Google Goodies
Google Goodies
Google has added a new feature to Google Classroom to allow teachers to turn any YouTube video into an interactive lesson by adding questions for students to answer throughout the video. It works similarly to paid products like EdPuzzle.
The interactive questions feature turns a passive watching experience into an engaging one, and improves students’ understanding of a subject by providing them with the space to make mistakes, review incorrect answers and assess correct answers at their own pace.
Once students within a class have completed the video activity, teachers will have access to a dashboard of key insights based on student engagement levels.
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HELP: Learn about interactive questions for YouTube videos in Google Classroom
- classroom
- youtube
With ChromeOS v103, Google has added a new app to Chromebooks called Screencast. If you are unfamiliar with this concept, screencasting is the ability to capture, store, and share video of your device's screen - with audio or webcam footage if desired - to share with others. It's a fantastic tool for education, as an educator can record a short video demonstrating a concept or lesson to share with students. This can be done as a way to frontload students with content prior to a lesson, or something they can revisit after the lesson to reinforce the learning. And once a screencast has been created, it can be used over and over - you don't have to recreate it every year.
P.S. Google's Screencast app also provided built-in transcription and translation!
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VIDEO: When you have an idea to share, Screencast it
HELP: Use Screencast to record and share on your Chrome OS devices
- chromebook
- screencast
ChromeOS v96 is rolling out to employee Chromebooks right now. This update includes a handy new feature that lets you scan a document to a PDF by using your webcam. This could be a simple way of making a PDF of a paper document so you can share it with students through Classroom or simply display it on your classroom projector/flat panel.
After your Chromebook has updated, simply launch the Camera app and then choose the Scan option. For best results, I recommend using some kind of backing with the document (like a clipboard) when scanning.
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With this Google Goodie I wanted to shine a light on a cool new feature within Google Classroom - Originality Reports. Similar to third-party paid tools like Turnitin, Originality Reports allows teachers to easily identify text in submitted student work that may be "borrowed," poorly paraphrased, or not properly cited. Submissions are compared to content in public sources on the Internet, as well as work submitted by other Romoland School District students.
Besides being built into Google Classroom (and therefore free), one of the cool things about this feature is that it allows students three opportunities to run originality reports on their assignment before turning it in, enabling them to turn in their best work instead of not knowing about the mistake until after the assignment has been graded.
If you are taking advantage of Google Classroom to assign writing assignments to students and allowing them to submit them digitally, simple check the "Originality Reports" checkbox when creating your Google Doc assignment. Grading writing assignments can be time consuming, so hopefully between this new feature and the improvements that Google has made to streamline assignment feedback in Classroom (such as rubrics and comment banks) you will find that handling writing assignments digitally can be a huge time saver over paper!
Please note that our Google licensing enables our teachers to have access to unlimited originality reports per class so you don't have to be selective about which writing assignments can utilize this feature.
Classes that teachers create in Google Classroom are typically only intended to be used for a single school year. Google for Education has produced a short video that explains for teachers what tasks they should perform at the end of the school year in order to properly close out old classes to make way for new classes next year.
Google Classroom - What should I do at the end of the school year? (video, 4:43 min)
For more helpful videos from the Google Classroom Video Series, click here to view the entire list.