Game Changer: Q&A In Google Slides

Get ready for a game changer! Google Slides now allows you to review and respond to audience questions as well as keeping track of those questions and allowing your audience to vote for the questions they want you to answer. This new feature will appear as an option when you enter presentation mode.

When you choose "Presenter View" you are able to use the new Q&A feature along with your speaker notes. You can choose to share questions as they come up, or wait until the end of your presentation. This is helpful to both you and your audience as you preserve the flow of your presentation, but they don't forget the questions they want to ask.

Your audience will see a link at the top of your presentation that will allow them to both post questions or vote on other audience member's questions. Questions may be asked anonymously or by using your Google sign-in info. The presenter can then choose whether or not to share these questions with the audience and how to respond.

For the time being, it seems that if you're in a school-domain using Google Apps for Education, only members of your domain can participate in the online question submission. But you can easily work around this by using a free Google account to create your slideshow.

You could use this to allow students to, anonymously or not, ask questions, or you can pose questions and allow them to post their responses. The audience "voting thumbs up or down" feature could likewise be used in a variety of ways.

Beautiful Multimedia Timelines (made easy)

Timelines can look professional and polished while reinforcing a number of research and digital citizenship skills. The amazing folks at the Knight Lab at Northwestern University have created a template that, with a little help, anyone from upper elementary students to high schoolers, and beyond can make amazing embedded timelines.

Students make a copy of the template in their Google Drives and then enter dates, headlines, links to audio, video, or images they've found online along with their citations. Then following a few step-by-step instructions, they are able to get either a link or embed code to share their timeline with anyone they wish, from their teacher and class to a worldwide audience! Think of all of the ways timelines can be used in your classroom!

Even more ways to add games!

Check out this cool quiz-creation tool! Quizzizz works in a similar way to Kahoot with a couple of key differences. The student sees both the question and answer choices on their screen and you can set question time up to 5 minutes.

Both have an extensive bank of ready-made quizzes that you can use. Check out this quick walk-through to see if it could work in your classroom!

Quizizz Presentation from Quizizz

Weekly Tech Tips

In Classroom, when students open an assignment, their document will open in a new tab, leaving the assignment's instructions hidden on their previous tab. Alice Keeler's come up with a brilliant solution for this in the Classroom Split Chrome Extension.
Give it a try!

Go to the Chrome Web Store and add the extension. 

Once you've added it, open an assignment in Classroom and click on the extension.

You will now see your screen split into two parts. One with the assignment's instructions and the other with the copied document.

Tech Tip of the week #2 is also from Alice Keeler! It is a quick settings change that will allow you to automatically convert any Word Docs that are shared with you into Google Docs.

Step 1: Open your Google Drive

Step 2: Click on the gear icon at the upper right

Step 3: Click Settings

Step 4: Check Convert uploaded files to Google Docs editor format

SumoPaint

Looking for a way to edit pictures or create illustrations in the cloud? For Chrome users, there is free and easy way with the SumoPaint app from the Chrome Web Store. There are hundreds of tools available without the need to download anything.

This free app allows users to create, manipulate and export images with ease.  The learning curve may seem steep because there are just so many options available, but there's a SumoPaint YouTube channel with tutorials on everything you may want to do from basic to advanced creation and editing. If you've had any experience with PhotoShop, you should be able to jump right into creating with this robust tool.