Game Design for Any Subject, Google Apps and More - Top Posts of 2015

2015 was an exciting year for helping teachers beyond my local district! In this post I will list some of the top tips, activities and resources from this blog over the past 12 months.

First, just a thought about my other blog. I love sharing resources and tips here at CG&T, but my heart has been in at my Teaching Like an Artist blog. I had a great year with some conferences, inspirational posts and even a book (digital and print). Be sure to check out my top posts there and consider following that work in 2016!

Now on to the great resources that got the most attention this year…
I ran a few PD sessions in the summer and these popular tips and tipsheets were a result:

• 4 Tipsheets for Navigating Google Classroom
• Updated and compiled resources for making comics using Google Slides
• Part of the above resources, but great to highlight on it's own - How to create comics using just the Google Slides app on your favorite mobile device

Here's an important post that introduces teachers to 10 simple, free tools for showing off any project (even non-tech projects) beyond the classroom. They range from simple to more involved.

I developed these two methods for making a narrated slideshow presentation using just a Chromebook.

• This simpler way uses Google Slides and SnagIt. (This hasn't yet been a "top post", but it is a great option that goes with this often requested presentation method.)
• This more involved method was my guest post on Free Tech for Teachers in June!

And these are my favorite quick tips from the year:

• How to record an audio "podcast" quickly and easily on a Chromebook using Twisted Wave
• Marking up images with a Chromebook and Google Drawings
• Two fast, simple tools for adding text to images

New Game Design Resources
Any teacher knows students today love games and many of them want to make games. I posted two popular series about creating games design this year. These are both non-digital game activities.

This first one is a “make a game in an hour” activity that I’ve done with designers. I started with a big picture look at what I and others have learned from making games.

Game Design in the Classroom - What I learned, what others learned, the "game jam" style activity and thoughts on developing and publishing

Later in the year I created this series, which one designer called a “baby step” into game design. All the resources are created in Google Docs for easy modification and sharing with students. It’s a flexible introduction to making games that integrates with many subjects. The flow of the project is...

• Learn the basic game
• Modify the game by adding a theme and possibly other rules
• Test the games
• Reflect on the process (This step is the key to tying it all together with your course content.)

Also new in 2015, I created this Game Design Page as a convenient place to find all my best classroom game design resources.

4 Tipsheets for Navigating Google Classroom

These four tipsheets are about the most important pages in Google Classroom, each from the teacher's side of things. The most common tasks I'm asked about and the most overlooked options are marked with stars.

I am sharing them as Google Drawings so you can copy and modify them as necessary. You can easily download them as PDFs or image files if necessary.

• The Classes Page
• A Class Page
• The Assignments Page
• An Assignment Page

If these are helpful, you might also be interested in my tipsheet explaining the 3 ways to share assignment attachments in Google Classroom.

Tipsheet for the 3 Ways to Share Assignments in Google Classroom

I made this one-page tipsheet for a training session I'm doing next week. (Luckily it had nothing to do with the changes Google rolled out this week. Gotta love surprise updates when preparing training!)

Classroom gives teachers three ways to share documents from Drive. This tipsheet answers a few questions about each method. For example:

• Which method is best for your particular assignment?
• If the teacher changes their copy of the document will the changes show up for students?
• Where do students find the document?

You can find the tipsheet here. Feel free to copy and edit it, but please keep the link to my blog that's included on the bottom of the page.

If you found this post helpful you might also want to see:

• Turning in Assignments in Google Classroom
• Google Classsroom Basics - Not from this blog, but resources I made for teachers in my district.

Basic Chromebooks Tips for Teachers

I've been using Chromebooks myself for a couple years, but our middle school is just received the first few classroom sets this summer. I created these two documents with helpful Chromebook tips for the teachers and I wanted to share them here.

Some of the information is specific to our district, but you can easily make a copy of these and edit them as necessary. I'd appreciate it if you include a link to this blog on any copies distribute.

The first tipsheet is about file management. Among other tips, it refers to the Save to Google Drive extension, which is installed on all of our Chromebooks.

File Management With a Chromebook

And the second tipsheet is about ways to capture the screen, including how I mark up my screen captures.

Screen Captures on a Chromebook

You might also want to see:

• Using a Chromebook to Make a Narrated Slideshow
• Google Apps Tutorials - Summer PD from 2014