Ideal Verge - Your Daily Dose of Knowledge and Inspiration.

Good morning from Maine where my friends Kris and Beth Still are visiting for the week. Beth, a Google Certified Teacher, will be helping me with the Practical Ed Tech Chromebook Camp that starts on Monday. Yesterday, we went on an unsuccessful back roads drive to look for a moose. We'll try again this evening after a traditional Maine supper of lobsters prepared outdoors.

Here are this week's most popular posts:
1. Character Scrapbook - A Template for Reflecting on Stories
2. Zaption is Closing - Try These Alternatives
3. Two Easy Ways to Add Accent Marks in Google Documents
4. 10 Ways to Use Adobe Spark in School
5. 7 Free Timeline Tools Compared In One Chart
6. Alphabetimals - A Dictionary of Animal Sounds
7. Sugar Scanner Shows You How Much Sugar You're Consuming

Word cloud generators provide students with a nice way to visualize the most frequently used words in a passage of text. There are plenty of word cloud creation tools on the web. There is even a Google Docs Add-on for making word clouds. One relatively newer tool for making word clouds is found at WordClouds.com. In my video embedded below I demonstrate the features of WordClouds.com


Watch my video embedded below to learn how to make word clouds in Google Documents.

In late May I published a video about how to use Adobe Spark. Since then I've showcased it in a couple of my workshops. In response to my video and in my workshops I've received a lot of questions about using Adobe Spark in classrooms. Many of the most common questions about Adobe Spark are answered in the free Adobe Spark Edu Guide (link opens a PDF). In the guide you will find answers to questions about data privacy, using Adobe Spark with kids under age 13, and what each part of Adobe Spark does.

Watch my video embedded below to learn how to get started with Adobe Spark.

Earlier this year I published a chart in which I compared the core features of six online timeline creation tools. The History Project is a new tool that I've featured twice in the last week so I updated my comparison chart to include it. My complete chart of comparisons of seven timeline creation tools for students is embedded below. You can also get the Google Docs version here.

One of my favorite ways to use Padlet is to have students collaboratively create multimedia KWL (Know, Want, Learn) charts. To provide students with guidance on where to place their notes, I use a custom background on Padlet. The background is a just a screenshot of a three column page that I make in Google Documents (any other document program will work just as well) that is uploaded to Padlet. Eighteen months ago I published a video about how to do this, but since Padlet changed their user interface last month I have made a new video on how to create KWL charts in Padlet. The new video is embedded below.

Good evening from Maine where I'm getting ready for the Practical Ed Tech BYOD Camp that starts on Monday morning. Earlier this week, for the first time in years, I went consecutive days without publishing a blog post. I did that because I needed a little brain break after weeks of being on the road including a week at ISTE 2016 where I was bombarded with product pitches. During that little break I went bass fishing with a friend I hadn't seen in almost a year and I took some time for a long bike ride. We all need an unscheduled break sometimes. Now I feel ready to get back to cranking out helpful information to share on FreeTech4Teachers.com.

Here are this week's most popular posts:
1. How to Enable Automatic Grading in Google Forms
2. How to Create Online Collaborative Whiteboards
3. CK-12 Concept Maps Show Kids Connections Between Math and Science
4. Google Forms Can Now Automatically Grade Quizzes Without an Add-on
5. How Fireworks Work
6. Flubaroo Compared to the New Google Forms Auto-grading Feature
7. The History Project - Like Storycorps With Timelines

The CK-12 Foundation recently released a new feature that should help students see the connections between topics in science and mathematics. CK-12 concepts maps are interactive webs of related math and science terms. Clicking on the "details" tab below a term in the web will lead students to definitions and explanations, to interactive concept simulations, and to interactive review exercises.

To find a concept map on CK-12 simply go to the CK-12 Concept Map page and enter a science or mathematics topic into the search box. You will then see a color-coded web of terms. Terms appearing in green will lead students to science resources. Terms appearing in blue will lead students to mathematics resources.

Applications for Education
CK-12 Concept Maps could be a good resource for teachers who are looking for ideas when developing lessons that incorporate mathematics and science around one topic. For example, the inertia concept map provided me with resources that could be used to teach Newton's first law as well as resources that could be used to teach the calculation of acceleration.

On the topic of CK-12 resources, take a look at their free online whiteboard tool called Stoodle.

The History Project is a new multimedia timeline tool funded in part by The New York Times. Larry Ferlazzo tipped me off to The History Project and I gave it a try this afternoon.

The History Project lets you upload your own pictures or import pictures from social networks to add to your timeline. Each event on your timeline can include multiple pictures. After adding a picture to a timeline event you can record audio to add to that event. You also have the option to upload an existing audio recording. Of course, like any good time tool, The History Project lets you write in notes, dates, and locations. When you write in a location a Google Map of that location is added to your timeline event.

Applications for Education
The History Project is designed for telling personal stories which is why I titled the post "like Storycorps with timelines." The History Project's editing interface is rather straight-forward and you could easily have middle school and high school students using it in a short amount of time.

The History Project could be a fantastic tool for students to use to record and share stories about themselves, about their families, and about community elders. Timelines created on The History Project are private unless you choose to publish them for the world to see.

Wizer is a neat tool for creating a variety of interactive assignments including writing assignments, multiple choice quizzes, and labeling assignments. You can distribute your Wizer activities to your students through Google Classroom or through the use of a link and pin system. Back in February I published a video about how to use Wizer.

This week Wizer added a feature that teachers have frequently requested. That feature is the option to share resources in folders. To create a shared folder first sign into your Wizer account then select the "new folder" button. Select a few resources or activities to add to your new folder. When you're ready to share your folder just click "add members" and enter the email addresses of your colleagues.

Watch the video embedded below to learn more about creating activities in Wizer.

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.

Good afternoon from an airplane somewhere over upstate New York. I'm my last flight heading from the ISTE 2016 conference. This is also my last flight for a month. June was a fantastically busy month as I had the pleasure and privilege of working with teachers at ten events spread across five states. But now I'm ready to stay home for the next month to play with my dogs, ride my bike, and get ready for the Practical Ed Tech Summer Camps.

As I do on the last day of every month, I have put together a list of the most popular posts of the last 30 days. This month the most popular post was about Google's new grading tool in Google Forms.

Here are this month's most popular posts:
1. Google Forms Can Now Automatically Grade Quizzes Without an Add-on
2. 15 Tools for Teaching History With Technology - A Handout
3. Google Cast for Education Gets Your Students on the Same Page
4. The Best Ways to Use Padlet - Examples from Teachers
5. An Illustrated Mathematics Glossary
6. Three Geography Games Based on Google Maps and Google Earth
7. 7 Blogging Platforms for Teachers Compared and Ranked
8. Click to Spin - A Fun and Free Random Name Picker
9. Ten Good Video Channels for Science Students
10. How to Use the New Version of Padlet

 

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.

This week at ISTE 2016 Google and Samsung had large booth displays devoted to virtual reality headsets. The proliferation of virtual reality headsets has been the catalyst for some good conversations about the value of virtual reality in education. Many have wondered if it is a novelty or if could have a meaningful impact on students. I have been a part of those conversations. But as I want to be prepared with good information on the topic, I turned to Google Scholar to see what has been written on the topic of VR in education. The following three papers stood out to me.

Construct3D: a virtual reality application for mathematics and geometry education.

On the usability and likeability of virtual reality games for education: The case of VR-ENGAGE.

Can virtual reality improve anatomy education? A randomised controlled study of a computer‐generated three‐dimensional anatomical ear model.

All three of these studies found that virtual reality was beneficial to students. Each study came to that conclusion in a different context. The first found an improvement in students' comprehension of geometrical concepts. The second found an improvement in students' understanding of geographical concepts and relationships, but only with prior knowledge. And the third study found an improvement in students' understanding of anatomy.

These three studies had small sample sizes and control groups that could probably be categorized as "high achieving, highly engaged" students. Whether or not the outcome of the students linked above will be similar to those of other students is still to be determined. That said, I'm excited to see what happens with virtual reality in K-12 classrooms over the next five years.

Disclosure: Samsung paid for my hotel room during the 2016 ISTE conference. 

Earlier this week at the ISTE 2016 conference I had a nice meeting with the founders of the popular assessment tool, Formative. Formative is hard at work to add new features in time for the new school year in the northern hemisphere. The list of features that they showed me is fifteen deep. Many of those features are focused on data, but some are focused on providing solutions to practical problems that almost every teacher has faced at one time or another while using online assessment tools. These are the five practical Formative features that I'm looking forward to seeing this fall.

• Send assignments/ quizzes to individual students. 
• Scheduling a start time and an end time for assignments/ quizzes. 
• Scheduling a time for the return of quiz scores/ feedback. You'll be able to hold scores until every student has completed the assignment/ quiz. 
• Students will have a progress meter to show them where they are in a particular quiz/ assignment. 
• Improved font formatting tools. 

Applications for Education
One of the things that has helped Formative become popular is the "show your work" response option that allows students to draw responses to your questions and prompts. The addition of these new features should only help to make Formative a better tool for gathering formal and informal assessment responses from students.

On Tuesday morning at the ISTE 2016 conference I sat down with the founder of the popular digital portfolio tool, SeeSaw. He showed me some of updated features of SeeSaw's free product as well as the new analytics options within SeeSaw Plus (a subscription service).

One of the best features of SeeSaw's free service is the classroom blogging component. SeeSaw added the blogging feature in January in response to requests from users. SeeSaw's blogging feature allows you to select artifacts from your students' digital portfolios to feature on your classroom's blog. You can also have students submit written blog posts that you approve before they go live on the blog. The video in this post shows you how to create a blog within SeeSaw.

Applications for Education
Connecting with other classroom blogs is a great way to build an authentic audience for your students' work. SeeSaw put together a spreadsheet of public classroom blogs to help teachers connect their classroom blogs. The spreadsheet includes the Twitter and or Google+ ID of the teacher in charge of each listed blog.

SeeSaw's blog feature includes a "following" option that makes it easy to quickly see when a blog your class is following publishes a new post. The video embedded below demonstrates how to connect and follow a SeeSaw blog.

For the last few years Verizon has hosted the Innovative App Challenge for students. Verizon recently published the list of the best apps developed in the 2015-16 Innovative App Challenge. The top app was created by middle school students in Michigan. Their app provides a way for the public to alert local government to safety concerns in public parks. The whole list of top student-created apps can be seen in this PDF.

The next Verizon Innovative App Challenge begins in August. Students must make a video to explain the concept of their apps and write a short essay about their apps. Complete entry rules are available here.

If your students do want to build an app either for this contest or for their own enjoyment, the MIT App Inventor offers a great way to do that. Students can build working apps in their web browsers before using them on their Android devices. Click here to read more about the MIT App Inventor.