Creating and Using a Google Form Quiz

Thank you Tony for sharing this week's tip!

Google can do a lot of things and most recently they have updated their Google Forms to have a built in feature to grade quizzes.  Below is an image that is a link to a document that will walk you through these steps!

Google Sheets: Split Text to Columns

The following is a blog post by Alice Keeler.  (If the images below don't work, go directly to the blog post).

When you copy and paste into Google Sheets you will notice an option will automatically appear allowing you to split the text into columns. Choose the delineator and poof, text is split.

Data Menu

You can also manually activate text to columns by highlighting your data and choosing “Split text to columns” from the Data menu.

Eats Data

Note that choosing to split text to columns will eat the data in adjacent columns. Tip to insert blank columns before splitting your text to columns.

Printer Settings and Presets

With our new copiers, you can set them to double side, hole punch and/or staple.  Below is a quick screencast on how to create those settings.

Pin Tabs in Chrome - Keep important tabs right in front

Google Chrome allows you to pin a tab in the browser. Pinning a tab moves the tab to the front and locks it to the front. This can be really helpful for websites you visit a lot.  

Alice Keeler has a great blog post tutorial on how to do this.  Take a look: 
http://alicekeeler.com/2016/10/21/pin-tab-google-classroom-email-gradebook/

Google Forms in Google Classroom

This post is a quick tutorial on how to use Google Forms and how to integrate it into Google Classroom.  Your tech liaisons are always here to help if you have any questions.

http://www.alicekeeler.com/teachertech/2015/10/07/google-classroom-google-forms-magic/

Database of YouTube Channels for Education

YouTube Channels for Education Database

The spreadsheet linked below is a collection of YouTube channels that are good for your classroom.  The spreadsheet is organized by subject area and they are always looking for more suggestions.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jqRf5BQ2nZ-Og12jTfxPIxtr9pDohckx38wXfhhi_Xs/edit#gid=0

Changing Staples Preferences at the Copy machine

Sometimes you may arrive at the copier and find that it out of staples (as someone nicely put a note on it and informed Janet), and you need to make sure that you can still get your job.  You can make sure that your job comes out by telling it not to staple your job.  To do this open up your queue of print jobs

Highlight the job you would like to print and click on the options button.

Be sure that the stapling option is on "no stapling."

Now press print and you are all set! 

Google Forms Quick Start Guide

If you are looking to start using Google Forms in your classroom, this post from Alice Keeler might be helpful.  It goes over how to add questions, the various questions types, formatting your form and more.

http://www.alicekeeler.com/teachertech/2015/04/06/google-forms-quick-start-guide/

7 more Tips for learning Google

The full post can be found at http://alicekeeler.com/2016/03/14/7-more-tricks-to-learn-during-spring-break/ Alice Keeler is great and always has the best tips and tricks.

This post will include:

• Hint Text in Google Forms
• Commenting in Google Docs
• formatting a cell in Google Sheets
• Editing the slide master in Google Slides
• Making straight lines in Google Drawing
• Quickly closing a number of tabs in Chrome
• Linking to assignments in Classroom 

ViewPure - Remove ads from YouTube

If you are concerned with showing YouTube videos in the classroom because of the related videos, ads and comments, try ViewPure.  Simply visit ViewPure and search for a video.  If you know the URL for the video you can also just paste it there.  It's that simple and you will be viewing your video without any distraction.

Rolling over your homework website to this school year

As a reminder, you'll want to roll over your homework website to this school year or create a new one.  Below is a quick video to show you how to do that.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact your TILs. 

SymbalooEDU - visual bookmarking tool

SymbalooEDU  is a visual bookmarking tool!   It's all about the tiles and students just click or touch the tile to navigate right where you want them to be online.  With a free account, one can access your bookmarks from anywhere with any device and share online resources with "yourself" other teachers, or your students for unique lessons.  Here is a screen shot of the WEBMIX for our NYS Teacher Centers with a tile/link to our Partner Companies.  Just search "New York State Teacher Centers" in the public webmixes and you can keep this as one of your tabs.  You can search SymbalooEDU for any topic and grab the tiles, like "Math Grade 3". https://www.symbaloo.com

Reducing the File size of a PDF

There are times when a pdf that you have created is too big for things like sharing via e-mail. You can use Preview to reduce the file size so that it is more manageable for the purpose that you need it for. You should note that this will also reduce the quality of the document.


1 -Open your PDF in Preview. If your PDF files are set to open in Preview, then simply double-click the file. If not, secondary/right click on the document and choose to open it in Preview. (If you aren't sure how to use secondary click you can view this video.)
Create a copy of the original file to test this method before applying it to your final PDF. This method can result in a lot of quality loss.

2 - Click File and select export. In the options, click the Quartz Filter menu, and select "Reduce File Size."

3 - Save the file. Select your desired location, then click Save. Your file will be saved in a much-reduced size. This may result in a noticeable drop in quality.

Flubaroo is an Add-On for Google Sheets spreadsheets that will automatically grade student responses to formative assessment submitted through a Google Form.  Flubaroo has the option to email students their results. Since not all schools have email turned on for students, Flubaroo has another option. Flubaroo recently added the feature to create a summary report on a Google Doc that is shared with the student through Google Drive. Click here to view the Flubaroo blog post.

To learn more about this and how to create an assessment in Google Forms, visit Alice Keeler's blog. 

Self Paced Google Training

If you are looking to get some Google Training, but need to do it on your own time I encourage you to check out the LHRIC MLP catalog.  At the bottom of the list you will see listing for self-paced courses in: Google Doc, Google Forms, Google Sheets, Google Slides  as well as Digital Citizenship, Smart Notebook and Wiki.

Just go to www.mylearningplan.com to see what course are offered (plus they are free!)

A playlist of video tech tips

If you aren't reading Richard Byrne's Free Tech for Teachers Blog, be sure to add it to your feed. He recently put together a collection of some of the videos he has made into a YouTube playlist. There are a lot of great videos for a variety of tech tools. Take a look at it and see what new thing you can try. Click on the link below to see a playlist of videos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLtx-qUNKJwDwazAWE7UaLATKaV0gcpNYv&v=W4eKfe-fNYs

Make Groups with just a few clicks

Group Maker is a super simple add on you can use in Google Sheets.  Once you have created the template (by copying and pasting your roster into the document given), you can use it as many times as you want to create groups of any size.  To see more details you can visit:
http://www.alicekeeler.com/teachertech/2015/10/19/group-maker-automatically-make-groups-with-google-sheets/

Creating Google Contact Groups for sharing files

Some of you may frequently be sharing Google Drive files with a number of people (such as your department, grade level or group of students).  One option (there are many) is to create a Google Contact Group.  Once you have this created, any time you are in Google you can type in the group's name and it will populate the field with all of the addresses of the people in the group.  Here is a quick video to show you how to do this.