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.
Whether you want to quickly assess your students understanding after a discussion or would like to have students perform assessments of their peer's understanding of their presentation, Kahoot can add a fun, gameshow atmosphere to your class. Use iPads, Chromebooks, Lab computers or the students' smartphones!
So often, students give presentations, receive their grade, and that's it. But wouldn't it be great to find out if their audience actually learned anything from all of their hard work? Wouldn't student audience members pay more attention if they knew they were going to be playing a game using the information their peers shared?
Kahoot does what all of those sets of "clickers" and fancy software packages promised, but without the hassle of additional devices and almost no learning curve!
Once you've gotten an account, you log in and choose what type of questions you want to ask.
Then when you're ready, project your quiz screen and students will see something like this.
Students would just need to go to Kahoot.it (on ANY device with internet access) and enter the game's pin number, enter a nickname (I'd suggest 1st name or Google username) and when you (or the gamemaster) starts the game, they'll see the 4 choices on their screen.
Please let me know if you'd like to start using this in your class, I'd be happy to co-plan a lesson with you!
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
This week SATEC participated in the Hour of Code in celebration of Computer Science in Education Week. While the younger students learned about giving step-by-step directions to achieve their goal on the iPads using Bee Bot, The Foos and the Daisy the Dinosaur apps, older students got to try websites like: www.code.org www.codecombat.com www.playcodemonkey.com www.madewithcode.com
All of these apps and resources are free to download and use!
It was a wonderful chance for all students throughout our SATEC community to share the focus of examining the role of technology in their daily lives and consider learning how to program and control that technology themselves.
