CoolTools Blog - LWilliams723

For this assignment, I actually implemented two new tools that I used within the week leading up to break: Plickers and Quizlet Live.  I'm notorious for giving a Unit Exam right before a break, so of course, as April break approached, I was finishing up a unit and spending the class-before-the-test reviewing with students.  I reviewed in class on Monday-Tuesday, and gave the exam on Wednesday-Thursday (we meet every other day, and I have 3 different sections).  I read about and asked other teachers about both Plickers and Quizlet Live to see which one they preferred for their students. What I found was that some teachers liked Plickers, while others liked Quizlet, and I decided, based on the makeup of my classes, that one class would use Plickers, while the other two would use Quizlet Live.  I chose Plickers for my 4th period class because they are my challenging group. The SWD population is 12 (out of 26), and their needs are pretty significant. That cl...

For this assignment, I wanted to explore what I could do with GoogleForms, and specifically an app attached to it, called "Flubaroo".  I've used Flubaroo superficially before, simply to get quickly-graded quizzes and provide feedback to individual students. Recently, I thought I saw another teacher using Flubaroo to summarize commonly missed questions on a quiz, and wanted to know more about how to do this in the app. After exploring a bit, I realized that this wasn't a feature of Flubaroo, it was a feature already on GoogleForms!  What I learned was that while Flubaroo would grade the quiz for me, GoogleForms can show a summary of responses to show me (and my students) which ones were commonly missed, or which ones they all got right. This provides whole-group feedback and helps me look in the mirror, too, to see what I could've done differently to teach a certain portion of the content better.  This seems like a basic step and only requires a click of one...

For this assignment, I checked out padlet.com. The reason I chose to explore Padlet is because in another PD that I'm doing, we are compiling our feedback and thoughts on a padlet (I'm wondering if that PD leader learned about it from the Cool Tools PD--wouldn't that be full circle!).  I wanted to see how it might be useful to me as a teacher or to my students, so I started to put together some resources for my upcoming unit on Civil Rights. Link here .  I liked how I could organize ideas by lesson or column, as well as having the option to color-code to differentiate between topics.  I disliked the fact that I would still run into trouble if I wanted to share some links with students. I'd have to upload the files to GoogleDrive first, then make sure those files looked right, then link it to Padlet. It seemed like a bit of extra work if this was going to be a place to compile resources.  I think I might explore Padlet a bit more as a tool for leaving...

This is my first year using GoogleClassroom regularly for my own students. I like the classroom because it aids in communication between teachers and students; however, it has drawbacks, too.   For example, since I began teaching (12 years ago), I've always used PowerPoint as my tool-of-choice for presenting info, directions, images, etc. to my students. What I started doing this year was posting all of my lesson materials in my U.S. History GoogleClassroom...powerpoints, note sheets, homework, etc. What I've noticed is that the PowerPoint files don't always mesh nicely with GoogleClassroom...sometimes students will open the slideshow and the images will be misplaced or the text might run off of the slide.  For this assignment, I decided to mess around with GoogleSlides by uploading a PowerPoint that I'll be using after break to the Drive. This way, when I post the slideshow to GoogleClassroom, I'll just post the GoogleSlides presentation rather than the Powe...

So, I made a Bitmoji of myself, but can't seem to make another one, even if I try a different app. I will have to try to work on this some more.  My line of thinking was....I could create a Bitmoji of Abraham Lincoln, or Nat Turner, or Frederick Douglass (all historical figures that are part of my current unit) and then I could incorporate them into the unit. Some historical figures appear in political cartoons on the NYS Regents Exam, so it is important to know what they look like in real life so that students can easily recognize them in an image or cartoon. I was hoping to have an assignment where students create a Bitmoji of an historical figure and then either list some bulleted facts next to it or some quotes from that person. It would also be cool to use it in a "Guess-Who" style game, where I say a fact/quote and the students would have to decide which Bitmoji it matched. I have a bunch of ideas for using this tool.  I liked reading about the one Math...

I chose to check out Flipgrid, which I've never heard of before, but will probably try to incorporate into my classroom somehow. Flipgrid has many options, but the one I chose to do a video on was #8: Exit tickets get a makeover.  Post the question “What did you learn today?” or better yet ask your students “What did you create today?” for the students to answer before leaving class. Here's my video, which would be used as the Exit Ticket prompt (you have to click my selfie for the video to play!):  https://admin.flipgrid.com/manage/grids/1013642/topics/3093325  I don't always have to do a video to ask the question, but I like that students have to record an audio or video response. A lot of students are hesitant to write, but a good percentage of my weak writers could talk for hours . One of my theories that my co-teacher and I have been testing out this year has to do with the hypothesis "If you can talk about the topic or teach the topic to someone else flue...