If you're interested in checking out some of the technology available in our makerspaces and a whole lot more, come to the Technology Petting Zoo on Thursday, 10.19.17, from 4-6 down at the Mass. Green High Performance Computing Center in Holyoke. The October CSTA-Western Mass' monthly meeting will feature a Technology Petting Zoo in conjunction with Eduporium. Please join us - by registering at this link: http://bit.ly/CSTA-WMA1019. Here's the link to the flyer with more info and registration. All are welcome!.

Vicki Davis recently posted a couple of excellent tutorials on using Google Keep to take notes and keep track of your research, especially if you're a Google App school.  I know I find it useful to grab info, tag it and quickly flip it into a Google Doc.

Check out Vicki's tutorial below and read more about it, get an additional video with EdPuzzle embeds on Vicki's blog. 

The other day a friend asked me how to put superscripts and subscripts into a Google Sheet.  I had never done this on sheets- just on docs and kind of assumed that it would work the same way.  It doesn't.  And to be honest, I looked and looked and did not find a way to make it work.  Using unicode did not work- it put the superscript in, but sheets read it as text- not a number; and the same with copying and pasting from a doc- looks good, but reads as text, formulas do not work.  So- if you know how to do this- please share and put it in the comments!

Luckily there are some amazing teachers in my PLN who have shared great ideas of ways to use Google Chrome to help teach math and to help kids show what they know. Miguel Guhlin down in Texas, wrote a great blog post the other day- laying out eight tools/extensions you can use to enhance your math instruction. You can read more about it here. 

I do want to highlight 2 of these extensions- Equatio and Desmos.  Equatio, from texthelp has been flying of late. So many improvements!  Those of you who struggled to get LAtex to work properly, and have tried every tool in the book to get math equations to work on a computer, check out Equatio. You may be pleasantly surprised. 

Desmos is so much more than a graphing calculator.  A teacher at a workshop I attended this summer did a demo and I was amazed.  Not a math-oriented person myself, it was easy to see that this tool has come a long way and has a lot to offer teachers of all grades.  Check out some of the ideas here.

This may not apply to everyone, but I stopped to check out the updates coming in Windows 10. The one that caught my eye was the Story ReMix. It looks like it is easy to use, kind of reminds me of Animoto.  If you haven't used Animoto for quick and easy videos... the free educator version info page is here. Back to Windows 10 Story ReMix... more info here and in video below.

I saw an article recently which basically said that teachers are doing DOK wrong. Now, since I still remember having to look up what DOK meant (not coming from a teacher prep program I am easily confused by edu acronyms), I was interested in knowing more about this. Robert Kaplinksy has a great matrix about this here and he also sent me an email today about DOK and referenced his blog post here. So go read more about what educators need to know about DOK- below is one of Robert's graphics to get you started..
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I saw a couple of great ideas to have fun with math (I know, coming from me that's kind of an oxymoronic phrase).

• One idea is from Amanda Wilp's PrimaryGal blog. She does "Scoot Math". Essentially she has the kids write their own math problem using chalk on the sidewalk and then scoot to the next problem(s) and solve them as they scoot along.  You can read more about it here, and grab the free recording sheets from TPT here.
  
  
• The other math idea I saw came from Terri Eicholz's blog Engage Their Minds, about doing clothesline math. Terri got the idea from Chris Shore's website- Clothesline Math.  He has lots of resources on the site and between the site and the video below you may get a better idea of what this is and how to do it in your class. Looks adaptable and fun for all ages and abilities.

I tend to use Google Keep every day. Steve WIcks posted a hyperdoc today to help put all the Google Keep info in one place.  He wrote about it on his blog Recharge Learning. Try it- you may like it.  Click here to access the doc- To keep your own copy: File>Make a copy.  

I wrote a week or so ago about Google Keep, as well as here, and here.  I went to #EdCampNQ this past weekend and in a session about chrome extensions, once again Google Keep came up.  This time an AT from a neighboring district (@OsborneAllegra) demo'd how she uses Keep in her job.  Because she goes from school to school, her Google Keep for work is arranged with a note for each school-but the cool thing for all you visual learners was the way she used a different photo for each note.  Using her phone, she could see by quickly scrolling thru the notes exactly what she needed to accomplish at each school- with color coded notes and checkboxes.  She also has a Google Keep extension that she uses for her personal account and is quite literally using it as a planning and organization tool for her summer trips.  Another participant, @jrowebbrsd,  also uses it for its OCR capabilities. If you've never tried to pop an image into Google Keep and then pull the text out of it... check it out in this short video.  Imagine having a student who may struggle to get all the assignments written down. A quick image with a phone or other device, pop it into Google Keep, grab the text, pop it into a Google Doc and have it read to you by Read and Write for Google Chrome.  If you haven't checked out Google Keep, you're missing out.  It just keeps getting better.

I love the versatility of Google Forms.  They can be used for so much more than surveys! I use them all the time when I am making digital breakouts for students to use. Data validation turns a form into a way to require the "secret password" or gives feedback with additional clues. Today I was reading/listening to Matt Miller and Kasey Bell's podcast and blog posts about using Google Forms for differentiation.  
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What I really liked about Kasey and Matt's podcast/posts was that it reminded me of 2 things. One: Use forms as a learning tool. By using branching you can give a formative assessment with the learning reinforcement built in. When a student gets a question wrong,  he moves on to a video or other lesson material to reteach/reinforce the concept vs. just getting it wrong. If the student is correct, he moves to the next question.  Here's the link to Kasey's post with some great step by step directions for you to try out.  Just in case you don't have time to read her whole post, buried way down at the bottom is alink to (French teacher) Sylvia Duckworth's blog post on using forms for a choose your own adventure story.  Check it out...it's fun to do a story this way.

Here's the podcast if you'd rather just listen along...

Reshare of Google Forms Teacher Tips... this is updated every Tuesday

This evening I participated in a #GAFEchat and the topic was Google Forms. So, it's not just me who loves Google Forms.  So many interesting resources were shared... 

• Amazing things you can do with forms
  
  ​ *** if nothing else- check these 2 out!

• ***Discovering the Power of Google Forms- presentation link Great ideas and you can make copies of forms that you'd like to take and use.
• ***Eric Curts FormsResources 
• Assignment Dropbox with Google Forms  
• Engaging Quiet Students with Google Forms
• End of the Year Escape Room 
• Amazing Race ( first one is 2016)
• Make Sequencing Questions
• Things you May not Know about Forms
• Do Not Copy Forms! 
• Nine Awesome Add-Ons for Forms
• Use Advanced Awesome Table to see Summaries and charts

OK... this list is getting way too long. I still need to learn more about using all the various add-ons that are available.  I could probably spend a week just on Forms and then there would be something new the next day. One thing I would like to explore is how to use Google forms to streamline the workflow of teachers. of students and of the various admin offices. Talking with a few other people, there is interest in the area schools.  Perhaps we can collaborate on something  that would benefit all of us.

Here's thelink to the collection of links from this #gafechat or the curated collection is listed below (use Participate.com to quickly gather all links from fast moving chats)

Google Forms Ninja Moves and Secret Passwords

Using Tables in Forms