Teach with Movies

Lesson Plans and Learning Guides based on more than 425 feature films. 

The Library of Congress Is Uploading 75 Years of Poetry and Literature Recordings

Yesterday selections from the Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature at the Library of Congress became available to stream online for the first time — the launch of a project digitizing some of their 2,000 recordings from the past 75 years of literature.

4 Ways to add Clipart to Google Docs

Eric Curtis shares options that are great for students creating stories, reports, projects, posters, and more, as well as teachers making instructional material, hyperdocs, templates, and such. In addition, all of these options allow you to respect copyrights and teach students about the proper use of media.

Let Your (Google) Voice Be Heard . . .and Translated

Post and short video about how to use both voice typing and translate in Google Docs

5 Fantastic Fluency Tools for Speaking World Languages

One of the great powers of technology is breaking down the barriers between people regardless of language or distance. One way to help achieve this is by using technology tools to develop, practice, and improve our students' spoken fluency in a world language.

See the rest of the post to learn about five fantastic Google tools, features, and extensions to help with improving your students' world language fluency.

Science Journal - a new app

Science Journal - a new app that is a digital science notebook that allows students to record data from sensors on an Android phone or connected device, take notes, observer, interpret, predict, create graphs and much more.

Addressing student cheating in Google Apps

Modern technology provides schools with amazing options for the "4 C's" - Creativity, Communication, Collaboration, and Critical thinking.

Unfortunately it also provides new opportunities for a fifth "C" - Cheating.

21st century technology gives students new ways to plagiarize or share work. As more and more schools embrace technology, Google Apps, Chromebooks, and more, what are we to do to address the issues of academic integrity?

Eric Curtis recently recorded a one-hour webinar on this topic. In the video training we take a look at cheating as well as possible options to help address the issue. These include non-technology options, as well as technology tools and resources that can help prevent or investigate cheating.

22 Powerful Closure Ideas

What Is Closure?

Closure is the activity that ends a lesson and creates a lasting impression.

Teachers use closure to:

• Check for understanding and inform subsequent instruction
• Emphasize key information
• Tie up loose ends
• Correct misunderstandings

Students find closure helpful for:

• Summarizing, reviewing, and demonstrating their understanding of major points
• Consolidating and internalizing key information
• Linking lesson ideas to a conceptual framework and/or previously-learned knowledge
• Transferring ideas to new situations

Like contracting your bicep at the top of a dumbbell curl, closure squeezes an extra oomph into a lesson. See my favorite closure strategies below!

Creative Closure Activities

20 Instant Google Searches your Students Need to Know

Google strives to make their search as useful as possible, bringing back the most

appropriate results for the terms you entered. Sometimes though Google goes above and beyond the normal list of search results by providing instant search cards at the top of the page.

These cards contain the information you searched for, but often also include interactive controls to let you dig deeper, branch off, or experience the information in a more engaging manner. As students learn to become better at searching and researching, many of the instant search cards can be useful to them in a variety of their school subjects.

Eric Curtis shares 20 examples of instant searches students can do, the interactive results they get, and ideas for how these could be used to improve learning in school.

The Question Matrix

Deeper questioning – asked correctly from the outset – anticipates a deeper response from students. When lesson planning, is it useful to pre-plan your key questions for the class/students by keeping in mind lesson objectives and success criteria. Every teacher should ask themselves, do we want students to develop critical thinking skills or to deepen their subject knowledge? More on the Te@cher Toolkit

.

GOOGLE CLASSROOM: Scheduling Posts

This new Google Classroom feature makes it incredibly easy to stay organized and plan ahead in your lessons. Previously, teachers were required to manually go into Classroom and ‘release’ work to each class at the exact time that they wanted students to access them. The new scheduled post feature eliminates the need for that! Teachers can choose a date from a drop down menu and then type in a specific time for release on any assignment, announcement, or question. 

NEW Google Image Search Save

From the Daring Librarian:

Google has quietly unveiled a super handy new way to search...and Save Google Images!

Balloon Debate

“You are in a hot air balloon that is losing height rapidly. It will soon crash into the side of a mountain because it is overweight. To prevent the certain death of everybody on board, only one person will be allowed to stay in the balloon!” 

Balloon debates are a great way of promoting research and presentational skills, and invariably make for a very lively lesson! This site has a template and teacher information for the activity.

Talk with your audience — not at them — with Slides Q&A

Read the full blog post

Giving thanks (and time back) to teachers with new updates to Google Classroom

Starting today, teachers can plan ahead by scheduling announcements, assignments and questions to post at a later date or a specific time (great for the early birds who want to get a head start on school planning during the summer ;). Just look for the scheduling option when posting new assignments, questions and announcements. You can find scheduled and draft posts in the “Saved posts” section of your class stream, and you’ll get email and mobile notifications when your scheduled posts go live.

See the full post

Formative Assessment with Google Tools

This  video had some really good ways to use Docs, Forms, and Slides for formative assessment.

Historical Selfies

@willkimbley shared a Google Drawing Instagram template for students to create Historical Selfies. Make a copy or it can be posted in Google Classroom.

Google Drive: Moving one file to multiple folders

You may have noticed that Google Drive has changed the way you file items.

Clicking the little folder in a Doc lets you file the doc. But you can no longer add it to multiple folders. Instead, you open Drive, click once on a file and then Shift-Z on it. This pops open an small window. Choose the next folder you want to put the document in and click Add.

A full set of directions is here.