3 Tools for Creating Digital Portfolios – From Avra 

This post first appeared on Edutopia. Learn more from Avra on Twitter: @avrarachel Throwing items away has never been a skill of mine. That feeling of “I might use this someday” only worsened when I became a teacher and then a mother. My “keep or toss” decisions became clouded by sentimentality, and I couldn’t bring myself to throw away the precious gems my daughter created in school. But the large artifacts she brought home eventually created a storage issue, so I began taking pictures of them and getting rid of some. I didn’t realize it at the time, but by…

10 Next-Level Classroom Applications for Using Google My Maps from Ben Sondgeroth 

Want to learn more from Ben? Follow him on Twitter @Mr_Sondgeroth Google My Maps offers teachers and students across disciplines an ability to bring map-making into the classroom. For an in-depth look at how to create a Google My Map, please check out my previous post: Bring Map Making to Any Classroom using Google My Maps. If you are ready to discover how maps can assist in expanding learning for your students, then read on! 1) Teachers can expand a map activity outside their classroom walls. My Maps allows users to import data into a map from a Google Sheet, KML…

Bring Map Making to Any Classroom Using Google My Maps 

Want to learn more from Ben? Follow him on Twitter: @Mr_Sondgeroth As a former history teacher, maps were an essential part of my curriculum. From showing locations of battlefields, to explaining territorial expansion, maps help put historical content into perspective. Many of my classroom activities involved using paper maps as visual references, allowing students to see spatially how historical movements affected the events analyzed in class. In my experience as both a teacher and EdTechTeacher Instructor, I find that maps are being used across grade levels and disciplines to help students understand perspective, locations, and many other learning objectives. For…

Three Little Known Features about Google Scholar 

Though most students knows about Google, few realize the power of Google Scholar.  Unlike a regular Google search, Google Scholar limits its results to sources considered to be scholarly: books, journals, abstracts, theses, and even court cases. Also unlike Google, instead of ranking results by popularity, keyword, and past searches, Google Scholar examines the text in the documents, the credibility of the publication, and how often the work has been cited by other scholars. Particularly for high school students, Google Scholar can be a great research tool; and like all things Google, it also has a few hidden features that…

3 Strategies for Using G Suite for Education in the K-3 Classroom 

G Suite for Education provides opportunities for students of all ages to learn and grow.  When combined with a Chromebook or laptop, the core G Suite programs create a powerful platform for learning.   By designing interactive learning experiences for students in the K-3 classroom with G Suite, we also provide opportunities for students to start building the skills that they will need to be successful in the intermediate grade levels and in our digital world. Google Drawings for Interactive Activities By engaging students in Google Drawings learning experiences, teachers are creating opportunities for students to engage in sequencing, classification,…

Awesome Assessment App Smash: Google Drawings and Google Forms 

In my work as an instructor for EdTechTeacher, I have the pleasure of working with teachers from all over the country in both face-to-face workshops and online learning modules. As the teachers and I work together to explore new ideas, strategies, and tools, we learn and grow together. Recently, a Webster Public Schools cohort of teachers were exploring Google Drawings in an online learning module I created. As we discussed ways to utilize Google Drawings in an educational setting, we explored student and teacher uses of the program. Through our discussions, I began to consider how the combination of Google…