Give feedback faster with Quizzes in Google Forms

Google launched Quizzes in Google Forms on Monday to help teachers quickly create, deliver and grade assignments or assessments. With Quizzes, teachers can select correct answers for multiple choice and checkbox questions to reduce repetitive grading. They can also enter explanations and review materials to help students learn. And to make sure students understand the lesson material, teachers can prevent students from sending themselves a copy of their responses. Read the full post.

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Discover Great Typography

Google's font directory places typography front and center, inviting users to explore, sort, and test fonts for use in more than 135 languages. We showcase individual type designers and foundries, giving you valuable information about the people and their processes, as well as analytics on usage and demographics. Our series of thematic collections helps you discover new fonts that have been vetted and organized by our team of designers, engineers, and collaborators, and our default sort organizes fonts based on popularity, trends, and your geographic location. You can also create your own highly customized collections by filtering families, weights, and scripts, plus test color themes, and review sample copy. Collections can be shared, making it easy to collaborate on projects and ensure typography is optimized and streamlined throughout the design and engineering process. These fonts are free.

How to manage your shared Drive folders

This video has some great tips for managing files and folders in Google Drive such as setting expiry dates, searching for files and file control.

Also check out the searchable library for more videos: https://goo.gl/SK6ENo

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Evaluating Project-Based Learning

by Michael Hernandez via Edutopia

Last year I took a group of students to Cuba to produce documentaries about the island nation's culture and history. The main objective was learning how to produce documentaries, but one of my students learned a much more powerful lesson through the process. After completing her project, she posted it publicly to YouTube and received critical comments from someone living in Cuba. The feedback from an audience member in another country profoundly affected her, making her aware of what she was missing in her piece, and the impact that her work can have on others.

No test, grade, or teacher evaluation could have come close to helping her learn that deeply, and it made clear to me how important it is for teachers to reexamine why and how we grade our students if we truly care about their success.

As collaboration and project-based learning become preeminent ways of teaching and learning, many teachers struggle with how to evaluate these types of lessons. Traditional methods of evaluation, which have many flaws on their own, are not well-suited for interdisciplinary, multi-modal learning. Teachers need ideas for encouraging students, providing meaningful feedback, and setting students up for success. Read the rest of the article.

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20 YouTube Channels for Educators

YouTube = Learning at Your Fingertips!

There are so many ways to learn with YouTube channels for teachers and students! When you want to learn something new these days, most of us head over to YouTube. You can learn just about anything on YouTube: how to fix your dryer, how to create a blog, or how to use Google Docs. For students, YouTube is often their first stop when learning a new skill. Did you know you can also get notifications when new videos have been added by your favorite channels? Or that you can use YouTube as a curation tool to create playlists for your students? 

Kasey Bell shares with you some of her favorite YouTube Channels. Just about all of your favorite educational organization and bloggers have a YouTube channel. When you subscribe, you can set up notifications when something new has been posted. This is a great way to stay up-to-date with innovative tools like Google Apps. Below are 20 YouTube Channels to get you started!

Google Forms: Do NOT Duplicate Forms

Alice Keeler gives tips on how to recycle a Google Form for each class & keep data separate.

Extensions vs Web Apps vs Add-ons

The Google ecosystem provides a wide range of powerful programs to help you do pretty much anything you need. This includes browsing the web, typing a document, creating a slideshow, sending email, collecting data, and so much more.

However, even with all the features in their tools, Google knows they can’t do everything. There is probably some task you wish you could do, but can’t.

To help address this, Google allows third parties to create tools to extend the functions and features of Chrome, Docs, Sheet, Forms, and more. Read @ericcurtis post on some helpful tools and apps. 

Taming Twitter for Time-strapped Teachers and Techies

If you are an educator, and you are not using Twitter, you need to be. It is a powerful way to connectwith other educators around the world to share your ideas, learnfrom others, discover resources,build relationships, and be inspired to transform your teaching and your students’ learning.

However, if you are an educator and you are using Twitter, it can still be quite a challenge to use it well. Twitter has over 300 million active users (and many more inactive) sending over 500 million tweets per day (about 6,000 tweets per second). Trying to get useful information from Twitter has often be compared to trying to take a sip of water from a fire hose.

For many years, I found myself in just that situation. I was a Twitter user but didn’t feel like I was making the best use of it. Just like any educator, the one thing I don’t have is spare time. I was miserably failing to keep up with the flood of tweets, or to pull out useful information from it. Watching the Twitter site felt like staring at the computer screen in the Matrix movie, trying to process the constant flow of cryptic symbols. Link to @ericcurtis full article

Bio Digital Human

The BioDigital Human is a virtual 3D body that brings to life thousands of medically accurate anatomy objects and health conditions in an interactive Web-based environment. The interactive 3D map of the human body makes it easy to visualize data, anatomy, disease and treatments in any web or mobile application.