GIFs like the one above can explain muti-step process for students to review. The search engine Giphy can be used to find already created GIFs
No matter your pronunciation there's no doubt you've seen one of the thousands of GIFs (i.e. a lossless format for image files that supports both animated and static images."a GIF image") floating around on the internet. Many of the GIFs revolve around funny video clips and memes that you can watch over and over again, but with the ease of creating your own they can easily be used in an educational capacity. After attending a presentation give by Ben Wilkoff last year at a GAFE Summit run by the Edtech Team I was introduced to the innovative ways you can use a GIF to help your students or fellow staff members.
The best GIF maker I've used is the free download LICEcap which allows you to record anything on your screen with an adjustable window interface. MakeGIF is a Chrome App & Extension that allows you record short sections of YouTube videos or compile a stack of pictures to make a GIF. The TechSmith Snag-it extension is another tool that can be used to create GIFs from short videos/screencasts. So what can you do with a GIF? One of the most useful applications I have experienced is to create step-by-step instructions on any type of process that could benefit from repeated visual instruction. With the roll out of a new website at our school my staff appreciated a collection of simple tutorials that are time consuming than instructional videos (see below). By embedding GIFs in a Google Presentation staff or students can flip back and forth between steps and figure out the process at their own pace. Classroom teachers can use them to record processes like multi-step equations. No matter what the topic, using GIFs as a teaching tool has real potential. Comment below if you have ever used them before or any ideas you have for using them in the future.
By publishing a Google Slides presentation I can set the show to play on repeat and customize the amount of time spent on each slide. By using the tool bar at the bottom you can control the pace and go back to review steps.
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This is the second GAFE summit I've been able to attend and I'm always amazed at the innovate and new ways educators can use Google Apps for Education (GAFE) to accomplish so many things in the classroom and promote student learning. Below you will find my thoughts and take-aways from the sessions I attended including a quick reference guide Google Presentation.
Fueling Future-Ready Students with 20time The opening keynote was an eye opening look at utilizing 20time in the classroom. Kevin Brookhouser spoke to his own experience in the classroom giving his students 20% of their time to work on a project that means something to them. He found he was able to create powerful learning that was engaging to the students. I loved his emphasis on completion of student projects rather than perfection and that students need to feel comfortable sharing and exploring "bad" ideas in order to develop good ones. Paperless Projects: Google Slides as Project templates This was an eye-opening look at how Google Slides can be used to provide templates for student projects and easily handed out and collected with Google Classroom. The speaker notes section for each slide can be used to record instructions for the project. Slides can also be graded with a custom rubric using Doctopus and Goobric. If you want a background template on a slide for students to base their work on you can easily change the background of a slide (individually or for all slides) using any image or a Google Drawing. Slides provides for a great way to provide guidance for various types of student projects that can be fun and dynamic. Check out Nate Paul's presentation for a more detailed overview on how you can utlilize Slides in a multitude of ways. Dynamic Google Drawings Google Drawings is an often underused GAFE tool that has many applications for teachers and students. The drawings you or students create can become interactive posters by adding links to videos, websites, images, sound clips, and other Google apps. It's also a quick and easy device for basic photo editing or modification. Creating backgrounds and templates for Google Slides was my biggest take-away for the uses of Drawing. It allows you to customize any type of graphic organizer (chart, graph, venn diagram, etc...) that your students can work off of without fear of accidentally altering or deleting crucial pieces. Preparing a Staff for Major Change There are lots of changes happening in education and in order for one to be successful all the stakeholders have to involved. Rushton Hurley did a great job talking through changes he has helped educational organizations make, focusing on adopting and utilizing educational technology. The one concept that really stuck with me was his feeling that all parties involved in some type of change need to truly be able to explain, justify, and understand both sides of the proposed change in order to effectively move forward in any type of decision. I think this often gets lost in making a decision that stakeholders are firmly on only one side of the fence which results in a change that isn't fully supported and facing an uphill battle. Check out Rushton's website, http://www.nextvista.org/ for great free resources, videos, and contests that you can do with your students. Google Sites 1.0 Google sites has not been my favorite platform for building websites, but it has begun to grow on me as I have seen what others are able to accomplish with it. Michael Wacker showed me how to set the custom footer on your Google Site in order to create links and information that are specific to the visitors coming to your site. Another nifty trick is using Google Drawing to create your very own Favicon for your website (that mini icon on the browser tab). Google Drawing can also be used to create a custom header for your website, which if you have ever tried inserting a photo into a header section of any website without formatting its size you can understand the frustration of trying to move and resize a photo within a header. The integration of other GAFE tools with Google Sites has slowly started to bring me around to the idea of utilizing Sites as a web-building tool. Demo Slam Demo slams are one of my favorite events at the GAFE summit because of their instant gratification in learning and using new, cool tools. Four demos really stood out to me this year: 1. The ability to insert Google Slides into Google Maps to make a really engaging and unique presentation. 2. The add-on "SaveAsDoc" which allows you to take information in a spreadsheet (typically collected in a Form) and quickly save it as a Google Doc which makes it much easier to read and process. 3. The Chrome extension "Black Menu" is an amazing all-in-one menu to access everything Google from your browser and even work within the extension so you don't lose your current tab. 4. The biggest take-away is an amazing extension and web teaching device called DocentEDU (you may need to load unsafe scripts if you're using Chrome). This fantastic tool allows you to adapt any website of your choosing into an interactive lesson for students. I had an opportunity to chat with one of the co-creators, Karin Hogan, after the summit and was incredibly impressed with this device and how useful it is in the education. Assessment in the Digital Age Assessment is always something educators are looking to improve upon and the GAFE tools are making constant improvements to how we can assess all the time. Using Google Forms is a great way to complete formative and summative assessments. It's now easier than ever to add elements like pictures and YouTube videos for students to reference as they complete the form. On the response end you can use conditional formatting to quickly check for right and wrong answers as students complete your quiz and if you haven't checked out the Autocrat add-on to send automated responses and feedback forms then your missing out on a great time-saver and feedback device. As useful as Google Forms are for creating assessments and gathering data there are several other options out there that make assessment fun and dynamic for students: Quizizz, Socrative, and Kahoot are all great game-based assessment tools you should also spend time looking into. How to Survive a Zombie Apocalypse w/ Google This was a unique way at looking how encouraging students to solve a large complex problem and use GAFE tools in order to put a plan for a solution together. James Sanders is always looking to make educational technology dynamic and innovative to encourage students to learn. The problem you have students solve doesn't have to revolve around surviving zombies, but there are many scenarios you could create that would engage your students and require them to use a variety of cross-curricular skills and tools in a fun and engaging way. Check out James' website, classroominthefuture.com, to learn more about all the great projects he's working on. 30+ Forgotten buckets of Googlicious Awesomeness There are so many tricks and tips for using Google and web that go un-utilized. Michael Wacker went through a laundry list of items that are both fun and useful. Many people don't know that by right-clicking on the Omnibox (a.k.a address bar) you can customize the search engines that are used when making a quick search. Most people are aware of Google translate, but enabling the microphone access can be a great way for students to practice their speech and self-assess if they are pronouncing words correctly. Peanut Gallery films and Google Story Builder are quick and effective ways to digitally express stories and ideas. Wacker is continously updating this list so be sure to check him out from time to time to find the next great Googlicious item. Build you own Android apps (and learn to code) The explosion of students learning coding has lead to a whole new way of learning to problem solve. Kevin Brookhouser demonstrated how anyone can use the free software on MIT App Inventor and create simple to very complex applications for an Android device. Check out that website as well as code.org to find tons of free resources to teach and learn coding. When looking at how we can improve our schools and make teachers and students successful, I think developing and recognizing professional capital is a critical component to that success. Michael Fullan and Andy Hargreaves do a great job outline what you can do as a staff member or administrator to cultivate professional capital and use it to create an open and safe environment for better ourselves as educators. Thinking about professional capital as three different parts: human (talent), social (group) and decisional (judgement) helps put into perspective how achieving it can be done in our own district along with many others. There needs to be a balance of all three and there are definitely elements of each that are important to my goals of integrating new and useful technology to help teachers accommodate their curricular goals. I believe human capital is at an all time high in many districts especially my own. We have such a large pool of talented educators that hold multiple degrees that schools can tap in order to function at a high level. I hope to do a better job at tapping the great resources I have all around me which is crucial to the success of my own position. Successfully integrating technology for the success of learning requires an understanding of what my fellow staff know and where they want to go and I would be remiss in thinking that other teachers couldn’t teach me something that could benefit others. Social capital is absolutely crucial to the success of a school and educators can accomplish so much when this is in place. The toughest part is providing sufficient time, structure, and support to allow social capital to help those who are struggling and advance those who already excel. The technology department is making a big push to carve out time in order to collaborate with teachers on many different levels including district-wide, building, and grade-level/departments. It’s our hope that by becoming a regular part of teacher collaboration technology will no longer be viewed as one more thing to do, but another tool that helps accomplish curricular goals and level the playing field for all our teachers. We want to establish a level of trust with our colleagues that enables them to ask us questions and try out things that may or may not work, but we can all learn from and advance. Finally, decisional capital is crucial to rounding out the success of professional capital. As I stated earlier I think we have a large number of talented, highly-qualified teachers in education, which should be allowed and encouraged to make and execute decisions. I feel like this is one of the hardest pieces to execute well because of the lack of opportunities for educators to actually make impactful decisions and learn from them. If we feel teachers are professionals then we have to treat them as such in order to allow them to grow and be successful. In the technology realm I want to encourage teachers to have the decisional capital Another crucial concept from the book that needs to be considered is “Teaching like a pro”. This is not an easy task and requires a lot of reflection and humility on the part of an educator. The first step is to “...continuously inquire into and improving on one’s own teaching.” (pg 21) By attending as many PD opportunities I can and working with various committees and teams within the district I hope to reflect on my own practice and bring back new skills and techniques to improve my own craft and raise my and the staff’s expectations. Second step, “...planning teaching, improving teaching, and often doing teaching not as an isolated individual but as part of a high performing team.” (pg 21) Being the first year for my position it has been really challenging to interject myself into the various grade-level and department teams, but we have laid the groundwork to become a regular part of these team meetings even if just to sit-in and listen to what teachers are doing at first and then try to interject ideas we may have to improve the projects and work going on in the classroom. I hope this more regular presence will create a much more effective working relationship with teachers and staff. The third and last step, “...being part and parcel of the wider teaching profession and contributing to its development.” (pg 22) This speaks most to my position and its potential impact on our district and profession as a whole. Utilizing technology is a great way to help teachers collaborate with one another whether in the same building or across the country. By introducing teachers to various tools and social communities (Google+, Twitter, Facebook, etc…) they can connect with other successful professionals to build their own professional capital. The goal should always be to identify best practices and be on the lookout for new and improved practices that benefit the individual and team they are working with. “Professional capital is about communities of teachers using best and next practices together.” (pg 50) As a technology integrator my main focus is to identify any new and improved practices to share with teachers, but also improve on or work with any practices a teacher may be finding continued success with (if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!) One example of where this fits is in looking at the SAMR (Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, and Redefinition) model for technology use in education. There is no need to move every teacher and activity they do through this hierarchy if what they are doing is successful and effective in its current state. This mentality is also helpful in not overwhelming or pressuring teachers with the need to inject technology into every lesson or activity for the sake of using technology. As a collaborative community of professionals it will become a commitment to working together to achieve excellence for ourselves and school. The term PLC (Professional Learning Communities) is often thrown around in many schools including my own as a key educational buzzword, but the establishment of such a thing is not easy. It is simply considered one more thing for us to do and not as a vehicle for the improvement of our profession and development of professional capital. “In the best professional learning communities, we will see, strong collaboration and distinctive individuality go together in vibrant communities of innovation and growth.” (pg 111) In my school we have a great opportunity to model this with the development of our Leadership Team to staff and administrators alike. As we work together to address the needs, issues, and growth of our school we can tap the expertise of those around us and even outside of our school and district to have a fully functioning collaborative culture that educators feel safe in. Professional capital is not easily achieved, but all the elements exist right in front of us to make it happen. It takes a commitment from all the stakeholders to work to improve themselves and those around them for the sake of the students and their educational community. Being one such stakeholder in the new and upcoming field of educational technology I know I can make an impact on cultivating the professional capital that lives in my school and district. “What pulls people in, teacher all the more so, is doing important work with committed and excited colleagues and leaders engages in activities that require creative to solve complex problems that make a real difference.” (pg 150) It will take time, but I am committed to helping make a real difference.
I love using Google Slides as an alternative to PowerPoint because of it's accessibility and ease of integration to all the other great Google apps we use in my district, but one feature that many colleagues have asked for is getting a presentation to play on repeat and have the slides hold for longer then 3 seconds.
Currently the only way to accomplish this is to publish your presentation to the web which will allow you to change the slide length and have the presentation repeat itself automatically. You can then either share the link or use the embed code (see presentation below) to insert a presentation into a website or other platform for people to view.
One worry my colleagues have regarding publishing is the fear of everyone and anyone accessing this information. One way to avoid this is the check box that requires someone sharing your domain in order to see the content (see image). Now what decide you publish should definitely be a consideration, but with the abundance of content out there in the world wide web, you are but a tiny piece of sand on the beach that is the internet (metaphor alert!). I wouldn't worry too much about anyone but your target audience seeing your content, but you should only publish content you are comfortable with being accessed by anyone. By publishing your information you never know who you might help, so don't be afraid to share your thoughts with the world!
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About EvanDirector of Technology for Traverse City Area Public Schools. Level 2 Google Certified Educator. Former Tech Integration Specialist and 4th grade teacher at Aspen School District and Spartan for life! Go Green! Categories
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