift.tt/2gZkhrf

A lot of times we think of Google slides as the presentation tool, which of course it is, and there’s nothing wrong with that, please don’t get me wrong. It’s fantastic for kids to just do a presentation. Stand up in front of the class, do a book talk or talk about their explorer or their animal. But there’s a lot of other fun things you can do with slides.

Idea #8: Comic Strips with Google Slides

[00:04:00]

ERIC: One way to do is to create comic strips with Google Slides.   And what you can do is think of each slide as a different panel of the comic strip. And students could then insert clip art and animations and speech bubbles. And when they then published that to the web you’ve got an online animated comic strip, whether it’s to explain a vocab term or science concept or retell part of a story.

Read more: Creative Slide Uses for Students

Idea #9: Create eBooks or Storybooks with Google Slides

In the same vein you can create eBooks or storybooks with Google Slides   where each slide is a page of the eBook and you are allowed to change the page dimensions, it doesn’t have to be the normal landscape. You can make it portrait, you can make a square to make it whatever size book you want.

Read: Google Slides for Student Created Storybooks

Idea #10: Create Stop Motion Animations in Google Slides

Other fun things include stop motion animation. This is a fun trick you can do with slides where basically you just speed up the slide show by hacking the URL just a little bit on the presentation so that you get each slide going by maybe a quarter of a second and you can either take actual photographs using the built-in webcam of your Chromebook or whatever device you have or you can just add images and move them around from one slide to the other.

Read: Stop Motion Animation with Google Slides

Idea #11: Dr. Seus Manipulative Slide Show

But, again, it’s another great creative way for kids to tell stories or express their understanding. Beyond that, some other fun things you can do especially with the little ones – I do have a bunch of manipulative type slide shows. We’ve got a one-fish, two-fish, red-fish, blue-fish sorting activity,   that’s great when you’re doing Dr. Seuss stuff.

Read: “One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish” Sorting with Google Slides

Idea #12 Build a Snowman Creation and Writing Activity with Google Slides

I’ve also got a Build a snowman one.    You may want to hang off on that a little bit further into the winter month, there’s great template that allows students to build their own snowman with a wide collection of eyes and noses and mouths and ears and hats and all sorts of other things. And so they copy and paste those onto their snowman and then there’s a box where they write a little story about what their snowman has done that day or what he’s going to be going off to do.

So lots of real fun things that you could do with slides besides just a traditional presentation.

Read: Build a Snowman with Google Slides

Idea #13: Pixel Art in Google Sheets

VICKI:          Now, all these hacks, you have cute little videos and tutorials and things to help us. So we’re just giving you teachers an overview and then you could pick what you want. So do we have time for another?

[00:06:00]

ERIC:                Sure. Google Sheets  is another fun one. We usually think of Google Sheets as something for math or for doing charts and graphs and it certainly is. Don’t forget that it’s always great for that. But it’s also a great way to do things like pixel art.   I have a template that you can use where you simply put in some letters there and it creates a colored in box for each one of those and you can make pixel art.

Read: Pixel Art Activities for Any Subject with Google Sheets

Idea #14: Random Writing Prompt Generator with Google Sheets

ERIC: Or how about language art with Google Sheets? Absolutely. Sheets are great for randomization.

So I’ve got two templates for random writing prompt generators.  One gives works being randomly put together…

Read: Random Writing Prompt Generator with Google Sheets

Idea #15: Random Emoji Writing Prompt Generator

ERIC:  …another one is random emojis being put together.   And both places, it allows you to generate a whole bunch of random writing prompts that will be great for journal entries, short stories or poems.

Read: Emoji Writing Prompt Generator with Google Sheets

Idea #16: Create Graphic Organizers with Google Drawings

ERIC: Beyond that, if we can still squeeze something in I’ll throw in Google Drawings. http://ift.tt/2gZl5MJ

One of my favorites, I think it’s overlooked a lot of times because it’s kind of hidden down in the menus there but Google Drawings is a great way to do loads of things including graphic organizers…

Read: Language Arts Graphic Organizers with Google Drawings

Idea #17: Create Interactive Posters with Google Drawings (These are like Thinglink)

ERIC: …interactive images which is like ThingLink, people are familiar with that.  You can use Google Drawings to make images and put hyperlinks on that branch out to videos and websites and additional information.

Read: Googlink: Creating Interactive Posters with Google Drawings

Idea #18: Magnetic “Drag and Drop” Poetry

ERIC: Google drawings is a great way for creativity with magnetic poetry, drag and drop poetry.   It’s also fantastic for math.

Read: Eric has two articles on magnetic poetry

Idea #19: Use Manipulatives and Tangrams in Google Drawings

ERIC: A lot of great manipulatives and interactives you can do such as teaching congruent figures and similar figures,  partitioning shapes…

Read: Pattern Block Templates and Activities with Google Drawings

Idea #20: Download Templates to Teach Shapes and Algebra So You Don’t Have to Create Them Yourself

ERIC: we’ve got algebra tile, pattern blocks, lots and lots of templates that I’ve created that you can just hit the ground running with those.

Read: 11 Ways to Teach Math with Google Drawings

Idea #21: Create Greeting Cards Using Google Drawings

ERIC: But Google Drawing also services well as a desktop publishing tool because it really isn’t something built into Google Suite that quite does what Microsoft publisher does. And so Drawings is a nice stand in for that for things like creating greeting cards, I’ve got a couple of templates for that…

Read: How Your Students Can Use Google Drawings to Make Greeting Cards

Idea #22: Make Motivational Posters in Google Drawings

ERIC: as well as making educational, motivational posters.  We’re used to those big black posters with the big picture and word at the bottom with a neat saying. Those can be done for actual motivation topics or you can pick a vocab term of the week and then add an appropriate image to go with it and a definition in your own terms.

Read: Have Students Create Educational “Motivational Posters” with Google Drawings

Idea #23: Explore Templates on Eric’ Site

[00:08:00]

ERIC:                    And all of those again, those templates are all available on the control of the ControlAltAchieve.com website.

Read: Here is an index of templates on Eric’s site. What a fantastic resource!

VICKI:          Teachers, I know your mind is blown but here’s the thing, you’ve all got great ideas, whether it’s emojis for variables in algebra there’s so many ideas. So one of the greatest things to do with kids is to show them something they’ve never seen before. And the best time to do that is in the first week or two of school. Blow their minds.

Follow the links in the show notes and I love Eric website particular because he shows us how to do stuff but also all the free templates. I have been tweeting out and sending out stuff of his all day, the day we’re taping here just because I love it. It’s great resource for G-Suite. And good luck with back to school. And get in there and use these tools and have some fun.

Thank You, Staples, for Sponsoring Episode 112 of the 10-Minute Teacher Podcast!

Staples is my go-to back to school shopping source. Check out http://ift.tt/2vQXj8m for my ten ways to tackle back to school like a pro. And remember to sign up for Staple’s Teacher Rewards for free shipping orders over $14.99 and 5% back. Staple has everything we need in stock all season long and ready to go for school. Go to http://ift.tt/2bpV9ah for more information and great deals. Good luck with back to school

Thank you for listening to the Ten-minute Teacher Podcast. You can download the show notes and see the archive at http://ift.tt/2quX4Nu. Never stop learning.

[End of Audio 0:09:43]

[Transcription created by tranzify.com. Some additional editing has been done to add grammatical, spelling, and punctuation errors. Every attempt has been made to correct spelling. For permissions, please email lisa@coolcatteacher.com]

Bio as Submitted

Eric has been in education for 25 years, and is currently serving as a Technology Integration Specialist for the Stark Portage Area Computer Consortium in Canton, Ohio where he oversees Google Apps for Education implementation, training, and support, as well as online learning and other technology integration initiatives.

Eric is an authorized Google Education Trainer and a Google Certified Innovator and provides Google Apps training to schools, organizations, and conferences throughout Ohio and across the country. He is a co-leader of the Ohio Google Educator Group (GEG) at tiny.cc/geg-ohio and runs the award-winning blog http://ift.tt/1W5EJjQ where all of his Google Apps and edtech resources can be found. Eric is married with four children.

  Disclosure of Material Connection: This is a “sponsored podcast episode.” The company who sponsored it compensated me via a cash payment, gift, or something else of value to include a reference to their product. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I believe will be good for my readers and are from companies I can recommend. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.” This company has no impact on the editorial content of the show.

The post 23 GSuite Ideas to Excite Kids About Learning appeared first on Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis @coolcatteacher helping educators be excellent every day. Meow!

23 GSuite Ideas to Excite Kids About Learning published first on http://ift.tt/2yTzsdq

[growthvue]

23 GSuite Ideas to Excite Kids About Learning

Eric Curts on episode 214 [A special encore episode] of the 10-Minute Teacher Podcast

From the Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis

Follow @coolcatteacher on Twitter

Eric Curts @ericcurts  teaches us twenty-three ways to use Gsuite tools in our classroom. With ideas for Google Docs, Slides, Sheets, and Drawings for all subjects and ages, you’ll want to scroll down and follow the links in our enhanced show notes.

Today’s episode is sponsored by JAM.com, the perfect last minute holiday gift for your kids or grandkids. The creative courses at Jam.com are project-based, creative and FUN. Use the code COOLCAT50 to get $50 off your course. And remember that you can sign up for a 14 day FREE trial of any course with your child aged 7-16. Drawing. Minecraft. Legos. And more!

Use the code COOLCAT50 for $50 off the cost of the course.

Listen Now

Listen to the show on iTunes or Stitcher

Stream by clicking here.

Transcript of Episode 214: 23 GSuite Ideas to Excite Your Students about Learning with Eric Curts

Download the transcript

VICKI:          It’s back to school and so many of us are getting ready to introduce the G-Suite of tools in the classroom for those of you who don’t know what that is. That’s all these Google tools. And Eric Curts @ericcurts from Control Alt Achieve   and co-leader of their higher Google Educators group has so many fantastic ideas. You’d definitely want to check the transcript and show notes for all of these ideas.

This blog post is being added to 100+ Great Google Classroom Resources for Educators. This resource has a curated list of Gsuite resources, books, and tips.

You’ll definitely want to go to Eric’s website Control Alt Achieve and his YouTube channel.

VICKI:                    So Eric, give us some cool ways that we can use G-Suite to start of the school year with a punch.

ERIC:               What I’m going to take a look at here as we run through these today are just some of the common Google tools that we tend to use but maybe look at them from a different angle and some fun ways they can be used. So why don’t we start off with Google Docs. http://ift.tt/2eKfGZe

Today, Eric goes through some engaging ideas for using 4 of the Gsuite apps:

Google Docs – http://www.http://ift.tt/2eK3OGQ

Google Slides – http://www.http://ift.tt/2gZkjzn

Google Sheets – http://www.http://ift.tt/2eK5Si7

Google Drawings – http://www.http://ift.tt/2gZkmv3

    ERIC:               Most people think of that as Google’s word processing program which obviously it is and that’s a fantastic way for students to write reports and wrote stories on all the normal things. But some fun twists that you can put on this, some folks don’t know that Google Docs support emojis. You can actually insert emojis right from the ‘insert special characters’ menu and it’s going to open up a lot of really fun activities for students.

Idea #1: Write Emoji Stories

Idea #2: Summarize Something You’ve Seen or Read Using Emojis

If you’re looking for a way to get them engaged and excited early on in the year, they can write emoji stories or they can summarize a story or a movie or something they’ve seen recently using emojis.

See: 5 Emoji Activities for Google Docs  where Eric describes how to do all of these emoji activities including the emoji math picture shown below.

Idea #3: Use Emojis to Explain Math Variables

ERIC: They can also incorporate this into math. Yes, I used to be a math teacher so I just have a soft spot for math.

[00:02:00]

Emojis can be a great way to replace variables to bring a better concrete understanding of what you’re doing when solving math problems. And then there’s a lot of other possible neat examples. And like you said in the show notes, there’d be links to all of my blog post that go into the specific details on those. But that’s a fun thing.

Emojis help variables come alive and make sense. See Eric’s blog post on emojis in Google docs to learn how to do this.

Idea #4: Black Out Poetry in Google Docs

ERIC: While still on the topic of docs another neat thing to do is to use the highlight tool but not for highlighting. Let’s turn it on its head and use it to black things out. In Google Docs you can use the highlighting tool to do blackout poetry where students start with some text and then remove all the words except what they want to leave for their found poem, you can also use the exact same tool to do summarization.

Idea #5: Article Summarization with Black Out in Google Docs

It’s a process called text reduction strategy which is typically done with a big black marker and an actual piece of paper or an article, but you can do it in Google Docs as well, you can take an article from one of the many excellent websites like DOGO News, throw that in there and have the students go through and remove everything that’s not critical so that they end up with their summarization of the article. It’s a great way to help move students toward those summarization skills.

Read More: Improve Reading Comprehension with Google Docs “Black Out”

Idea #6: Choose Your Own Adventure Stories

Beyond that, lots of other fun things you can do include creating choose your own adventure stories. Create one for students to work together in a group where they write a story and use hyperlinks inside of the doc to jump to different pages as they write their choose your own adventure stories.

Those are just a couple of Docs ideas.

Read More: Choose Your Own Adventure Stories with Google Docs

Idea #7: Teach Anchors and Hyperlinks

VICKI:          And plus, choose your own adventure, we give you the ability to teach about anchors and teach about hyperlinks. There are so many things you can do with these ideas. I love them, Eric.

A hyperlink links to another web page. (Just go to insert –> Hyperlink.) However, an anchor links within the document. This lets you skip down a long page. I do this an easy way in a long document by making headings. Then, insert a table of contents. The headings automatically become anchors. You can also insert anchors manually.  they are a big time saver for students and teaches on long documents, for example, if you’re writing a book.

ERIC:           Absolutely.

VICKI:          Okay, what’s next?

ERIC:            Sure. Let’s jump over to Google Slides. http://ift.tt/2gZkhrf

A lot of times we think of Google slides as the presentation tool, which of course it is, and there’s nothing wrong with that, please don’t get me wrong. It’s fantastic for kids to just do a presentation. Stand up in front of the class, do a book talk or talk about their explorer or their animal. But there’s a lot of other fun things you can do with slides.

Idea #8: Comic Strips with Google Slides

[00:04:00]

ERIC: One way to do is to create comic strips with Google Slides.   And what you can do is think of each slide as a different panel of the comic strip. And students could then insert clip art and animations and speech bubbles. And when they then published that to the web you’ve got an online animated comic strip, whether it’s to explain a vocab term or science concept or retell part of a story.

Read more: Creative Slide Uses for Students

Idea #9: Create eBooks or Storybooks with Google Slides

In the same vein you can create eBooks or storybooks with Google Slides   where each slide is a page of the eBook and you are allowed to change the page dimensions, it doesn’t have to be the normal landscape. You can make it portrait, you can make a square to make it whatever size book you want.

Read: Google Slides for Student Created Storybooks

Idea #10: Create Stop Motion Animations in Google Slides

Other fun things include stop motion animation. This is a fun trick you can do with slides where basically you just speed up the slide show by hacking the URL just a little bit on the presentation so that you get each slide going by maybe a quarter of a second and you can either take actual photographs using the built-in webcam of your Chromebook or whatever device you have or you can just add images and move them around from one slide to the other.

Read: Stop Motion Animation with Google Slides

Idea #11: Dr. Seus Manipulative Slide Show

But, again, it’s another great creative way for kids to tell stories or express their understanding. Beyond that, some other fun things you can do especially with the little ones – I do have a bunch of manipulative type slide shows. We’ve got a one-fish, two-fish, red-fish, blue-fish sorting activity,   that’s great when you’re doing Dr. Seuss stuff.

Read: “One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish” Sorting with Google Slides

Idea #12 Build a Snowman Creation and Writing Activity with Google Slides

I’ve also got a Build a snowman one.    You may want to hang off on that a little bit further into the winter month, there’s great template that allows students to build their own snowman with a wide collection of eyes and noses and mouths and ears and hats and all sorts of other things. And so they copy and paste those onto their snowman and then there’s a box where they write a little story about what their snowman has done that day or what he’s going to be going off to do.

So lots of real fun things that you could do with slides besides just a traditional presentation.

Read: Build a Snowman with Google Slides

Idea #13: Pixel Art in Google Sheets

VICKI:          Now, all these hacks, you have cute little videos and tutorials and things to help us. So we’re just giving you teachers an overview and then you could pick what you want. So do we have time for another?

[00:06:00]

ERIC:                Sure. Google Sheets  is another fun one. We usually think of Google Sheets as something for math or for doing charts and graphs and it certainly is. Don’t forget that it’s always great for that. But it’s also a great way to do things like pixel art.   I have a template that you can use where you simply put in some letters there and it creates a colored in box for each one of those and you can make pixel art.

Read: Pixel Art Activities for Any Subject with Google Sheets

Idea #14: Random Writing Prompt Generator with Google Sheets

ERIC: Or how about language art with Google Sheets? Absolutely. Sheets are great for randomization.

So I’ve got two templates for random writing prompt generators.  One gives works being randomly put together…

Read: Random Writing Prompt Generator with Google Sheets

Idea #15: Random Emoji Writing Prompt Generator

ERIC:  …another one is random emojis being put together.   And both places, it allows you to generate a whole bunch of random writing prompts that will be great for journal entries, short stories or poems.

Read: Emoji Writing Prompt Generator with Google Sheets

Idea #16: Create Graphic Organizers with Google Drawings

ERIC: Beyond that, if we can still squeeze something in I’ll throw in Google Drawings. http://ift.tt/2gZl5MJ

One of my favorites, I think it’s overlooked a lot of times because it’s kind of hidden down in the menus there but Google Drawings is a great way to do loads of things including graphic organizers…

Read: Language Arts Graphic Organizers with Google Drawings

Idea #17: Create Interactive Posters with Google Drawings (These are like Thinglink)

ERIC: …interactive images which is like ThingLink, people are familiar with that.  You can use Google Drawings to make images and put hyperlinks on that branch out to videos and websites and additional information.

Read: Googlink: Creating Interactive Posters with Google Drawings

Idea #18: Magnetic “Drag and Drop” Poetry

ERIC: Google drawings is a great way for creativity with magnetic poetry, drag and drop poetry.   It’s also fantastic for math.

Read: Eric has two articles on magnetic poetry

Idea #19: Use Manipulatives and Tangrams in Google Drawings

ERIC: A lot of great manipulatives and interactives you can do such as teaching congruent figures and similar figures,  partitioning shapes…

Read: Pattern Block Templates and Activities with Google Drawings

Idea #20: Download Templates to Teach Shapes and Algebra So You Don’t Have to Create Them Yourself

ERIC: we’ve got algebra tile, pattern blocks, lots and lots of templates that I’ve created that you can just hit the ground running with those.

Read: 11 Ways to Teach Math with Google Drawings

Idea #21: Create Greeting Cards Using Google Drawings

ERIC: But Google Drawing also services well as a desktop publishing tool because it really isn’t something built into Google Suite that quite does what Microsoft publisher does. And so Drawings is a nice stand in for that for things like creating greeting cards, I’ve got a couple of templates for that…

Read: How Your Students Can Use Google Drawings to Make Greeting Cards

Idea #22: Make Motivational Posters in Google Drawings

ERIC: as well as making educational, motivational posters.  We’re used to those big black posters with the big picture and word at the bottom with a neat saying. Those can be done for actual motivation topics or you can pick a vocab term of the week and then add an appropriate image to go with it and a definition in your own terms.

Read: Have Students Create Educational “Motivational Posters” with Google Drawings

Idea #23: Explore Templates on Eric’ Site

[00:08:00]

ERIC:                    And all of those again, those templates are all available on the control of the ControlAltAchieve.com website.

Read: Here is an index of templates on Eric’s site. What a fantastic resource!

VICKI:          Teachers, I know your mind is blown but here’s the thing, you’ve all got great ideas, whether it’s emojis for variables in algebra there’s so many ideas. So one of the greatest things to do with kids is to show them something they’ve never seen before. And the best time to do that is in the first week or two of school. Blow their minds.

Follow the links in the show notes and I love Eric website particular because he shows us how to do stuff but also all the free templates. I have been tweeting out and sending out stuff of his all day, the day we’re taping here just because I love it. It’s great resource for G-Suite. And good luck with back to school. And get in there and use these tools and have some fun.

Thank You, Staples, for Sponsoring Episode 112 of the 10-Minute Teacher Podcast!

Staples is my go-to back to school shopping source. Check out http://ift.tt/2vQXj8m for my ten ways to tackle back to school like a pro. And remember to sign up for Staple’s Teacher Rewards for free shipping orders over $14.99 and 5% back. Staple has everything we need in stock all season long and ready to go for school. Go to http://ift.tt/2bpV9ah for more information and great deals. Good luck with back to school

Thank you for listening to the Ten-minute Teacher Podcast. You can download the show notes and see the archive at http://ift.tt/2quX4Nu. Never stop learning.

[End of Audio 0:09:43]

[Transcription created by tranzify.com. Some additional editing has been done to add grammatical, spelling, and punctuation errors. Every attempt has been made to correct spelling. For permissions, please email lisa@coolcatteacher.com]

Bio as Submitted

Eric has been in education for 25 years, and is currently serving as a Technology Integration Specialist for the Stark Portage Area Computer Consortium in Canton, Ohio where he oversees Google Apps for Education implementation, training, and support, as well as online learning and other technology integration initiatives.

Eric is an authorized Google Education Trainer and a Google Certified Innovator and provides Google Apps training to schools, organizations, and conferences throughout Ohio and across the country. He is a co-leader of the Ohio Google Educator Group (GEG) at tiny.cc/geg-ohio and runs the award-winning blog http://ift.tt/1W5EJjQ where all of his Google Apps and edtech resources can be found. Eric is married with four children.

  Disclosure of Material Connection: This is a “sponsored podcast episode.” The company who sponsored it compensated me via a cash payment, gift, or something else of value to include a reference to their product. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I believe will be good for my readers and are from companies I can recommend. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.” This company has no impact on the editorial content of the show.

The post 23 GSuite Ideas to Excite Kids About Learning appeared first on Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis @coolcatteacher helping educators be excellent every day. Meow!

23 GSuite Ideas to Excite Kids About Learning published first on http://ift.tt/2xx6Oyq

[athena29stone]

23 GSuite Ideas to Excite Your Students about Learning with Eric Curts

Episode 112 - The 10-Minute Teacher Podcast

From the Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis

Follow @coolcatteacher on Twitter

Eric Curts @ericcurts  teaches us twenty-three ways to use Gsuite tools in our classroom. With ideas for Google Docs, Slides, Sheets, and Drawings for all subjects and ages, you’ll want to scroll down and follow the links in our enhanced show notes.

Podcast Sponsor

This episode is sponsored by Staples. Staples is my go-to back to school shopping source. Check out coolcatteacher.com/pro for 10 Ways to tackle back to school like a pro. And remember to sign up for Staples Teacher rewards for free shipping on orders over $14.99 and 5% back. Staples has everything we need in stock all season long and ready to go for school. Go to www.staples.com/backtoschool for more information and great deals!

Check out back to school tips for teachers

Listen to the show on iTunes or Stitcher

You can right click and download a copy

Below is a transcript modified for your reading pleasure. For information on the guests and items mentioned in this show, scroll down to the bottom of this post.

****

Transcript of Episode 112: 23 GSuite Ideas to Excite Your Students about Learning with Eric Curts

Download the transcript

VICKI:          It’s back to school and so many of us are getting ready to introduce the G-Suite of tools in the classroom for those of you who don’t know what that is. That’s all these Google tools. And Eric Curts @ericcurts from Control Alt Achieve   and co-leader of their higher Google Educators group has so many fantastic ideas. You’d definitely want to check the transcript and show notes for all of these ideas.

This blog post is being added to 100+ Great Google Classroom Resources for Educators. This resource has a curated list of Gsuite resources, books, and tips.

You’ll definitely want to go to Eric’s website Control Alt Achieve and his YouTube channel.

VICKI:                    So Eric, give us some cool ways that we can use G-Suite to start of the school year with a punch.

ERIC:               What I’m going to take a look at here as we run through these today are just some of the common Google tools that we tend to use but maybe look at them from a different angle and some fun ways they can be used. So why don’t we start off with Google Docs. http://www.controlaltachieve.com/docs

Today, Eric goes through some engaging ideas for using 4 of the Gsuite apps:

Google Docs – http://www.controlaltachieve.com/docs

Google Slides – http://www.controlaltachieve.com/slides

Google Sheets – http://www.controlaltachieve.com/sheets

Google Drawings – http://www.controlaltachieve.com/drawings

    ERIC:               Most people think of that as Google’s word processing program which obviously it is and that’s a fantastic way for students to write reports and wrote stories on all the normal things. But some fun twists that you can put on this, some folks don’t know that Google Docs support emojis. You can actually insert emojis right from the ‘insert special characters’ menu and it’s going to open up a lot of really fun activities for students.

Idea #1: Write Emoji Stories

Idea #2: Summarize Something You’ve Seen or Read Using Emojis

If you’re looking for a way to get them engaged and excited early on in the year, they can write emoji stories or they can summarize a story or a movie or something they’ve seen recently using emojis.

See: 5 Emoji Activities for Google Docs  where Eric describes how to do all of these emoji activities including the emoji math picture shown below.

Idea #3: Use Emojis to Explain Math Variables

ERIC: They can also incorporate this into math. Yes, I used to be a math teacher so I just have a soft spot for math.

[00:02:00]

Emojis can be a great way to replace variables to bring a better concrete understanding of what you’re doing when solving math problems. And then there’s a lot of other possible neat examples. And like you said in the show notes, there’d be links to all of my blog post that go into the specific details on those. But that’s a fun thing.

Emojis help variables come alive and make sense. See Eric’s blog post on emojis in Google docs to learn how to do this.

Idea #4: Black Out Poetry in Google Docs

ERIC: While still on the topic of docs another neat thing to do is to use the highlight tool but not for highlighting. Let’s turn it on its head and use it to black things out. In Google Docs you can use the highlighting tool to do blackout poetry where students start with some text and then remove all the words except what they want to leave for their found poem, you can also use the exact same tool to do summarization.

Idea #5: Article Summarization with Black Out in Google Docs

It’s a process called text reduction strategy which is typically done with a big black marker and an actual piece of paper or an article, but you can do it in Google Docs as well, you can take an article from one of the many excellent websites like DOGO News, throw that in there and have the students go through and remove everything that’s not critical so that they end up with their summarization of the article. It’s a great way to help move students toward those summarization skills.

Read More: Improve Reading Comprehension with Google Docs “Black Out”

Idea #6: Choose Your Own Adventure Stories

Beyond that, lots of other fun things you can do include creating choose your own adventure stories. Create one for students to work together in a group where they write a story and use hyperlinks inside of the doc to jump to different pages as they write their choose your own adventure stories.

Those are just a couple of Docs ideas.

Read More: Choose Your Own Adventure Stories with Google Docs

Idea #7: Teach Anchors and Hyperlinks

VICKI:          And plus, choose your own adventure, we give you the ability to teach about anchors and teach about hyperlinks. There are so many things you can do with these ideas. I love them, Eric.

A hyperlink links to another web page. (Just go to insert –> Hyperlink.) However, an anchor links within the document. This lets you skip down a long page. I do this an easy way in a long document by making headings. Then, insert a table of contents. The headings automatically become anchors. You can also insert anchors manually.  they are a big time saver for students and teaches on long documents, for example, if you’re writing a book.

ERIC:           Absolutely.

VICKI:          Okay, what’s next?

ERIC:            Sure. Let’s jump over to Google Slides. http://www.controlaltachieve.com/slides

A lot of times we think of Google slides as the presentation tool, which of course it is, and there’s nothing wrong with that, please don’t get me wrong. It’s fantastic for kids to just do a presentation. Stand up in front of the class, do a book talk or talk about their explorer or their animal. But there’s a lot of other fun things you can do with slides.

Idea #8: Comic Strips with Google Slides

[00:04:00]

ERIC: One way to do is to create comic strips with Google Slides.   And what you can do is think of each slide as a different panel of the comic strip. And students could then insert clip art and animations and speech bubbles. And when they then published that to the web you’ve got an online animated comic strip, whether it’s to explain a vocab term or science concept or retell part of a story.

Read more: Creative Slide Uses for Students

Idea #9: Create eBooks or Storybooks with Google Slides

In the same vein you can create eBooks or storybooks with Google Slides   where each slide is a page of the eBook and you are allowed to change the page dimensions, it doesn’t have to be the normal landscape. You can make it portrait, you can make a square to make it whatever size book you want.

Read: Google Slides for Student Created Storybooks

Idea #10: Create Stop Motion Animations in Google Slides

Other fun things include stop motion animation. This is a fun trick you can do with slides where basically you just speed up the slide show by hacking the URL just a little bit on the presentation so that you get each slide going by maybe a quarter of a second and you can either take actual photographs using the built-in webcam of your Chromebook or whatever device you have or you can just add images and move them around from one slide to the other.

Read: Stop Motion Animation with Google Slides

Idea #11: Dr. Seus Manipulative Slide Show

But, again, it’s another great creative way for kids to tell stories or express their understanding. Beyond that, some other fun things you can do especially with the little ones – I do have a bunch of manipulative type slide shows. We’ve got a one-fish, two-fish, red-fish, blue-fish sorting activity,   that’s great when you’re doing Dr. Seuss stuff.

Read: “One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish” Sorting with Google Slides

Idea #12 Build a Snowman Creation and Writing Activity with Google Slides

I’ve also got a Build a snowman one.    You may want to hang off on that a little bit further into the winter month, there’s great template that allows students to build their own snowman with a wide collection of eyes and noses and mouths and ears and hats and all sorts of other things. And so they copy and paste those onto their snowman and then there’s a box where they write a little story about what their snowman has done that day or what he’s going to be going off to do.

So lots of real fun things that you could do with slides besides just a traditional presentation.

Read: Build a Snowman with Google Slides

Idea #13: Pixel Art in Google Sheets

VICKI:          Now, all these hacks, you have cute little videos and tutorials and things to help us. So we’re just giving you teachers an overview and then you could pick what you want. So do we have time for another?

[00:06:00]

ERIC:                Sure. Google Sheets  is another fun one. We usually think of Google Sheets as something for math or for doing charts and graphs and it certainly is. Don’t forget that it’s always great for that. But it’s also a great way to do things like pixel art.   I have a template that you can use where you simply put in some letters there and it creates a colored in box for each one of those and you can make pixel art.

Read: Pixel Art Activities for Any Subject with Google Sheets

Idea #14: Random Writing Prompt Generator with Google Sheets

ERIC: Or how about language art with Google Sheets? Absolutely. Sheets are great for randomization.

So I’ve got two templates for random writing prompt generators.  One gives works being randomly put together…

Read: Random Writing Prompt Generator with Google Sheets

Idea #15: Random Emoji Writing Prompt Generator

ERIC:  …another one is random emojis being put together.   And both places, it allows you to generate a whole bunch of random writing prompts that will be great for journal entries, short stories or poems.

Read: Emoji Writing Prompt Generator with Google Sheets

Idea #16: Create Graphic Organizers with Google Drawings

ERIC: Beyond that, if we can still squeeze something in I’ll throw in Google Drawings. http://www.controlaltachieve.com/drawings

One of my favorites, I think it’s overlooked a lot of times because it’s kind of hidden down in the menus there but Google Drawings is a great way to do loads of things including graphic organizers…

Read: Language Arts Graphic Organizers with Google Drawings

Idea #17: Create Interactive Posters with Google Drawings (These are like Thinglink)

ERIC: …interactive images which is like ThingLink, people are familiar with that.  You can use Google Drawings to make images and put hyperlinks on that branch out to videos and websites and additional information.

Read: Googlink: Creating Interactive Posters with Google Drawings

Idea #18: Magnetic “Drag and Drop” Poetry

ERIC: Google drawings is a great way for creativity with magnetic poetry, drag and drop poetry.   It’s also fantastic for math.

Read: Eric has two articles on magnetic poetry

Idea #19: Use Manipulatives and Tangrams in Google Drawings

ERIC: A lot of great manipulatives and interactives you can do such as teaching congruent figures and similar figures,  partitioning shapes…

Read: Pattern Block Templates and Activities with Google Drawings

Idea #20: Download Templates to Teach Shapes and Algebra So You Don’t Have to Create Them Yourself

ERIC: we’ve got algebra tile, pattern blocks, lots and lots of templates that I’ve created that you can just hit the ground running with those.

Read: 11 Ways to Teach Math with Google Drawings

Idea #21: Create Greeting Cards Using Google Drawings

ERIC: But Google Drawing also services well as a desktop publishing tool because it really isn’t something built into Google Suite that quite does what Microsoft publisher does. And so Drawings is a nice stand in for that for things like creating greeting cards, I’ve got a couple of templates for that…

Read: How Your Students Can Use Google Drawings to Make Greeting Cards

Idea #22: Make Motivational Posters in Google Drawings

ERIC: as well as making educational, motivational posters.  We’re used to those big black posters with the big picture and word at the bottom with a neat saying. Those can be done for actual motivation topics or you can pick a vocab term of the week and then add an appropriate image to go with it and a definition in your own terms.

Read: Have Students Create Educational “Motivational Posters” with Google Drawings

Idea #23: Explore Templates on Eric’ Site

[00:08:00]

ERIC:                    And all of those again, those templates are all available on the control of the ControlAltAchieve.com website.

Read: Here is an index of templates on Eric’s site. What a fantastic resource!

VICKI:          Teachers, I know your mind is blown but here’s the thing, you’ve all got great ideas, whether it’s emojis for variables in algebra there’s so many ideas. So one of the greatest things to do with kids is to show them something they’ve never seen before. And the best time to do that is in the first week or two of school. Blow their minds.

Follow the links in the show notes and I love Eric website particular because he shows us how to do stuff but also all the free templates. I have been tweeting out and sending out stuff of his all day, the day we’re taping here just because I love it. It’s great resource for G-Suite. And good luck with back to school. And get in there and use these tools and have some fun.

Thank You, Staples, for Sponsoring Episode 112 of the 10-Minute Teacher Podcast!

Staples is my go-to back to school shopping source. Check out coolcatteacher.com/pro for my ten ways to tackle back to school like a pro. And remember to sign up for Staple’s Teacher Rewards for free shipping orders over $14.99 and 5% back. Staple has everything we need in stock all season long and ready to go for school. Go to staples.com/backtoschool for more information and great deals. Good luck with back to school

Thank you for listening to the Ten-minute Teacher Podcast. You can download the show notes and see the archive at coolcatteacher.com/podcast. Never stop learning.

[End of Audio 0:09:43]

[Transcription created by tranzify.com. Some additional editing has been done to add grammatical, spelling, and punctuation errors. Every attempt has been made to correct spelling. For permissions, please email lisa@coolcatteacher.com]

Bio as Submitted

Eric has been in education for 25 years, and is currently serving as a Technology Integration Specialist for the Stark Portage Area Computer Consortium in Canton, Ohio where he oversees Google Apps for Education implementation, training, and support, as well as online learning and other technology integration initiatives.

Eric is an authorized Google Education Trainer and a Google Certified Innovator and provides Google Apps training to schools, organizations, and conferences throughout Ohio and across the country. He is a co-leader of the Ohio Google Educator Group (GEG) at tiny.cc/geg-ohio and runs the award-winning blog www.ControlAltAchieve.com where all of his Google Apps and edtech resources can be found. Eric is married with four children.

  The post 23 GSuite Ideas to Excite Your Students about Learning with Eric Curts appeared first on Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis @coolcatteacher helping educators be excellent every day. Meow!

from Cool Cat Teacher BlogCool Cat Teacher Blog http://www.coolcatteacher.com/e112/

[aira26soonas]

23 GSuite Ideas to Excite Your Students about Learning with Eric Curts

Episode 112 - The 10-Minute Teacher Podcast

From the Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis

Follow @coolcatteacher on Twitter

Eric Curts @ericcurts  teaches us twenty-three ways to use Gsuite tools in our classroom. With ideas for Google Docs, Slides, Sheets, and Drawings for all subjects and ages, you’ll want to scroll down and follow the links in our enhanced show notes.

Podcast Sponsor

This episode is sponsored by Staples. Staples is my go-to back to school shopping source. Check out coolcatteacher.com/pro for 10 Ways to tackle back to school like a pro. And remember to sign up for Staples Teacher rewards for free shipping on orders over $14.99 and 5% back. Staples has everything we need in stock all season long and ready to go for school. Go to www.staples.com/backtoschool for more information and great deals!

Check out back to school tips for teachers

Listen to the show on iTunes or Stitcher

You can right click and download a copy

Below is a transcript modified for your reading pleasure. For information on the guests and items mentioned in this show, scroll down to the bottom of this post.

****

Transcript of Episode 112: 23 GSuite Ideas to Excite Your Students about Learning with Eric Curts

Download the transcript

VICKI:          It’s back to school and so many of us are getting ready to introduce the G-Suite of tools in the classroom for those of you who don’t know what that is. That’s all these Google tools. And Eric Curts @ericcurts from Control Alt Achieve   and co-leader of their higher Google Educators group has so many fantastic ideas. You’d definitely want to check the transcript and show notes for all of these ideas.

This blog post is being added to 100+ Great Google Classroom Resources for Educators. This resource has a curated list of Gsuite resources, books, and tips.

You’ll definitely want to go to Eric’s website Control Alt Achieve and his YouTube channel.

VICKI:                    So Eric, give us some cool ways that we can use G-Suite to start of the school year with a punch.

ERIC:               What I’m going to take a look at here as we run through these today are just some of the common Google tools that we tend to use but maybe look at them from a different angle and some fun ways they can be used. So why don’t we start off with Google Docs. http://www.controlaltachieve.com/docs

Today, Eric goes through some engaging ideas for using 4 of the Gsuite apps:

Google Docs – http://www.controlaltachieve.com/docs

Google Slides – http://www.controlaltachieve.com/slides

Google Sheets – http://www.controlaltachieve.com/sheets

Google Drawings – http://www.controlaltachieve.com/drawings

    ERIC:               Most people think of that as Google’s word processing program which obviously it is and that’s a fantastic way for students to write reports and wrote stories on all the normal things. But some fun twists that you can put on this, some folks don’t know that Google Docs support emojis. You can actually insert emojis right from the ‘insert special characters’ menu and it’s going to open up a lot of really fun activities for students.

Idea #1: Write Emoji Stories

Idea #2: Summarize Something You’ve Seen or Read Using Emojis

If you’re looking for a way to get them engaged and excited early on in the year, they can write emoji stories or they can summarize a story or a movie or something they’ve seen recently using emojis.

See: 5 Emoji Activities for Google Docs  where Eric describes how to do all of these emoji activities including the emoji math picture shown below.

Idea #3: Use Emojis to Explain Math Variables

ERIC: They can also incorporate this into math. Yes, I used to be a math teacher so I just have a soft spot for math.

[00:02:00]

Emojis can be a great way to replace variables to bring a better concrete understanding of what you’re doing when solving math problems. And then there’s a lot of other possible neat examples. And like you said in the show notes, there’d be links to all of my blog post that go into the specific details on those. But that’s a fun thing.

Emojis help variables come alive and make sense. See Eric’s blog post on emojis in Google docs to learn how to do this.

Idea #4: Black Out Poetry in Google Docs

ERIC: While still on the topic of docs another neat thing to do is to use the highlight tool but not for highlighting. Let’s turn it on its head and use it to black things out. In Google Docs you can use the highlighting tool to do blackout poetry where students start with some text and then remove all the words except what they want to leave for their found poem, you can also use the exact same tool to do summarization.

Idea #5: Article Summarization with Black Out in Google Docs

It’s a process called text reduction strategy which is typically done with a big black marker and an actual piece of paper or an article, but you can do it in Google Docs as well, you can take an article from one of the many excellent websites like DOGO News, throw that in there and have the students go through and remove everything that’s not critical so that they end up with their summarization of the article. It’s a great way to help move students toward those summarization skills.

Read More: Improve Reading Comprehension with Google Docs “Black Out”

Idea #6: Choose Your Own Adventure Stories

Beyond that, lots of other fun things you can do include creating choose your own adventure stories. Create one for students to work together in a group where they write a story and use hyperlinks inside of the doc to jump to different pages as they write their choose your own adventure stories.

Those are just a couple of Docs ideas.

Read More: Choose Your Own Adventure Stories with Google Docs

Idea #7: Teach Anchors and Hyperlinks

VICKI:          And plus, choose your own adventure, we give you the ability to teach about anchors and teach about hyperlinks. There are so many things you can do with these ideas. I love them, Eric.

A hyperlink links to another web page. (Just go to insert –> Hyperlink.) However, an anchor links within the document. This lets you skip down a long page. I do this an easy way in a long document by making headings. Then, insert a table of contents. The headings automatically become anchors. You can also insert anchors manually.  they are a big time saver for students and teaches on long documents, for example, if you’re writing a book.

ERIC:           Absolutely.

VICKI:          Okay, what’s next?

ERIC:            Sure. Let’s jump over to Google Slides. http://www.controlaltachieve.com/slides

A lot of times we think of Google slides as the presentation tool, which of course it is, and there’s nothing wrong with that, please don’t get me wrong. It’s fantastic for kids to just do a presentation. Stand up in front of the class, do a book talk or talk about their explorer or their animal. But there’s a lot of other fun things you can do with slides.

Idea #8: Comic Strips with Google Slides

[00:04:00]

ERIC: One way to do is to create comic strips with Google Slides.   And what you can do is think of each slide as a different panel of the comic strip. And students could then insert clip art and animations and speech bubbles. And when they then published that to the web you’ve got an online animated comic strip, whether it’s to explain a vocab term or science concept or retell part of a story.

Read more: Creative Slide Uses for Students

Idea #9: Create eBooks or Storybooks with Google Slides

In the same vein you can create eBooks or storybooks with Google Slides   where each slide is a page of the eBook and you are allowed to change the page dimensions, it doesn’t have to be the normal landscape. You can make it portrait, you can make a square to make it whatever size book you want.

Read: Google Slides for Student Created Storybooks

Idea #10: Create Stop Motion Animations in Google Slides

Other fun things include stop motion animation. This is a fun trick you can do with slides where basically you just speed up the slide show by hacking the URL just a little bit on the presentation so that you get each slide going by maybe a quarter of a second and you can either take actual photographs using the built-in webcam of your Chromebook or whatever device you have or you can just add images and move them around from one slide to the other.

Read: Stop Motion Animation with Google Slides

Idea #11: Dr. Seus Manipulative Slide Show

But, again, it’s another great creative way for kids to tell stories or express their understanding. Beyond that, some other fun things you can do especially with the little ones – I do have a bunch of manipulative type slide shows. We’ve got a one-fish, two-fish, red-fish, blue-fish sorting activity,   that’s great when you’re doing Dr. Seuss stuff.

Read: “One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish” Sorting with Google Slides

Idea #12 Build a Snowman Creation and Writing Activity with Google Slides

I’ve also got a Build a snowman one.    You may want to hang off on that a little bit further into the winter month, there’s great template that allows students to build their own snowman with a wide collection of eyes and noses and mouths and ears and hats and all sorts of other things. And so they copy and paste those onto their snowman and then there’s a box where they write a little story about what their snowman has done that day or what he’s going to be going off to do.

So lots of real fun things that you could do with slides besides just a traditional presentation.

Read: Build a Snowman with Google Slides

Idea #13: Pixel Art in Google Sheets

VICKI:          Now, all these hacks, you have cute little videos and tutorials and things to help us. So we’re just giving you teachers an overview and then you could pick what you want. So do we have time for another?

[00:06:00]

ERIC:                Sure. Google Sheets  is another fun one. We usually think of Google Sheets as something for math or for doing charts and graphs and it certainly is. Don’t forget that it’s always great for that. But it’s also a great way to do things like pixel art.   I have a template that you can use where you simply put in some letters there and it creates a colored in box for each one of those and you can make pixel art.

Read: Pixel Art Activities for Any Subject with Google Sheets

Idea #14: Random Writing Prompt Generator with Google Sheets

ERIC: Or how about language art with Google Sheets? Absolutely. Sheets are great for randomization.

So I’ve got two templates for random writing prompt generators.  One gives works being randomly put together…

Read: Random Writing Prompt Generator with Google Sheets

Idea #15: Random Emoji Writing Prompt Generator

ERIC:  …another one is random emojis being put together.   And both places, it allows you to generate a whole bunch of random writing prompts that will be great for journal entries, short stories or poems.

Read: Emoji Writing Prompt Generator with Google Sheets

Idea #16: Create Graphic Organizers with Google Drawings

ERIC: Beyond that, if we can still squeeze something in I’ll throw in Google Drawings. http://www.controlaltachieve.com/drawings

One of my favorites, I think it’s overlooked a lot of times because it’s kind of hidden down in the menus there but Google Drawings is a great way to do loads of things including graphic organizers…

Read: Language Arts Graphic Organizers with Google Drawings

Idea #17: Create Interactive Posters with Google Drawings (These are like Thinglink)

ERIC: …interactive images which is like ThingLink, people are familiar with that.  You can use Google Drawings to make images and put hyperlinks on that branch out to videos and websites and additional information.

Read: Googlink: Creating Interactive Posters with Google Drawings

Idea #18: Magnetic “Drag and Drop” Poetry

ERIC: Google drawings is a great way for creativity with magnetic poetry, drag and drop poetry.   It’s also fantastic for math.

Read: Eric has two articles on magnetic poetry

Idea #19: Use Manipulatives and Tangrams in Google Drawings

ERIC: A lot of great manipulatives and interactives you can do such as teaching congruent figures and similar figures,  partitioning shapes…

Read: Pattern Block Templates and Activities with Google Drawings

Idea #20: Download Templates to Teach Shapes and Algebra So You Don’t Have to Create Them Yourself

ERIC: we’ve got algebra tile, pattern blocks, lots and lots of templates that I’ve created that you can just hit the ground running with those.

Read: 11 Ways to Teach Math with Google Drawings

Idea #21: Create Greeting Cards Using Google Drawings

ERIC: But Google Drawing also services well as a desktop publishing tool because it really isn’t something built into Google Suite that quite does what Microsoft publisher does. And so Drawings is a nice stand in for that for things like creating greeting cards, I’ve got a couple of templates for that…

Read: How Your Students Can Use Google Drawings to Make Greeting Cards

Idea #22: Make Motivational Posters in Google Drawings

ERIC: as well as making educational, motivational posters.  We’re used to those big black posters with the big picture and word at the bottom with a neat saying. Those can be done for actual motivation topics or you can pick a vocab term of the week and then add an appropriate image to go with it and a definition in your own terms.

Read: Have Students Create Educational “Motivational Posters” with Google Drawings

Idea #23: Explore Templates on Eric’ Site

[00:08:00]

ERIC:                    And all of those again, those templates are all available on the control of the ControlAltAchieve.com website.

Read: Here is an index of templates on Eric’s site. What a fantastic resource!

VICKI:          Teachers, I know your mind is blown but here’s the thing, you’ve all got great ideas, whether it’s emojis for variables in algebra there’s so many ideas. So one of the greatest things to do with kids is to show them something they’ve never seen before. And the best time to do that is in the first week or two of school. Blow their minds.

Follow the links in the show notes and I love Eric website particular because he shows us how to do stuff but also all the free templates. I have been tweeting out and sending out stuff of his all day, the day we’re taping here just because I love it. It’s great resource for G-Suite. And good luck with back to school. And get in there and use these tools and have some fun.

Thank You, Staples, for Sponsoring Episode 112 of the 10-Minute Teacher Podcast!

Staples is my go-to back to school shopping source. Check out coolcatteacher.com/pro for my ten ways to tackle back to school like a pro. And remember to sign up for Staple’s Teacher Rewards for free shipping orders over $14.99 and 5% back. Staple has everything we need in stock all season long and ready to go for school. Go to staples.com/backtoschool for more information and great deals. Good luck with back to school

Thank you for listening to the Ten-minute Teacher Podcast. You can download the show notes and see the archive at coolcatteacher.com/podcast. Never stop learning.

[End of Audio 0:09:43]

[Transcription created by tranzify.com. Some additional editing has been done to add grammatical, spelling, and punctuation errors. Every attempt has been made to correct spelling. For permissions, please email lisa@coolcatteacher.com]

Bio as Submitted

Eric has been in education for 25 years, and is currently serving as a Technology Integration Specialist for the Stark Portage Area Computer Consortium in Canton, Ohio where he oversees Google Apps for Education implementation, training, and support, as well as online learning and other technology integration initiatives.

Eric is an authorized Google Education Trainer and a Google Certified Innovator and provides Google Apps training to schools, organizations, and conferences throughout Ohio and across the country. He is a co-leader of the Ohio Google Educator Group (GEG) at tiny.cc/geg-ohio and runs the award-winning blog www.ControlAltAchieve.com where all of his Google Apps and edtech resources can be found. Eric is married with four children.

  The post 23 GSuite Ideas to Excite Your Students about Learning with Eric Curts appeared first on Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis @coolcatteacher helping educators be excellent every day. Meow!

from Cool Cat Teacher BlogCool Cat Teacher Blog http://www.coolcatteacher.com/e112/

[ralph31ortiz]

23 GSuite Ideas to Excite Your Students about Learning with Eric Curts

Episode 112 - The 10-Minute Teacher Podcast

From the Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis

Follow @coolcatteacher on Twitter

Eric Curts @ericcurts  teaches us twenty-three ways to use Gsuite tools in our classroom. With ideas for Google Docs, Slides, Sheets, and Drawings for all subjects and ages, you’ll want to scroll down and follow the links in our enhanced show notes.

Podcast Sponsor

This episode is sponsored by Staples. Staples is my go-to back to school shopping source. Check out coolcatteacher.com/pro for 10 Ways to tackle back to school like a pro. And remember to sign up for Staples Teacher rewards for free shipping on orders over $14.99 and 5% back. Staples has everything we need in stock all season long and ready to go for school. Go to www.staples.com/backtoschool for more information and great deals!

Check out back to school tips for teachers

Listen to the show on iTunes or Stitcher

You can right click and download a copy

Below is a transcript modified for your reading pleasure. For information on the guests and items mentioned in this show, scroll down to the bottom of this post.

****

Transcript of Episode 112: 23 GSuite Ideas to Excite Your Students about Learning with Eric Curts

Download the transcript

VICKI:          It’s back to school and so many of us are getting ready to introduce the G-Suite of tools in the classroom for those of you who don’t know what that is. That’s all these Google tools. And Eric Curts @ericcurts from Control Alt Achieve   and co-leader of their higher Google Educators group has so many fantastic ideas. You’d definitely want to check the transcript and show notes for all of these ideas.

This blog post is being added to 100+ Great Google Classroom Resources for Educators. This resource has a curated list of Gsuite resources, books, and tips.

You’ll definitely want to go to Eric’s website Control Alt Achieve and his YouTube channel.

VICKI:                    So Eric, give us some cool ways that we can use G-Suite to start of the school year with a punch.

ERIC:               What I’m going to take a look at here as we run through these today are just some of the common Google tools that we tend to use but maybe look at them from a different angle and some fun ways they can be used. So why don’t we start off with Google Docs. http://www.controlaltachieve.com/docs

Today, Eric goes through some engaging ideas for using 4 of the Gsuite apps:

Google Docs – http://www.controlaltachieve.com/docs

Google Slides – http://www.controlaltachieve.com/slides

Google Sheets – http://www.controlaltachieve.com/sheets

Google Drawings – http://www.controlaltachieve.com/drawings

    ERIC:               Most people think of that as Google’s word processing program which obviously it is and that’s a fantastic way for students to write reports and wrote stories on all the normal things. But some fun twists that you can put on this, some folks don’t know that Google Docs support emojis. You can actually insert emojis right from the ‘insert special characters’ menu and it’s going to open up a lot of really fun activities for students.

Idea #1: Write Emoji Stories

Idea #2: Summarize Something You’ve Seen or Read Using Emojis

If you’re looking for a way to get them engaged and excited early on in the year, they can write emoji stories or they can summarize a story or a movie or something they’ve seen recently using emojis.

See: 5 Emoji Activities for Google Docs  where Eric describes how to do all of these emoji activities including the emoji math picture shown below.

Idea #3: Use Emojis to Explain Math Variables

ERIC: They can also incorporate this into math. Yes, I used to be a math teacher so I just have a soft spot for math.

[00:02:00]

Emojis can be a great way to replace variables to bring a better concrete understanding of what you’re doing when solving math problems. And then there’s a lot of other possible neat examples. And like you said in the show notes, there’d be links to all of my blog post that go into the specific details on those. But that’s a fun thing.

Emojis help variables come alive and make sense. See Eric’s blog post on emojis in Google docs to learn how to do this.

Idea #4: Black Out Poetry in Google Docs

ERIC: While still on the topic of docs another neat thing to do is to use the highlight tool but not for highlighting. Let’s turn it on its head and use it to black things out. In Google Docs you can use the highlighting tool to do blackout poetry where students start with some text and then remove all the words except what they want to leave for their found poem, you can also use the exact same tool to do summarization.

Idea #5: Article Summarization with Black Out in Google Docs

It’s a process called text reduction strategy which is typically done with a big black marker and an actual piece of paper or an article, but you can do it in Google Docs as well, you can take an article from one of the many excellent websites like DOGO News, throw that in there and have the students go through and remove everything that’s not critical so that they end up with their summarization of the article. It’s a great way to help move students toward those summarization skills.

Read More: Improve Reading Comprehension with Google Docs “Black Out”

Idea #6: Choose Your Own Adventure Stories

Beyond that, lots of other fun things you can do include creating choose your own adventure stories. Create one for students to work together in a group where they write a story and use hyperlinks inside of the doc to jump to different pages as they write their choose your own adventure stories.

Those are just a couple of Docs ideas.

Read More: Choose Your Own Adventure Stories with Google Docs

Idea #7: Teach Anchors and Hyperlinks

VICKI:          And plus, choose your own adventure, we give you the ability to teach about anchors and teach about hyperlinks. There are so many things you can do with these ideas. I love them, Eric.

A hyperlink links to another web page. (Just go to insert –> Hyperlink.) However, an anchor links within the document. This lets you skip down a long page. I do this an easy way in a long document by making headings. Then, insert a table of contents. The headings automatically become anchors. You can also insert anchors manually.  they are a big time saver for students and teaches on long documents, for example, if you’re writing a book.

ERIC:           Absolutely.

VICKI:          Okay, what’s next?

ERIC:            Sure. Let’s jump over to Google Slides. http://www.controlaltachieve.com/slides

A lot of times we think of Google slides as the presentation tool, which of course it is, and there’s nothing wrong with that, please don’t get me wrong. It’s fantastic for kids to just do a presentation. Stand up in front of the class, do a book talk or talk about their explorer or their animal. But there’s a lot of other fun things you can do with slides.

Idea #8: Comic Strips with Google Slides

[00:04:00]

ERIC: One way to do is to create comic strips with Google Slides.   And what you can do is think of each slide as a different panel of the comic strip. And students could then insert clip art and animations and speech bubbles. And when they then published that to the web you’ve got an online animated comic strip, whether it’s to explain a vocab term or science concept or retell part of a story.

Read more: Creative Slide Uses for Students

Idea #9: Create eBooks or Storybooks with Google Slides

In the same vein you can create eBooks or storybooks with Google Slides   where each slide is a page of the eBook and you are allowed to change the page dimensions, it doesn’t have to be the normal landscape. You can make it portrait, you can make a square to make it whatever size book you want.

Read: Google Slides for Student Created Storybooks

Idea #10: Create Stop Motion Animations in Google Slides

Other fun things include stop motion animation. This is a fun trick you can do with slides where basically you just speed up the slide show by hacking the URL just a little bit on the presentation so that you get each slide going by maybe a quarter of a second and you can either take actual photographs using the built-in webcam of your Chromebook or whatever device you have or you can just add images and move them around from one slide to the other.

Read: Stop Motion Animation with Google Slides

Idea #11: Dr. Seus Manipulative Slide Show

But, again, it’s another great creative way for kids to tell stories or express their understanding. Beyond that, some other fun things you can do especially with the little ones – I do have a bunch of manipulative type slide shows. We’ve got a one-fish, two-fish, red-fish, blue-fish sorting activity,   that’s great when you’re doing Dr. Seuss stuff.

Read: “One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish” Sorting with Google Slides

Idea #12 Build a Snowman Creation and Writing Activity with Google Slides

I’ve also got a Build a snowman one.    You may want to hang off on that a little bit further into the winter month, there’s great template that allows students to build their own snowman with a wide collection of eyes and noses and mouths and ears and hats and all sorts of other things. And so they copy and paste those onto their snowman and then there’s a box where they write a little story about what their snowman has done that day or what he’s going to be going off to do.

So lots of real fun things that you could do with slides besides just a traditional presentation.

Read: Build a Snowman with Google Slides

Idea #13: Pixel Art in Google Sheets

VICKI:          Now, all these hacks, you have cute little videos and tutorials and things to help us. So we’re just giving you teachers an overview and then you could pick what you want. So do we have time for another?

[00:06:00]

ERIC:                Sure. Google Sheets  is another fun one. We usually think of Google Sheets as something for math or for doing charts and graphs and it certainly is. Don’t forget that it’s always great for that. But it’s also a great way to do things like pixel art.   I have a template that you can use where you simply put in some letters there and it creates a colored in box for each one of those and you can make pixel art.

Read: Pixel Art Activities for Any Subject with Google Sheets

Idea #14: Random Writing Prompt Generator with Google Sheets

ERIC: Or how about language art with Google Sheets? Absolutely. Sheets are great for randomization.

So I’ve got two templates for random writing prompt generators.  One gives works being randomly put together…

Read: Random Writing Prompt Generator with Google Sheets

Idea #15: Random Emoji Writing Prompt Generator

ERIC:  …another one is random emojis being put together.   And both places, it allows you to generate a whole bunch of random writing prompts that will be great for journal entries, short stories or poems.

Read: Emoji Writing Prompt Generator with Google Sheets

Idea #16: Create Graphic Organizers with Google Drawings

ERIC: Beyond that, if we can still squeeze something in I’ll throw in Google Drawings. http://www.controlaltachieve.com/drawings

One of my favorites, I think it’s overlooked a lot of times because it’s kind of hidden down in the menus there but Google Drawings is a great way to do loads of things including graphic organizers…

Read: Language Arts Graphic Organizers with Google Drawings

Idea #17: Create Interactive Posters with Google Drawings (These are like Thinglink)

ERIC: …interactive images which is like ThingLink, people are familiar with that.  You can use Google Drawings to make images and put hyperlinks on that branch out to videos and websites and additional information.

Read: Googlink: Creating Interactive Posters with Google Drawings

Idea #18: Magnetic “Drag and Drop” Poetry

ERIC: Google drawings is a great way for creativity with magnetic poetry, drag and drop poetry.   It’s also fantastic for math.

Read: Eric has two articles on magnetic poetry

Idea #19: Use Manipulatives and Tangrams in Google Drawings

ERIC: A lot of great manipulatives and interactives you can do such as teaching congruent figures and similar figures,  partitioning shapes…

Read: Pattern Block Templates and Activities with Google Drawings

Idea #20: Download Templates to Teach Shapes and Algebra So You Don’t Have to Create Them Yourself

ERIC: we’ve got algebra tile, pattern blocks, lots and lots of templates that I’ve created that you can just hit the ground running with those.

Read: 11 Ways to Teach Math with Google Drawings

Idea #21: Create Greeting Cards Using Google Drawings

ERIC: But Google Drawing also services well as a desktop publishing tool because it really isn’t something built into Google Suite that quite does what Microsoft publisher does. And so Drawings is a nice stand in for that for things like creating greeting cards, I’ve got a couple of templates for that…

Read: How Your Students Can Use Google Drawings to Make Greeting Cards

Idea #22: Make Motivational Posters in Google Drawings

ERIC: as well as making educational, motivational posters.  We’re used to those big black posters with the big picture and word at the bottom with a neat saying. Those can be done for actual motivation topics or you can pick a vocab term of the week and then add an appropriate image to go with it and a definition in your own terms.

Read: Have Students Create Educational “Motivational Posters” with Google Drawings

Idea #23: Explore Templates on Eric’ Site

[00:08:00]

ERIC:                    And all of those again, those templates are all available on the control of the ControlAltAchieve.com website.

Read: Here is an index of templates on Eric’s site. What a fantastic resource!

VICKI:          Teachers, I know your mind is blown but here’s the thing, you’ve all got great ideas, whether it’s emojis for variables in algebra there’s so many ideas. So one of the greatest things to do with kids is to show them something they’ve never seen before. And the best time to do that is in the first week or two of school. Blow their minds.

Follow the links in the show notes and I love Eric website particular because he shows us how to do stuff but also all the free templates. I have been tweeting out and sending out stuff of his all day, the day we’re taping here just because I love it. It’s great resource for G-Suite. And good luck with back to school. And get in there and use these tools and have some fun.

Thank You, Staples, for Sponsoring Episode 112 of the 10-Minute Teacher Podcast!

Staples is my go-to back to school shopping source. Check out coolcatteacher.com/pro for my ten ways to tackle back to school like a pro. And remember to sign up for Staple’s Teacher Rewards for free shipping orders over $14.99 and 5% back. Staple has everything we need in stock all season long and ready to go for school. Go to staples.com/backtoschool for more information and great deals. Good luck with back to school

Thank you for listening to the Ten-minute Teacher Podcast. You can download the show notes and see the archive at coolcatteacher.com/podcast. Never stop learning.

[End of Audio 0:09:43]

[Transcription created by tranzify.com. Some additional editing has been done to add grammatical, spelling, and punctuation errors. Every attempt has been made to correct spelling. For permissions, please email lisa@coolcatteacher.com]

Bio as Submitted

Eric has been in education for 25 years, and is currently serving as a Technology Integration Specialist for the Stark Portage Area Computer Consortium in Canton, Ohio where he oversees Google Apps for Education implementation, training, and support, as well as online learning and other technology integration initiatives.

Eric is an authorized Google Education Trainer and a Google Certified Innovator and provides Google Apps training to schools, organizations, and conferences throughout Ohio and across the country. He is a co-leader of the Ohio Google Educator Group (GEG) at tiny.cc/geg-ohio and runs the award-winning blog www.ControlAltAchieve.com where all of his Google Apps and edtech resources can be found. Eric is married with four children.

  The post 23 GSuite Ideas to Excite Your Students about Learning with Eric Curts appeared first on Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis @coolcatteacher helping educators be excellent every day. Meow!

from Cool Cat Teacher BlogCool Cat Teacher Blog http://www.coolcatteacher.com/e112/

[patriciaanderson357-blog]

23 GSuite Ideas to Excite Your Students about Learning with Eric Curts

Episode 112 - The 10-Minute Teacher Podcast

From the Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis

Follow @coolcatteacher on Twitter

Eric Curts @ericcurts  teaches us twenty-three ways to use Gsuite tools in our classroom. With ideas for Google Docs, Slides, Sheets, and Drawings for all subjects and ages, you’ll want to scroll down and follow the links in our enhanced show notes.

Podcast Sponsor

This episode is sponsored by Staples. Staples is my go-to back to school shopping source. Check out coolcatteacher.com/pro for 10 Ways to tackle back to school like a pro. And remember to sign up for Staples Teacher rewards for free shipping on orders over $14.99 and 5% back. Staples has everything we need in stock all season long and ready to go for school. Go to www.staples.com/backtoschool for more information and great deals!

Check out back to school tips for teachers

Listen to the show on iTunes or Stitcher

You can right click and download a copy

Below is a transcript modified for your reading pleasure. For information on the guests and items mentioned in this show, scroll down to the bottom of this post.

****

Transcript of Episode 112: 23 GSuite Ideas to Excite Your Students about Learning with Eric Curts

Download the transcript

VICKI:          It’s back to school and so many of us are getting ready to introduce the G-Suite of tools in the classroom for those of you who don’t know what that is. That’s all these Google tools. And Eric Curts @ericcurts from Control Alt Achieve   and co-leader of their higher Google Educators group has so many fantastic ideas. You’d definitely want to check the transcript and show notes for all of these ideas.

This blog post is being added to 100+ Great Google Classroom Resources for Educators. This resource has a curated list of Gsuite resources, books, and tips.

You’ll definitely want to go to Eric’s website Control Alt Achieve and his YouTube channel.

VICKI:                    So Eric, give us some cool ways that we can use G-Suite to start of the school year with a punch.

ERIC:               What I’m going to take a look at here as we run through these today are just some of the common Google tools that we tend to use but maybe look at them from a different angle and some fun ways they can be used. So why don’t we start off with Google Docs. http://www.controlaltachieve.com/docs

Today, Eric goes through some engaging ideas for using 4 of the Gsuite apps:

Google Docs – http://www.controlaltachieve.com/docs

Google Slides – http://www.controlaltachieve.com/slides

Google Sheets – http://www.controlaltachieve.com/sheets

Google Drawings – http://www.controlaltachieve.com/drawings

    ERIC:               Most people think of that as Google’s word processing program which obviously it is and that’s a fantastic way for students to write reports and wrote stories on all the normal things. But some fun twists that you can put on this, some folks don’t know that Google Docs support emojis. You can actually insert emojis right from the ‘insert special characters’ menu and it’s going to open up a lot of really fun activities for students.

Idea #1: Write Emoji Stories

Idea #2: Summarize Something You’ve Seen or Read Using Emojis

If you’re looking for a way to get them engaged and excited early on in the year, they can write emoji stories or they can summarize a story or a movie or something they’ve seen recently using emojis.

See: 5 Emoji Activities for Google Docs  where Eric describes how to do all of these emoji activities including the emoji math picture shown below.

Idea #3: Use Emojis to Explain Math Variables

ERIC: They can also incorporate this into math. Yes, I used to be a math teacher so I just have a soft spot for math.

[00:02:00]

Emojis can be a great way to replace variables to bring a better concrete understanding of what you’re doing when solving math problems. And then there’s a lot of other possible neat examples. And like you said in the show notes, there’d be links to all of my blog post that go into the specific details on those. But that’s a fun thing.

Emojis help variables come alive and make sense. See Eric’s blog post on emojis in Google docs to learn how to do this.

Idea #4: Black Out Poetry in Google Docs

ERIC: While still on the topic of docs another neat thing to do is to use the highlight tool but not for highlighting. Let’s turn it on its head and use it to black things out. In Google Docs you can use the highlighting tool to do blackout poetry where students start with some text and then remove all the words except what they want to leave for their found poem, you can also use the exact same tool to do summarization.

Idea #5: Article Summarization with Black Out in Google Docs

It’s a process called text reduction strategy which is typically done with a big black marker and an actual piece of paper or an article, but you can do it in Google Docs as well, you can take an article from one of the many excellent websites like DOGO News, throw that in there and have the students go through and remove everything that’s not critical so that they end up with their summarization of the article. It’s a great way to help move students toward those summarization skills.

Read More: Improve Reading Comprehension with Google Docs “Black Out”

Idea #6: Choose Your Own Adventure Stories

Beyond that, lots of other fun things you can do include creating choose your own adventure stories. Create one for students to work together in a group where they write a story and use hyperlinks inside of the doc to jump to different pages as they write their choose your own adventure stories.

Those are just a couple of Docs ideas.

Read More: Choose Your Own Adventure Stories with Google Docs

Idea #7: Teach Anchors and Hyperlinks

VICKI:          And plus, choose your own adventure, we give you the ability to teach about anchors and teach about hyperlinks. There are so many things you can do with these ideas. I love them, Eric.

A hyperlink links to another web page. (Just go to insert –> Hyperlink.) However, an anchor links within the document. This lets you skip down a long page. I do this an easy way in a long document by making headings. Then, insert a table of contents. The headings automatically become anchors. You can also insert anchors manually.  they are a big time saver for students and teaches on long documents, for example, if you’re writing a book.

ERIC:           Absolutely.

VICKI:          Okay, what’s next?

ERIC:            Sure. Let’s jump over to Google Slides. http://www.controlaltachieve.com/slides

A lot of times we think of Google slides as the presentation tool, which of course it is, and there’s nothing wrong with that, please don’t get me wrong. It’s fantastic for kids to just do a presentation. Stand up in front of the class, do a book talk or talk about their explorer or their animal. But there’s a lot of other fun things you can do with slides.

Idea #8: Comic Strips with Google Slides

[00:04:00]

ERIC: One way to do is to create comic strips with Google Slides.   And what you can do is think of each slide as a different panel of the comic strip. And students could then insert clip art and animations and speech bubbles. And when they then published that to the web you’ve got an online animated comic strip, whether it’s to explain a vocab term or science concept or retell part of a story.

Read more: Creative Slide Uses for Students

Idea #9: Create eBooks or Storybooks with Google Slides

In the same vein you can create eBooks or storybooks with Google Slides   where each slide is a page of the eBook and you are allowed to change the page dimensions, it doesn’t have to be the normal landscape. You can make it portrait, you can make a square to make it whatever size book you want.

Read: Google Slides for Student Created Storybooks

Idea #10: Create Stop Motion Animations in Google Slides

Other fun things include stop motion animation. This is a fun trick you can do with slides where basically you just speed up the slide show by hacking the URL just a little bit on the presentation so that you get each slide going by maybe a quarter of a second and you can either take actual photographs using the built-in webcam of your Chromebook or whatever device you have or you can just add images and move them around from one slide to the other.

Read: Stop Motion Animation with Google Slides

Idea #11: Dr. Seus Manipulative Slide Show

But, again, it’s another great creative way for kids to tell stories or express their understanding. Beyond that, some other fun things you can do especially with the little ones – I do have a bunch of manipulative type slide shows. We’ve got a one-fish, two-fish, red-fish, blue-fish sorting activity,   that’s great when you’re doing Dr. Seuss stuff.

Read: “One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish” Sorting with Google Slides

Idea #12 Build a Snowman Creation and Writing Activity with Google Slides

I’ve also got a Build a snowman one.    You may want to hang off on that a little bit further into the winter month, there’s great template that allows students to build their own snowman with a wide collection of eyes and noses and mouths and ears and hats and all sorts of other things. And so they copy and paste those onto their snowman and then there’s a box where they write a little story about what their snowman has done that day or what he’s going to be going off to do.

So lots of real fun things that you could do with slides besides just a traditional presentation.

Read: Build a Snowman with Google Slides

Idea #13: Pixel Art in Google Sheets

VICKI:          Now, all these hacks, you have cute little videos and tutorials and things to help us. So we’re just giving you teachers an overview and then you could pick what you want. So do we have time for another?

[00:06:00]

ERIC:                Sure. Google Sheets  is another fun one. We usually think of Google Sheets as something for math or for doing charts and graphs and it certainly is. Don’t forget that it’s always great for that. But it’s also a great way to do things like pixel art.   I have a template that you can use where you simply put in some letters there and it creates a colored in box for each one of those and you can make pixel art.

Read: Pixel Art Activities for Any Subject with Google Sheets

Idea #14: Random Writing Prompt Generator with Google Sheets

ERIC: Or how about language art with Google Sheets? Absolutely. Sheets are great for randomization.

So I’ve got two templates for random writing prompt generators.  One gives works being randomly put together…

Read: Random Writing Prompt Generator with Google Sheets

Idea #15: Random Emoji Writing Prompt Generator

ERIC:  …another one is random emojis being put together.   And both places, it allows you to generate a whole bunch of random writing prompts that will be great for journal entries, short stories or poems.

Read: Emoji Writing Prompt Generator with Google Sheets

Idea #16: Create Graphic Organizers with Google Drawings

ERIC: Beyond that, if we can still squeeze something in I’ll throw in Google Drawings. http://www.controlaltachieve.com/drawings

One of my favorites, I think it’s overlooked a lot of times because it’s kind of hidden down in the menus there but Google Drawings is a great way to do loads of things including graphic organizers…

Read: Language Arts Graphic Organizers with Google Drawings

Idea #17: Create Interactive Posters with Google Drawings (These are like Thinglink)

ERIC: …interactive images which is like ThingLink, people are familiar with that.  You can use Google Drawings to make images and put hyperlinks on that branch out to videos and websites and additional information.

Read: Googlink: Creating Interactive Posters with Google Drawings

Idea #18: Magnetic “Drag and Drop” Poetry

ERIC: Google drawings is a great way for creativity with magnetic poetry, drag and drop poetry.   It’s also fantastic for math.

Read: Eric has two articles on magnetic poetry

Idea #19: Use Manipulatives and Tangrams in Google Drawings

ERIC: A lot of great manipulatives and interactives you can do such as teaching congruent figures and similar figures,  partitioning shapes…

Read: Pattern Block Templates and Activities with Google Drawings

Idea #20: Download Templates to Teach Shapes and Algebra So You Don’t Have to Create Them Yourself

ERIC: we’ve got algebra tile, pattern blocks, lots and lots of templates that I’ve created that you can just hit the ground running with those.

Read: 11 Ways to Teach Math with Google Drawings

Idea #21: Create Greeting Cards Using Google Drawings

ERIC: But Google Drawing also services well as a desktop publishing tool because it really isn’t something built into Google Suite that quite does what Microsoft publisher does. And so Drawings is a nice stand in for that for things like creating greeting cards, I’ve got a couple of templates for that…

Read: How Your Students Can Use Google Drawings to Make Greeting Cards

Idea #22: Make Motivational Posters in Google Drawings

ERIC: as well as making educational, motivational posters.  We’re used to those big black posters with the big picture and word at the bottom with a neat saying. Those can be done for actual motivation topics or you can pick a vocab term of the week and then add an appropriate image to go with it and a definition in your own terms.

Read: Have Students Create Educational “Motivational Posters” with Google Drawings

Idea #23: Explore Templates on Eric’ Site

[00:08:00]

ERIC:                    And all of those again, those templates are all available on the control of the ControlAltAchieve.com website.

Read: Here is an index of templates on Eric’s site. What a fantastic resource!

VICKI:          Teachers, I know your mind is blown but here’s the thing, you’ve all got great ideas, whether it’s emojis for variables in algebra there’s so many ideas. So one of the greatest things to do with kids is to show them something they’ve never seen before. And the best time to do that is in the first week or two of school. Blow their minds.

Follow the links in the show notes and I love Eric website particular because he shows us how to do stuff but also all the free templates. I have been tweeting out and sending out stuff of his all day, the day we’re taping here just because I love it. It’s great resource for G-Suite. And good luck with back to school. And get in there and use these tools and have some fun.

Thank You, Staples, for Sponsoring Episode 112 of the 10-Minute Teacher Podcast!

Staples is my go-to back to school shopping source. Check out coolcatteacher.com/pro for my ten ways to tackle back to school like a pro. And remember to sign up for Staple’s Teacher Rewards for free shipping orders over $14.99 and 5% back. Staple has everything we need in stock all season long and ready to go for school. Go to staples.com/backtoschool for more information and great deals. Good luck with back to school

Thank you for listening to the Ten-minute Teacher Podcast. You can download the show notes and see the archive at coolcatteacher.com/podcast. Never stop learning.

[End of Audio 0:09:43]

[Transcription created by tranzify.com. Some additional editing has been done to add grammatical, spelling, and punctuation errors. Every attempt has been made to correct spelling. For permissions, please email lisa@coolcatteacher.com]

Bio as Submitted

Eric has been in education for 25 years, and is currently serving as a Technology Integration Specialist for the Stark Portage Area Computer Consortium in Canton, Ohio where he oversees Google Apps for Education implementation, training, and support, as well as online learning and other technology integration initiatives.

Eric is an authorized Google Education Trainer and a Google Certified Innovator and provides Google Apps training to schools, organizations, and conferences throughout Ohio and across the country. He is a co-leader of the Ohio Google Educator Group (GEG) at tiny.cc/geg-ohio and runs the award-winning blog www.ControlAltAchieve.com where all of his Google Apps and edtech resources can be found. Eric is married with four children.

  The post 23 GSuite Ideas to Excite Your Students about Learning with Eric Curts appeared first on Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis @coolcatteacher helping educators be excellent every day. Meow!

[succeedly]

23 GSuite Ideas to Excite Kids About Learning

Eric Curts on episode 214 [A special encore episode] of the 10-Minute Teacher Podcast

From the Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis

Follow @coolcatteacher on Twitter

Eric Curts @ericcurts  teaches us twenty-three ways to use Gsuite tools in our classroom. With ideas for Google Docs, Slides, Sheets, and Drawings for all subjects and ages, you’ll want to scroll down and follow the links in our enhanced show notes.

Today’s episode is sponsored by JAM.com, the perfect last minute holiday gift for your kids or grandkids. The creative courses at Jam.com are project-based, creative and FUN. Use the code COOLCAT50 to get $50 off your course. And remember that you can sign up for a 14 day FREE trial of any course with your child aged 7-16. Drawing. Minecraft. Legos. And more!

Use the code COOLCAT50 for $50 off the cost of the course.

Listen Now

Listen to the show on iTunes or Stitcher

Stream by clicking here.

Transcript of Episode 214: 23 GSuite Ideas to Excite Your Students about Learning with Eric Curts

Download the transcript

VICKI:          It’s back to school and so many of us are getting ready to introduce the G-Suite of tools in the classroom for those of you who don’t know what that is. That’s all these Google tools. And Eric Curts @ericcurts from Control Alt Achieve   and co-leader of their higher Google Educators group has so many fantastic ideas. You’d definitely want to check the transcript and show notes for all of these ideas.

This blog post is being added to 100+ Great Google Classroom Resources for Educators. This resource has a curated list of Gsuite resources, books, and tips.

You’ll definitely want to go to Eric’s website Control Alt Achieve and his YouTube channel.

VICKI:                    So Eric, give us some cool ways that we can use G-Suite to start of the school year with a punch.

ERIC:               What I’m going to take a look at here as we run through these today are just some of the common Google tools that we tend to use but maybe look at them from a different angle and some fun ways they can be used. So why don’t we start off with Google Docs. http://ift.tt/2eKfGZe

Today, Eric goes through some engaging ideas for using 4 of the Gsuite apps:

Google Docs – http://www.http://ift.tt/2eK3OGQ

Google Slides – http://www.http://ift.tt/2gZkjzn

Google Sheets – http://www.http://ift.tt/2eK5Si7

Google Drawings – http://www.http://ift.tt/2gZkmv3

    ERIC:               Most people think of that as Google’s word processing program which obviously it is and that’s a fantastic way for students to write reports and wrote stories on all the normal things. But some fun twists that you can put on this, some folks don’t know that Google Docs support emojis. You can actually insert emojis right from the ‘insert special characters’ menu and it’s going to open up a lot of really fun activities for students.

Idea #1: Write Emoji Stories

Idea #2: Summarize Something You’ve Seen or Read Using Emojis

If you’re looking for a way to get them engaged and excited early on in the year, they can write emoji stories or they can summarize a story or a movie or something they’ve seen recently using emojis.

See: 5 Emoji Activities for Google Docs  where Eric describes how to do all of these emoji activities including the emoji math picture shown below.

Idea #3: Use Emojis to Explain Math Variables

ERIC: They can also incorporate this into math. Yes, I used to be a math teacher so I just have a soft spot for math.

[00:02:00]

Emojis can be a great way to replace variables to bring a better concrete understanding of what you’re doing when solving math problems. And then there’s a lot of other possible neat examples. And like you said in the show notes, there’d be links to all of my blog post that go into the specific details on those. But that’s a fun thing.

Emojis help variables come alive and make sense. See Eric’s blog post on emojis in Google docs to learn how to do this.

Idea #4: Black Out Poetry in Google Docs

ERIC: While still on the topic of docs another neat thing to do is to use the highlight tool but not for highlighting. Let’s turn it on its head and use it to black things out. In Google Docs you can use the highlighting tool to do blackout poetry where students start with some text and then remove all the words except what they want to leave for their found poem, you can also use the exact same tool to do summarization.

Idea #5: Article Summarization with Black Out in Google Docs

It’s a process called text reduction strategy which is typically done with a big black marker and an actual piece of paper or an article, but you can do it in Google Docs as well, you can take an article from one of the many excellent websites like DOGO News, throw that in there and have the students go through and remove everything that’s not critical so that they end up with their summarization of the article. It’s a great way to help move students toward those summarization skills.

Read More: Improve Reading Comprehension with Google Docs “Black Out”

Idea #6: Choose Your Own Adventure Stories

Beyond that, lots of other fun things you can do include creating choose your own adventure stories. Create one for students to work together in a group where they write a story and use hyperlinks inside of the doc to jump to different pages as they write their choose your own adventure stories.

Those are just a couple of Docs ideas.

Read More: Choose Your Own Adventure Stories with Google Docs

Idea #7: Teach Anchors and Hyperlinks

VICKI:          And plus, choose your own adventure, we give you the ability to teach about anchors and teach about hyperlinks. There are so many things you can do with these ideas. I love them, Eric.

A hyperlink links to another web page. (Just go to insert –> Hyperlink.) However, an anchor links within the document. This lets you skip down a long page. I do this an easy way in a long document by making headings. Then, insert a table of contents. The headings automatically become anchors. You can also insert anchors manually.  they are a big time saver for students and teaches on long documents, for example, if you’re writing a book.

ERIC:           Absolutely.

VICKI:          Okay, what’s next?

ERIC:            Sure. Let’s jump over to Google Slides. http://ift.tt/2gZkhrf

A lot of times we think of Google slides as the presentation tool, which of course it is, and there’s nothing wrong with that, please don’t get me wrong. It’s fantastic for kids to just do a presentation. Stand up in front of the class, do a book talk or talk about their explorer or their animal. But there’s a lot of other fun things you can do with slides.

Idea #8: Comic Strips with Google Slides

[00:04:00]

ERIC: One way to do is to create comic strips with Google Slides.   And what you can do is think of each slide as a different panel of the comic strip. And students could then insert clip art and animations and speech bubbles. And when they then published that to the web you’ve got an online animated comic strip, whether it’s to explain a vocab term or science concept or retell part of a story.

Read more: Creative Slide Uses for Students

Idea #9: Create eBooks or Storybooks with Google Slides

In the same vein you can create eBooks or storybooks with Google Slides   where each slide is a page of the eBook and you are allowed to change the page dimensions, it doesn’t have to be the normal landscape. You can make it portrait, you can make a square to make it whatever size book you want.

Read: Google Slides for Student Created Storybooks

Idea #10: Create Stop Motion Animations in Google Slides

Other fun things include stop motion animation. This is a fun trick you can do with slides where basically you just speed up the slide show by hacking the URL just a little bit on the presentation so that you get each slide going by maybe a quarter of a second and you can either take actual photographs using the built-in webcam of your Chromebook or whatever device you have or you can just add images and move them around from one slide to the other.

Read: Stop Motion Animation with Google Slides

Idea #11: Dr. Seus Manipulative Slide Show

But, again, it’s another great creative way for kids to tell stories or express their understanding. Beyond that, some other fun things you can do especially with the little ones – I do have a bunch of manipulative type slide shows. We’ve got a one-fish, two-fish, red-fish, blue-fish sorting activity,   that’s great when you’re doing Dr. Seuss stuff.

Read: “One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish” Sorting with Google Slides

Idea #12 Build a Snowman Creation and Writing Activity with Google Slides

I’ve also got a Build a snowman one.    You may want to hang off on that a little bit further into the winter month, there’s great template that allows students to build their own snowman with a wide collection of eyes and noses and mouths and ears and hats and all sorts of other things. And so they copy and paste those onto their snowman and then there’s a box where they write a little story about what their snowman has done that day or what he’s going to be going off to do.

So lots of real fun things that you could do with slides besides just a traditional presentation.

Read: Build a Snowman with Google Slides

Idea #13: Pixel Art in Google Sheets

VICKI:          Now, all these hacks, you have cute little videos and tutorials and things to help us. So we’re just giving you teachers an overview and then you could pick what you want. So do we have time for another?

[00:06:00]

ERIC:                Sure. Google Sheets  is another fun one. We usually think of Google Sheets as something for math or for doing charts and graphs and it certainly is. Don’t forget that it’s always great for that. But it’s also a great way to do things like pixel art.   I have a template that you can use where you simply put in some letters there and it creates a colored in box for each one of those and you can make pixel art.

Read: Pixel Art Activities for Any Subject with Google Sheets

Idea #14: Random Writing Prompt Generator with Google Sheets

ERIC: Or how about language art with Google Sheets? Absolutely. Sheets are great for randomization.

So I’ve got two templates for random writing prompt generators.  One gives works being randomly put together…

Read: Random Writing Prompt Generator with Google Sheets

Idea #15: Random Emoji Writing Prompt Generator

ERIC:  …another one is random emojis being put together.   And both places, it allows you to generate a whole bunch of random writing prompts that will be great for journal entries, short stories or poems.

Read: Emoji Writing Prompt Generator with Google Sheets

Idea #16: Create Graphic Organizers with Google Drawings

ERIC: Beyond that, if we can still squeeze something in I’ll throw in Google Drawings. http://ift.tt/2gZl5MJ

One of my favorites, I think it’s overlooked a lot of times because it’s kind of hidden down in the menus there but Google Drawings is a great way to do loads of things including graphic organizers…

Read: Language Arts Graphic Organizers with Google Drawings

Idea #17: Create Interactive Posters with Google Drawings (These are like Thinglink)

ERIC: …interactive images which is like ThingLink, people are familiar with that.  You can use Google Drawings to make images and put hyperlinks on that branch out to videos and websites and additional information.

Read: Googlink: Creating Interactive Posters with Google Drawings

Idea #18: Magnetic “Drag and Drop” Poetry

ERIC: Google drawings is a great way for creativity with magnetic poetry, drag and drop poetry.   It’s also fantastic for math.

Read: Eric has two articles on magnetic poetry

Idea #19: Use Manipulatives and Tangrams in Google Drawings

ERIC: A lot of great manipulatives and interactives you can do such as teaching congruent figures and similar figures,  partitioning shapes…

Read: Pattern Block Templates and Activities with Google Drawings

Idea #20: Download Templates to Teach Shapes and Algebra So You Don’t Have to Create Them Yourself

ERIC: we’ve got algebra tile, pattern blocks, lots and lots of templates that I’ve created that you can just hit the ground running with those.

Read: 11 Ways to Teach Math with Google Drawings

Idea #21: Create Greeting Cards Using Google Drawings

ERIC: But Google Drawing also services well as a desktop publishing tool because it really isn’t something built into Google Suite that quite does what Microsoft publisher does. And so Drawings is a nice stand in for that for things like creating greeting cards, I’ve got a couple of templates for that…

Read: How Your Students Can Use Google Drawings to Make Greeting Cards

Idea #22: Make Motivational Posters in Google Drawings

ERIC: as well as making educational, motivational posters.  We’re used to those big black posters with the big picture and word at the bottom with a neat saying. Those can be done for actual motivation topics or you can pick a vocab term of the week and then add an appropriate image to go with it and a definition in your own terms.

Read: Have Students Create Educational “Motivational Posters” with Google Drawings

Idea #23: Explore Templates on Eric’ Site

[00:08:00]

ERIC:                    And all of those again, those templates are all available on the control of the ControlAltAchieve.com website.

Read: Here is an index of templates on Eric’s site. What a fantastic resource!

VICKI:          Teachers, I know your mind is blown but here’s the thing, you’ve all got great ideas, whether it’s emojis for variables in algebra there’s so many ideas. So one of the greatest things to do with kids is to show them something they’ve never seen before. And the best time to do that is in the first week or two of school. Blow their minds.

Follow the links in the show notes and I love Eric website particular because he shows us how to do stuff but also all the free templates. I have been tweeting out and sending out stuff of his all day, the day we’re taping here just because I love it. It’s great resource for G-Suite. And good luck with back to school. And get in there and use these tools and have some fun.

Thank You, Staples, for Sponsoring Episode 112 of the 10-Minute Teacher Podcast!

Staples is my go-to back to school shopping source. Check out http://ift.tt/2vQXj8m for my ten ways to tackle back to school like a pro. And remember to sign up for Staple’s Teacher Rewards for free shipping orders over $14.99 and 5% back. Staple has everything we need in stock all season long and ready to go for school. Go to http://ift.tt/2bpV9ah for more information and great deals. Good luck with back to school

Thank you for listening to the Ten-minute Teacher Podcast. You can download the show notes and see the archive at http://ift.tt/2quX4Nu. Never stop learning.

[End of Audio 0:09:43]

[Transcription created by tranzify.com. Some additional editing has been done to add grammatical, spelling, and punctuation errors. Every attempt has been made to correct spelling. For permissions, please email lisa@coolcatteacher.com]

Bio as Submitted

Eric has been in education for 25 years, and is currently serving as a Technology Integration Specialist for the Stark Portage Area Computer Consortium in Canton, Ohio where he oversees Google Apps for Education implementation, training, and support, as well as online learning and other technology integration initiatives.

Eric is an authorized Google Education Trainer and a Google Certified Innovator and provides Google Apps training to schools, organizations, and conferences throughout Ohio and across the country. He is a co-leader of the Ohio Google Educator Group (GEG) at tiny.cc/geg-ohio and runs the award-winning blog http://ift.tt/1W5EJjQ where all of his Google Apps and edtech resources can be found. Eric is married with four children.

  Disclosure of Material Connection: This is a “sponsored podcast episode.” The company who sponsored it compensated me via a cash payment, gift, or something else of value to include a reference to their product. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I believe will be good for my readers and are from companies I can recommend. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.” This company has no impact on the editorial content of the show.

The post 23 GSuite Ideas to Excite Kids About Learning appeared first on Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis @coolcatteacher helping educators be excellent every day. Meow!

23 GSuite Ideas to Excite Kids About Learning published first on http://ift.tt/2jn9f0m

[succeedly]

23 GSuite Ideas to Excite Kids About Learning

Eric Curts on episode 214 [A special encore episode] of the 10-Minute Teacher Podcast

From the Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis

Follow @coolcatteacher on Twitter

Eric Curts @ericcurts  teaches us twenty-three ways to use Gsuite tools in our classroom. With ideas for Google Docs, Slides, Sheets, and Drawings for all subjects and ages, you’ll want to scroll down and follow the links in our enhanced show notes.

Today’s episode is sponsored by JAM.com, the perfect last minute holiday gift for your kids or grandkids. The creative courses at Jam.com are project-based, creative and FUN. Use the code COOLCAT50 to get $50 off your course. And remember that you can sign up for a 14 day FREE trial of any course with your child aged 7-16. Drawing. Minecraft. Legos. And more!

Use the code COOLCAT50 for $50 off the cost of the course.

Listen Now

Listen to the show on iTunes or Stitcher

Stream by clicking here.

Transcript of Episode 214: 23 GSuite Ideas to Excite Your Students about Learning with Eric Curts

Download the transcript

VICKI:          It’s back to school and so many of us are getting ready to introduce the G-Suite of tools in the classroom for those of you who don’t know what that is. That’s all these Google tools. And Eric Curts @ericcurts from Control Alt Achieve   and co-leader of their higher Google Educators group has so many fantastic ideas. You’d definitely want to check the transcript and show notes for all of these ideas.

This blog post is being added to 100+ Great Google Classroom Resources for Educators. This resource has a curated list of Gsuite resources, books, and tips.

You’ll definitely want to go to Eric’s website Control Alt Achieve and his YouTube channel.

VICKI:                    So Eric, give us some cool ways that we can use G-Suite to start of the school year with a punch.

ERIC:               What I’m going to take a look at here as we run through these today are just some of the common Google tools that we tend to use but maybe look at them from a different angle and some fun ways they can be used. So why don’t we start off with Google Docs. http://ift.tt/2eKfGZe

Today, Eric goes through some engaging ideas for using 4 of the Gsuite apps:

Google Docs – http://www.http://ift.tt/2eK3OGQ

Google Slides – http://www.http://ift.tt/2gZkjzn

Google Sheets – http://www.http://ift.tt/2eK5Si7

Google Drawings – http://www.http://ift.tt/2gZkmv3

    ERIC:               Most people think of that as Google’s word processing program which obviously it is and that’s a fantastic way for students to write reports and wrote stories on all the normal things. But some fun twists that you can put on this, some folks don’t know that Google Docs support emojis. You can actually insert emojis right from the ‘insert special characters’ menu and it’s going to open up a lot of really fun activities for students.

Idea #1: Write Emoji Stories

Idea #2: Summarize Something You’ve Seen or Read Using Emojis

If you’re looking for a way to get them engaged and excited early on in the year, they can write emoji stories or they can summarize a story or a movie or something they’ve seen recently using emojis.

See: 5 Emoji Activities for Google Docs  where Eric describes how to do all of these emoji activities including the emoji math picture shown below.

Idea #3: Use Emojis to Explain Math Variables

ERIC: They can also incorporate this into math. Yes, I used to be a math teacher so I just have a soft spot for math.

[00:02:00]

Emojis can be a great way to replace variables to bring a better concrete understanding of what you’re doing when solving math problems. And then there’s a lot of other possible neat examples. And like you said in the show notes, there’d be links to all of my blog post that go into the specific details on those. But that’s a fun thing.

Emojis help variables come alive and make sense. See Eric’s blog post on emojis in Google docs to learn how to do this.

Idea #4: Black Out Poetry in Google Docs

ERIC: While still on the topic of docs another neat thing to do is to use the highlight tool but not for highlighting. Let’s turn it on its head and use it to black things out. In Google Docs you can use the highlighting tool to do blackout poetry where students start with some text and then remove all the words except what they want to leave for their found poem, you can also use the exact same tool to do summarization.

Idea #5: Article Summarization with Black Out in Google Docs

It’s a process called text reduction strategy which is typically done with a big black marker and an actual piece of paper or an article, but you can do it in Google Docs as well, you can take an article from one of the many excellent websites like DOGO News, throw that in there and have the students go through and remove everything that’s not critical so that they end up with their summarization of the article. It’s a great way to help move students toward those summarization skills.

Read More: Improve Reading Comprehension with Google Docs “Black Out”

Idea #6: Choose Your Own Adventure Stories

Beyond that, lots of other fun things you can do include creating choose your own adventure stories. Create one for students to work together in a group where they write a story and use hyperlinks inside of the doc to jump to different pages as they write their choose your own adventure stories.

Those are just a couple of Docs ideas.

Read More: Choose Your Own Adventure Stories with Google Docs

Idea #7: Teach Anchors and Hyperlinks

VICKI:          And plus, choose your own adventure, we give you the ability to teach about anchors and teach about hyperlinks. There are so many things you can do with these ideas. I love them, Eric.

A hyperlink links to another web page. (Just go to insert –> Hyperlink.) However, an anchor links within the document. This lets you skip down a long page. I do this an easy way in a long document by making headings. Then, insert a table of contents. The headings automatically become anchors. You can also insert anchors manually.  they are a big time saver for students and teaches on long documents, for example, if you’re writing a book.

ERIC:           Absolutely.

VICKI:          Okay, what’s next?

ERIC:            Sure. Let’s jump over to Google Slides. http://ift.tt/2gZkhrf

A lot of times we think of Google slides as the presentation tool, which of course it is, and there’s nothing wrong with that, please don’t get me wrong. It’s fantastic for kids to just do a presentation. Stand up in front of the class, do a book talk or talk about their explorer or their animal. But there’s a lot of other fun things you can do with slides.

Idea #8: Comic Strips with Google Slides

[00:04:00]

ERIC: One way to do is to create comic strips with Google Slides.   And what you can do is think of each slide as a different panel of the comic strip. And students could then insert clip art and animations and speech bubbles. And when they then published that to the web you’ve got an online animated comic strip, whether it’s to explain a vocab term or science concept or retell part of a story.

Read more: Creative Slide Uses for Students

Idea #9: Create eBooks or Storybooks with Google Slides

In the same vein you can create eBooks or storybooks with Google Slides   where each slide is a page of the eBook and you are allowed to change the page dimensions, it doesn’t have to be the normal landscape. You can make it portrait, you can make a square to make it whatever size book you want.

Read: Google Slides for Student Created Storybooks

Idea #10: Create Stop Motion Animations in Google Slides

Other fun things include stop motion animation. This is a fun trick you can do with slides where basically you just speed up the slide show by hacking the URL just a little bit on the presentation so that you get each slide going by maybe a quarter of a second and you can either take actual photographs using the built-in webcam of your Chromebook or whatever device you have or you can just add images and move them around from one slide to the other.

Read: Stop Motion Animation with Google Slides

Idea #11: Dr. Seus Manipulative Slide Show

But, again, it’s another great creative way for kids to tell stories or express their understanding. Beyond that, some other fun things you can do especially with the little ones – I do have a bunch of manipulative type slide shows. We’ve got a one-fish, two-fish, red-fish, blue-fish sorting activity,   that’s great when you’re doing Dr. Seuss stuff.

Read: “One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish” Sorting with Google Slides

Idea #12 Build a Snowman Creation and Writing Activity with Google Slides

I’ve also got a Build a snowman one.    You may want to hang off on that a little bit further into the winter month, there’s great template that allows students to build their own snowman with a wide collection of eyes and noses and mouths and ears and hats and all sorts of other things. And so they copy and paste those onto their snowman and then there’s a box where they write a little story about what their snowman has done that day or what he’s going to be going off to do.

So lots of real fun things that you could do with slides besides just a traditional presentation.

Read: Build a Snowman with Google Slides

Idea #13: Pixel Art in Google Sheets

VICKI:          Now, all these hacks, you have cute little videos and tutorials and things to help us. So we’re just giving you teachers an overview and then you could pick what you want. So do we have time for another?

[00:06:00]

ERIC:                Sure. Google Sheets  is another fun one. We usually think of Google Sheets as something for math or for doing charts and graphs and it certainly is. Don’t forget that it’s always great for that. But it’s also a great way to do things like pixel art.   I have a template that you can use where you simply put in some letters there and it creates a colored in box for each one of those and you can make pixel art.

Read: Pixel Art Activities for Any Subject with Google Sheets

Idea #14: Random Writing Prompt Generator with Google Sheets

ERIC: Or how about language art with Google Sheets? Absolutely. Sheets are great for randomization.

So I’ve got two templates for random writing prompt generators.  One gives works being randomly put together…

Read: Random Writing Prompt Generator with Google Sheets

Idea #15: Random Emoji Writing Prompt Generator

ERIC:  …another one is random emojis being put together.   And both places, it allows you to generate a whole bunch of random writing prompts that will be great for journal entries, short stories or poems.

Read: Emoji Writing Prompt Generator with Google Sheets

Idea #16: Create Graphic Organizers with Google Drawings

ERIC: Beyond that, if we can still squeeze something in I’ll throw in Google Drawings. http://ift.tt/2gZl5MJ

One of my favorites, I think it’s overlooked a lot of times because it’s kind of hidden down in the menus there but Google Drawings is a great way to do loads of things including graphic organizers…

Read: Language Arts Graphic Organizers with Google Drawings

Idea #17: Create Interactive Posters with Google Drawings (These are like Thinglink)

ERIC: …interactive images which is like ThingLink, people are familiar with that.  You can use Google Drawings to make images and put hyperlinks on that branch out to videos and websites and additional information.

Read: Googlink: Creating Interactive Posters with Google Drawings

Idea #18: Magnetic “Drag and Drop” Poetry

ERIC: Google drawings is a great way for creativity with magnetic poetry, drag and drop poetry.   It’s also fantastic for math.

Read: Eric has two articles on magnetic poetry

Idea #19: Use Manipulatives and Tangrams in Google Drawings

ERIC: A lot of great manipulatives and interactives you can do such as teaching congruent figures and similar figures,  partitioning shapes…

Read: Pattern Block Templates and Activities with Google Drawings

Idea #20: Download Templates to Teach Shapes and Algebra So You Don’t Have to Create Them Yourself

ERIC: we’ve got algebra tile, pattern blocks, lots and lots of templates that I’ve created that you can just hit the ground running with those.

Read: 11 Ways to Teach Math with Google Drawings

Idea #21: Create Greeting Cards Using Google Drawings

ERIC: But Google Drawing also services well as a desktop publishing tool because it really isn’t something built into Google Suite that quite does what Microsoft publisher does. And so Drawings is a nice stand in for that for things like creating greeting cards, I’ve got a couple of templates for that…

Read: How Your Students Can Use Google Drawings to Make Greeting Cards

Idea #22: Make Motivational Posters in Google Drawings

ERIC: as well as making educational, motivational posters.  We’re used to those big black posters with the big picture and word at the bottom with a neat saying. Those can be done for actual motivation topics or you can pick a vocab term of the week and then add an appropriate image to go with it and a definition in your own terms.

Read: Have Students Create Educational “Motivational Posters” with Google Drawings

Idea #23: Explore Templates on Eric’ Site

[00:08:00]

ERIC:                    And all of those again, those templates are all available on the control of the ControlAltAchieve.com website.

Read: Here is an index of templates on Eric’s site. What a fantastic resource!

VICKI:          Teachers, I know your mind is blown but here’s the thing, you’ve all got great ideas, whether it’s emojis for variables in algebra there’s so many ideas. So one of the greatest things to do with kids is to show them something they’ve never seen before. And the best time to do that is in the first week or two of school. Blow their minds.

Follow the links in the show notes and I love Eric website particular because he shows us how to do stuff but also all the free templates. I have been tweeting out and sending out stuff of his all day, the day we’re taping here just because I love it. It’s great resource for G-Suite. And good luck with back to school. And get in there and use these tools and have some fun.

Thank You, Staples, for Sponsoring Episode 112 of the 10-Minute Teacher Podcast!

Staples is my go-to back to school shopping source. Check out http://ift.tt/2vQXj8m for my ten ways to tackle back to school like a pro. And remember to sign up for Staple’s Teacher Rewards for free shipping orders over $14.99 and 5% back. Staple has everything we need in stock all season long and ready to go for school. Go to http://ift.tt/2bpV9ah for more information and great deals. Good luck with back to school

Thank you for listening to the Ten-minute Teacher Podcast. You can download the show notes and see the archive at http://ift.tt/2quX4Nu. Never stop learning.

[End of Audio 0:09:43]

[Transcription created by tranzify.com. Some additional editing has been done to add grammatical, spelling, and punctuation errors. Every attempt has been made to correct spelling. For permissions, please email lisa@coolcatteacher.com]

Bio as Submitted

Eric has been in education for 25 years, and is currently serving as a Technology Integration Specialist for the Stark Portage Area Computer Consortium in Canton, Ohio where he oversees Google Apps for Education implementation, training, and support, as well as online learning and other technology integration initiatives.

Eric is an authorized Google Education Trainer and a Google Certified Innovator and provides Google Apps training to schools, organizations, and conferences throughout Ohio and across the country. He is a co-leader of the Ohio Google Educator Group (GEG) at tiny.cc/geg-ohio and runs the award-winning blog http://ift.tt/1W5EJjQ where all of his Google Apps and edtech resources can be found. Eric is married with four children.

  Disclosure of Material Connection: This is a “sponsored podcast episode.” The company who sponsored it compensated me via a cash payment, gift, or something else of value to include a reference to their product. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I believe will be good for my readers and are from companies I can recommend. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.” This company has no impact on the editorial content of the show.

The post 23 GSuite Ideas to Excite Kids About Learning appeared first on Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis @coolcatteacher helping educators be excellent every day. Meow!

23 GSuite Ideas to Excite Kids About Learning published first on http://ift.tt/2jn9f0m