Our Go Beyond Challenge for the 2021-2022 School Year

Last spring, at the annual MACUL conference, I raised the question of whether we would go back to normal in the new school year, or go beyond. Of course, I encouraged them to take all that we learned about digital tools and go beyond.

It's easy to say that at a conference. It's hard to make it happen with everything else that came along in this school year. To help teachers in my district make it happen, I formalized what I'm calling the Go Beyond Challenge. I asked several of them to join me in doing a project or learning activity that meets this criteria:

1. It has to be (at least somewhat) new for the teacher. New steps toward deeper learning and best practices for tech integration will be encouraged, but this is open ended.
2. It has to allow for student voice, personality and creativity to be apparent.
3. It must have a final product we can share beyond the classroom.

I'm not putting a learning goal in the challenge, since that's a given. No one has time to slip in a project that doesn't focus on appropriate learning targets.

I am happy to say every teacher I have asked about this so far has agreed to try this. My goal is to get at least two teachers in each of our buildings involved at first, with at least 20% of them taking part by the end of the school year. 

Some have been concerned they can't do an impressive enough final product, but I assured them that's not the primary goal. Ultimately I want students to learn important content, practice or uncover some talents and experience a sense of accomplishment.

These goals stem from my studies of Liz Kolb's Triple E Framework and Scott McLeod's 4 Shifts Protocol. It's also what has survived from my own Teaching Like an Artist work over the years.

Hopefully this will be the first post of many about this Challenge and what results from it this year!

An Easy Way to See Students' Typed Answers in Google Docs

 I know I'm not the only one to use this method, but here's how I create highlighted answer blanks in Google Docs. This makes it easy to see their answers when you assign it as "Make a copy for each student" in Google Classroom.

Here's how it looks when they type in the box:

To create that box, I just insert a 1x1 table and then fill it with a light color. The animated GIF below shows the process. 

Once you make one answer blank like this, you can select it, copy it and then paste it in each question in your Doc.

Show Off the Learning With Digital Posters Using Google Slides

Do your students know how to use Google Slides to make an diagram or a message that shows what they learned? With just a few tricks, the popular presentation tool becomes an excellent, simple app for designing posters and other multimedia content. 

These work great in any class from 5th grade to 12th. Using digital tools, you can easily assign this as a project for remote learning.

This summer I made a full project about this that's available on Teachers Pay Teachers. I also made a short "preview version" that's available free. It has everything you and your students need to start with simple diagrams or message posters.

Click here to get your copy of the free preview lesson.

The preview has:

• A Teacher Guide that helps you decide what's needed in the project.
• Student directions that you can edit to fit any lesson.
• 8 short video tutorials embedded in the student directions right where they need them.
• Short video tutorials for you too!

If you like the preview, please consider getting the full version available for just $1.50 (for now) on Teachers Pay Teachers.

Improved Google Sites Headings Using Slides

Recently I saw a teacher ask online about better font options in Google Sites. Actually I have always appreciated the limited fonts in sites, so students don't get "lost in fontland" looking for the perfect one among hundreds.

However, if you do want to spice up your headings, the video below shows one way to do it.

The short explanation is:

• Design your headings using simple, attractive features in Google Slides. For example, Word Art, fill colors and drop shadows can really make your headings pop.
• Copy the image from Slides and paste it into your Site. Copying the image from Slides will be different depending on the computer you're using. I put some information below about both those cases.

Snipping an image from the screen using different computers.

• Windows Computer - As shown in my video, I recommend the Snipping Tool program.
• Mac - you can snip part of the screen by holding shift+command and then pressing 4. That will allow you to draw a box around it as I show in the video. It saves automatically to the desktop of your Mac. Since it saves instead of copying, you need to upload it to your Site instead of just pasting it in, just like you would any other image.
• Chromebook - The 6th key from the left in the top row of a Chromebook is needed for this shortcut. It's called the "show all windows" key. So if you press ctrl-shift-"show all windows", it will allow you to capture part of the screen much like what's shown in the video. You'll see a preview of the image appear in the lower right of the screen. Click the option to copy the image. 

Sharing your virtual classrooms with students

A couple months ago posts like this one helped make virtual classrooms all the rage. Teachers in my district discovered these, loved them, but have also asked for ways to share the final result with students. I'll share my suggestions below.

If you're unfamiliar with virtual classrooms, they're basically a slide (Google Slides works great) that lets you direct students to different links. This tutorial is the one that a teacher pointed out to me first and it's very well done. The article I linked to above has more information and several examples too.

So once you've made a virtual classroom, what's the best way to get it to students? Personally I prefer to publish the slide. Here's an example of how that might look. I prefer this to downloading a PDF or linking to the presentation because:

• This will open faster for students using Chromebooks. If you've ever checked a lot of Google Slides presentations on a Chromebook, you know it can be tedious loading each one. Using this method avoids that problem.
• A single published slide will open much more quickly for students and links open in a new tab with just a single click. (PDFs are similar, but the links don't open in a new tab.)
• Once published, you can easily link to the slide from Google Classroom or any other learning management system you use. You also can embed it on your website. 

I made this short video showing how to publish a slide and get the link.

This video shows how to use the embed code to embed it on a Google Site. It's similar for other website creation tools.