Ideal Verge - Your Daily Dose of Knowledge and Inspiration.

This afternoon during the Practical Ed Tech Chromebook Camp Beth Still and I shared some ways to use Google Sites with students. One of the features that I showed was using page level permissions (this video shows you how to enable those) to have students manage individual pages within a site. That raised the question of how to keep track of updates that students make to their pages. There is a simple way to do that by subscribing to page changes. Watch my video below to learn how to track changes to Google Sites.

One of the things that I was asked about during the Practical Ed Tech BYOD Camp on Monday was, "how can students write in two languages in Google Docs?" The person asking wanted her students to be able to write a few lines in English and then a few lines in Spanish or French. There are two rather easy ways to do this in Google Documents. Both of those methods are demonstrated in my short video that is embedded below.

The new automatic grading function in Google Forms seems to be a hit with many readers. I've received a bunch of questions about it in the last week. To answer many of those questions I created the short video that you can see embedded below and or on my YouTube channel.

Good evening from Maine where I'm relaxing after a long, fun, and tiring week at the ISTE 2016 conference. It was energizing to be around so many passionate educators. At the same time there never seems to be enough time to soak up all of the learning opportunities at ISTE.

A happy belated Canada Day to my friends to the north. And a happy Independence Day to my fellow Americans. I am spending the long weekend with friends at their lakeside camp ("camp" in Maine refers to what most people would call a cabin). Wherever you are this weekend, I hope that you get time to relax too.

Here are this week's most popular posts:
1. Google Forms Can Now Automatically Grade Quizzes Without an Add-on
2. Google Cast for Education Gets Your Students on the Same Page
3. The Best Ways to Use Padlet - Examples from Teachers
4. How to Blend Images in Google Slides
5. The Classroom Bookshelf - A Blog of Literature Lesson Ideas
6. 7 Word Summary of ISTE 2016
7. Connect Your Classroom Through SeeSaw Connected Blogs

On Monday Google Forms received an update that allows you to create automatically graded multiple choice and true/false quizzes. To do this just go into your Form's settings menu and select "quizzes." You can then specify point values for each multiple choice question in your Form. In that same menu you can enter answer explanations. The quizzes setting also gives you the option of letting students see their scores immediately after completing a quiz. The quizzes setting is convenient, but it is not as feature-laden as the Google Sheets Add-on called Flubaroo.

Flubaroo offers the option to grade fill-in-the-blank/ short answer questions. Additionally, you can use Flubaroo to accept more than one correct answer for each of the questions on your quiz. That is a great option when the answer to your question has multiple correct spellings (tsar and czar). Awarding partial credit for an answer is an option that Flubaroo offers too.

Flubaroo will let you send grades to students via email or by sharing in Google Docs immediately after they have completed a quiz or at a later time of your choosing. Printing grade summaries from Flubaroo is easier than it is in Google Forms at this time.

Applications for Education
The automatic quiz grading in Google Forms is handy for quickly giving your students a summary of what they know about a topic before you teach a lesson. Flubaroo is a good tool for when you are giving a more comprehensive assessment and want to be able to use a wider variety of scoring and reporting tools.

As the ISTE 2016 conference was winding down yesterday I took one last long walk through the vendor hall. I went up and down every aisle of the expo and at the end I published my summary of the vendor hall in this Tweet:

#ISTE2016 vendor floor summary: data, maker, VR, Google, damage control.

— Richard Byrne (@rmbyrne) June 29, 2016

Now to expand on those points in my Tweet:

1. I counted no less than ten companies offering student data collection and analysis tools. That only accounts for the companies focused entirely on that service. There are many, many other companies touting data collection and analysis as part of a larger service. Those booths seemed to be occupied by school administrators. I didn't see many teachers hanging around those booths.

2. Maker spaces and the Maker movement were all over the ISTE program. The conference program had plenty of workshops and presentations on topics related to the maker movement. There were playground areas set up for people to learn about 3D printers, robotics, and programming. In the vendor hall nearly every 3D printer company and robotics kits company had booths swarming with activity.

3. Google and Samsung had dueling booths featuring virtual reality headsets. I had many discussions with conference goers about virtual reality. The consensus seems to be that we're all fascinated with the possibilities but have concerns about the scalability an long-term use of virtual reality in classrooms.

4. Google, Google, Google. They made some big announcements this week about Forms, Cardboard Expeditions, a new screen sharing app, and an "apps bundling" scheme to sell sets of Chrome apps. Their booth was packed every time that I went into the vendor hall. It was interesting to see many other vendors standing around watching the Google presentations.

5. Damage control products were prominently displayed throughout the ISTE vendor hall. You could find a protective case for just about every tablet, Chromebook, phone, and laptop imaginable. There were also plenty of companies selling network monitoring software and web filtering products designed to protect your school network and or block access to websites.

For a long time Flubaroo has been one of my go-to recommendations for easy scoring of quizzes created in Google Forms. Today, Google made it easier than ever to have quizzes scored for you and to show students their scores. Now when you create a Google Form you can go into the Form settings and choose the quiz option. Within the quiz option you can choose to have your questions scored as students answer them. You can also choose to show students their scores as well as correct answers. See my screenshot below to learn where you can find the new quiz scoring options.


Applications for Education
The new automatic quiz scoring feature will make it easier to quickly deliver feedback to your students when they take multiple choice or true/false quizzes.

The automatic quiz scoring feature only supports multiple choice and true/false questions at this time. If you want to have short answer or fill-in-the-blank questions scored for you, you will need to use Flubaroo in Google Sheets.

This morning at the ISTE 2016 conference Google announced some great new features for teachers. One feature that immediately jumped out at me is the new Google Cast for Education Chrome app. The Google Cast for Education Chrome app enables teachers and students share their screens over wireless networks. The app integrates with Google Classroom to make it easy for you to quickly share your screen to your students' Chromebooks or laptops and for them to share with you. See the Google Cast for Education Chrome app in action in the video embedded below.



Applications for Education
The Google Cast for Education Chrome app will solve a problem that has plagued teachers for years. That problem is getting all of your students to look at the same webpage or app at the same time without having to rely on them to accurately enter a web address or click the correct link.

Google Sites is flexible tool for creating school websites, classroom blogs, wikis, and digital portfolios. For years it has remained unchanged except for the addition of page-level permissions a few years ago. Today, Google announced that a new version of Google Sites will be rolling out over the next year. The new version of Google Sites promises a new drag-and-drop editing platform, enhanced collaboration features, and new responsive design templates.

The new version will first be available to Google Apps for Business users, but should eventually appear in Google Apps for Edu too. I own a Google Apps for Business domain and I have applied for early adopter status to test the new Google Sites as soon as possible. When I have access I will be sure to post a video about the new version of Google Sites here.

Thanks to Beth Still for heads-up about the new Google Sites.

All of this week I am on the road working with teachers in Texas, Kansas, and Arizona. Rather than scrambling to write blog posts at the end of each day, I'm taking this time to feature some of the most popular posts and new tools of the 2015-2016 school year.

One of the most frustrating experiences you can have in a classroom is trying to get twenty-seven kids to land on the same webpage at the same time. Nothing can kill the momentum of a lesson like having to spend five minutes saying, "click here" or "you mistyped the address" to a bunch of students while the rest of the class is ready to move forward. Over the years I've put shortened URLs on my whiteboard for kids to copy, posted links on my blog and told students to go there to click a link, and I've used QR codes to direct students to webpages. While all three methods have been helpful, none has been perfect. Now there is a new method that I'm excited to try.

All of this week I am on the road working with teachers in Texas, Kansas, and Arizona. Rather than scrambling to write blog posts at the end of each day, I'm taking this time to feature some of the most popular posts and new tools of the 2015-2016 school year.

Last week I presented three webinars about Google Apps for Education. The third of those webinars was all about Google Drive Add-ons and Chrome extensions for teachers. If you couldn't attend the live webinar, you can still grab the handout here or view it as embedded below.

All of this week I am on the road working with teachers in Texas, Kansas, and Arizona. Rather than scrambling to write blog posts at the end of each day, I'm taking this time to feature some of the most popular posts and new tools of the 2015-2016 school year.

Flippity provides a handful of great Google Sheets templates. I've featured their Random Name Picker, Flashcard, and Jeopardy templates in the past. The latest Flippity template that I've tried is their Progress Indicator template. With that template you can create a progress chart that will update whenever you update the data in the chart. In the video embedded below I provide an overview of how to use Flippity's Progress Indicator template.

All of this week I am on the road working with teachers in Texas, Kansas, and Arizona. Rather than scrambling to write blog posts at the end of each day, I'm taking this time to feature some of the most popular posts and new tools of the 2015-2016 school year.

Around this time last year I shared a neat Google Spreadsheets script called Flippity. Flippity was originally designed to help you create flashcards through Google Spreadsheets. This morning Steve Fortna informed me that you can now use Flippity to create Jeopardy-style gameboards through Google Spreadsheets. In the video embedded I demonstrate how to use Flippity to create a Jeopardy-style gameboard.

Earlier this week a participant in one of my online courses asked a good question about using Google Forms as an assessment tool. Here's the paraphrased question:

I have created a great rubric for some year end projects. Rather than going straight to the spreadsheet, I complete the form as students present. However, i cannot for the life of me figure out the easiest way for me to take the responses and return them to students. It seems that when I open Flubaroo- things get super confusing.

This is one of the times when a Google Form might not be necessary. In fact, my suggestion was to skip the Form and just enter grades and comments into a Google Spreadsheet that has the Online Rubric Add-on enabled. Online Rubric helps you create a rubric within a Google Spreadsheet. The template will let you include email addresses so that you can quickly send to your students their grades and your comments. The video embedded below demonstrates how to use the Online Rubric Add-on for Google Sheets.

It's the end of the month and as I do every month I have compiled a list of the most frequently read posts of the last 31 days. May seemed to zip along quickly. This list offers an easy way to quickly see interesting and useful posts that you might have missed.

Here are the most popular posts from May, 2016:
1. 10 Sites and Apps for Vocabulary and Spelling Practice
2. Create an Interactive Video Summary of the School Year
3. A Fun Tool for Making Word Clouds in Fun Shapes
4. 12 Tools for Creating End-of-Year Review Activities
5. Great Tools for Creating Screencasts - A PDF Handout
6. 7 Tools for Creating Flowcharts, Mind Maps, and Diagrams
7. More Than 100 Sets of Primary Source Documents for Students
8. How to Blend Images in Google Slides
9. 10 Ways to Use Adobe Spark in School
10. 4 Google Apps Updates You Might Have Missed Last Week

• Take a look at the online workshops I'm hosting throughout the spring and summer.
• The Practical Ed Tech Chromebook Camp is sold out! Email me to get on the waiting list. 

Buncee offers a great tool for creating visual stories.

Last week Google released a new product and updated some existing products that are of interest to teachers and students.

Last Monday at the Google I/O conference Google introduced a new product called Spaces. Spaces is a service that lets you create small communities to share links, notes, and pictures. Take a look at my video about Spaces to see how it works.

On Wednesday of last week Google added a new charts feature to Google Slides. You can now import charts made in Google Sheets and display them in your slides. You can also use and modify one of the new charts templates in Google Slides. My video here demonstrates how to use the new charts feature in Google Slides.

Also on Wednesday of last week Google announced some updates to the Google Classroom API. The updated API could lead to more apps integrating with Google Classroom, not the least of which being improved gradebook options through Google Classroom. Learn more about these updates in the explanation that I shared on Thursday.

Finally, Google announced that Android apps can now be developed and published for use on Chromebooks. Beginning in June end-users will be able to add Android apps to the Acer R11, Asus, Flip, and Pixel Chromebooks. Support for running Android apps on other Chromebooks will be added later in the year. The list of supported devices can be seen here.