Mo Physics Mo Problems

When I learned about Closed Captioning in Google Slides from Kasey Bell & Matt Miller , I was excited but realized I wouldn't be using it much because I use Pear Deck for my Slides presentations. Well, it turns out that we can all use Closed Captioning in our Pear Deck Presentations as well! If you're not aware of the new captioning feature in Slides , it can be turned on from the presenter menu in presentation mode. You do need to have a microphone either external or internal turned on for the feature to work. It presents live text of what is being heard by the mic to the screen. Now to access this same feature in Pear Deck, it's pretty simple. You just have to click at the right time. In the video below, you'll see that if you click on the CC in the Slides Presenter bar that pops up as the presentation loads into Pear Deck, you'll get the lived closed captioning! As you can see the CC is not yet perfect and I was using my internal computer mic. But i...

This is the 5th school year I’ve been having students work with online portfolios. With the help of my co-teaching partner Andelee Espinosa , I have been changing the model up a bit every year to have it make more sense with what what we’re looking for students to communicate in class and to the outside world. This year, I’m working with a new curriculum aligned to Next Generation Science Standards. The unit design is focused on starting with an initial observation we are trying to understand. Throughout the course of the unit, students gain understandings that better help them describe what was occurring in that initial observation. This new unit framework has led me to rethink how we structure our content specific pages in our portfolio. I used to have students separate content pages by overarching outcomes and provide artifacts demonstrating each. With the new unit design, I’m trying out having students create unit pages which track the course of their work in that unit. The...

After school last week, I was lamenting to my co-teacher Andelee Espinosa that there still wasn’t a way to deliver copies of a template of a Google Site to students. She responded that it wasn’t a bad thing. She said that the creation of a website from scratch was actually the kind of skill all of our students should have. The ability to show them how easy it is to create the site was the power of the tool, she said. Andelee was right. That revelation has caused me to think a bit more about how quick I am to make and distribute templates of documents for all of my learners. There is clearly a trade-off I make when I make templates. I need to be a bit more reflective when I make an assignment if I should or shouldn’t distribute a template. When I first learned of Doctopus years ago, I couldn’t get enough of it. It allowed me to make a copy of a template of an assignment for all of my students that was already shared. There definitely are benefits giving students a template to work fr...

This is an updated post from December 2017 that includes grading in Speedgrader! I am really loving the Flipgrid app in Canvas. Why? It allows students to access class grids right from Canvas without having to share out links or codes. It allows me to create a Flipgrid response as a Canvas assignment. Students can turn in assignments as a Flipgrid response. With Speedgrader in Canvas, I can quickly see who has and hasn’t responded to a Flipgrid just like any other assignment submitted to Canvas. With Speedgrader, I can score assignments from a desktop, laptop, or mobile device. Part 1: Set-up So, I wanted to share out how to easily add it to your canvas course. If the GIFs are too small for you, I created a quick video below. From Setting in Canvas, go to the Apps tab. This sets up a specific Flipgrid for your course. The Flipgrid can then be accessed via the side navigation by you or students. Part 2: Create an Assignment You can ea...

With our new physics curriculum this year, we start each new unit with an anchor phenomenon. This is basically another form of a hook to build student engagement but drives students to begin making observations and asking questions. Before you say, “I don’t teach science. What does this have to do with me.” Take a lesson from Dave Burgess and realize the power of hooking your students on day 1 of instruction. It helps them not only understand the why of the unit. It has the potential to allow them to determine their own why. An anchor phenomenon could be anything that makes students curious, leads them to ask questions, and start trying to propose their own answer before digging deeper through the course of the instructional unit. This could be a hands-on experience, an article to read, an online video from the news or maybe something that has gone viral, or a piece of artwork. There are so many possibilities for different anchors to tie instruction to in order to root it and help it s...

I was listening to the newest episode of the Shukes and Giff Podcast when they mentioned a new Chrome extension from the EdTech Team called AudioPlayer for Slides from EdTech Team . I was super excited to check it out as it allows users to record new audio and add it to a slide. I teach physics in a co-taught classroom in which many of the students have difficulty demonstrating their understanding by composing written text. Many times they are able to successfully demonstrate their understanding verbally, though. This new extension will allow students to record their own audio explanations and add them to a slide to be played when viewed in presentation mode. Last school year, we converted all of our lab reports from Google Docs to Google Slides as it allows for more robust creations and creates manageable chunking of tasks for learners who can easily get lost in long scrolling documents. In addition, it allows us to provide prompts and directions in the speaker notes leaving t...

As I enter my 5th year of using Canvas as an LMS, I’ve come a long way in terms of how I design the look of my course to facilitate simpler and more transparent workflows for my learners. So, I just wanted to give you a quick tour because a lot of what I have learned has come from others sharing out to the greater EdTech community. So, I just want to keep paying it forward. The biggest breakthrough for me is embedding Google Slides into my site pages . It is really a game changer Dashboard First things first. If you haven’t added an image to your course to appear in the dashboard, get on it. It’ll make your course easier to identify and stand out.  This can all be done in the SETTINGS section. In FEATURE OPTIONS, turn on ENABLE DASHBOARD IMAGES FOR CANVAS. In COURSE DETAILS, click on IMAGE to upload or change your current image. You can upload a jpeg.  If you’re interested in creating GIFs instead of just static images, check out this post . Home P...