With the start of a new school year, there are a TON of new updates coming to Google Workspace. If you have a chance, I encourage you to check out of the Google Workspace Updates blog for all sorts of updates that could benefit you in the classroom this year.

One update that I am personally excited about is image placeholders in Google Slides. In this update, users can create placeholders that allow pictures to be easily added to the presentation while maintaining the size of the placeholder. As an A-type personality, I love this ability to add some organization to shared slides with students!

Below, I will share a YouTube video and GIF of how to use this new feature:

Using Image Placeholders Step-by-Step

Step #1: Setting it Up

• Create a Presentation.
• Go to “Slide”.
• Select “Slide Theme”.
  • Note: This section used to be titled “Edit Master” but has recently been updated to “Slide Theme”.

Step #2: Selecting the Placeholder

• Select a Slide Layout.
• Go to “Insert”.
• Select “Placeholder” then “Image Placeholder”.

Step #3: Edit, as Needed

• Add more placeholders and/or edit the current one.

Step #4: Add Slide & Image

• Go to the Main Presentation.
• Select the Slide Layout.
• Add Images.

If you would like to hear me walk you through this process, step-by-step, please watch the YouTube video below:

As always, feel free to drop any questions, comments, or thoughts in the comment section below!

As our school site continues on our journey of evaluating our grading practices (see my previous blog post for more details), I am excited to share more interactive resources that can be used for professional development at your site! In the previous blog post, I shared an activity that challenged teachers to evaluate their grading practices through a self-assessment. Now that teachers have gone through this process, it is important to begin the hard work of trying to brainstorm and establish common goals. To start this process, our school site leadership team met and determined three areas of importance when establishing common grading practices:

• Grading Scale
  • Example: 0-100, A-F, 4 Point Scale, Etc.
• Late Work
  • Example: Is late work allowed? What’s your policy?
• Categories & Weights
  • Example: What is more important – the task or learning? Do you weight your grades?

As a school site, our goal is to try to create common goals for grading practices across our PLC’s and, in some areas, on a schoolwide level. We are trying to start small by focusing on these three areas and PLC’s and, hopefully, growing them over time. As an example, starting with PLC’s or departments is already a huge task. Trying to establish all of these goals on a sitewide level could be a much larger task that may take some time. Overall, our goal is to allow our leadership team to help guide the focus of these conversations and where they hope that we should go as we deep dive into our grading practices.

To help us understand our common goals across PLC’s, we developed two activities that I will share below. As mentioned above, we are starting in PLC’s and that is how I will reference our process. However, you could certainly replace PLC’s with department, grade level, or even schoolwide. It is totally up to you and your site to decide what is best!

1.) Brainstorming Common Goals

In this activity, PLC’s will meet together to simply start brainstorming and thinking about these three categories and where they hope to go in the future. Think of it like a brain dump. There is no need to have all your questions answered or decisions made. Simply take the time to have a discussion with your PLC and record your thoughts. After the PLC’s record their thoughts and ideas, challenge them to view the other slides (based on subject area) to view other ideas and/or add comments and questions.

We have already completed this activity with our PLC’s and I absolutely loved the conversations that we observed and the ideas that were recorded. I was so impressed with the time and deep-dive our teachers took into evaluating their grading practices and attempting to start the process of establishing common goals.

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2.) Establishing Common Goals

After PLC’s have had the opportunity to brainstorm, challenge them to begin the hard work of narrowing their focus and establishing common goals. This is the real meat and potatoes of creating cohesive grading process across PLC’s (or departments, grade level, etc).

In this activity, you will once again see our three focus areas. Each slide represents one focus area and asks several questions to help PLC’s narrow down their common goals for their grading practices. By the end of this activity, the goal is for PLC’s to have a strong idea of what their PLC-wide focus will be for grading.

If you choose to make a copy of this activity and want to include all of your PLC’s, simply make a copy of the three slides multiple times and assign certain slides to certain PLC’s.

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I am going to be 100% transparent that this is a huge undertaking for our school site and the end goals are still being determined as we go through this process. Hopefully, if you find yourself in similar conversations at your school site, these activities can help frame and guide your conversations.

As always, drop any comments and/or questions below!

Our site has recently begun the journey of evaluating our grading practices through a deep dive into the book, “Grading for Equity“, by Joe Feldman. It’s a hard conversation to have for any teacher because it is personal and our brains have been so ingrained in the current grading practices that are in place. However, it is an incredibly important conversation to have to understand if our grading practices are truly equitable across all students.

When we discuss these grading practices, it is more than simply evaluating the current 0-100 scale that tends to dominate education. It goes much deeper than this. It also includes conversations such as late work policies, hard vs soft skills, assessment practices, and more. All of these pieces of our grading practices can influence students and their grades. Do our current grading practices represent the type of education we are giving our students today? Or do they more closely model a world of the past? Honestly, I am still exploring my own beliefs for the most equitable grading practices. There is a lot of hard work, conversations, and reflections that will be coming over the next several months. During this time, I hope to create some interactive and engaging professional development activities that you could also share with your teachers, departments or sites.

In this first activity, I created a simple, short, and interactive PearDeck presentation that challenges teachers to evaluate their grading practices to determine if it is truly equitable. I can take little to no credit for the content in this, since the majority of it came from Joe Feldman’s Quiz on his Grading for Equity website. However, I took this quiz and put it into a presentation that would allow school sites to have interactive conversations as they go through it. Here are a couple ideas on how to use this activity with your staff or team:

• Individually Paced – Set up the PearDeck for teachers to complete on their own and at their own pace during a staff meeting. Review the answers at the end, then break into groups to discuss these answers.
• Whole Group Paced – Set up the PearDeck for teachers to complete as a group. Display the responses to the whole group to see if the site is aligned or not. Review the answers, one by one, discuss during the presentation. If time allows, break into groups at the end for further discussion.

Personally, my favorite is the whole group option, although that was rarely my teaching style in the classroom. However, it is truly powerful to go through these questions as a whole site and compare where everyone is at and to see whether or not the school was aligned. You may find that, on certain questions, nearly all your teachers completely agree with one another. On the other hand, there may be questions where they are more split – which is where the true work begins!

If you are interested in using this activity with your site, all you need to do is:

1. Make your own copy.
2. Install the PearDeck add-on.
3. Present with PearDeck!

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Important Note: To view the answers choices to the quiz, you must present through PearDeck.  You can also view them in the speaker notes at the bottom.

Has your school taken a deep dive into its grading practices? If so, share in the comments below!

Hello EDU Friends! I hope you are surviving this crazy world that we are living in right now. Whether you are in distance learning, hybrid, or fully back in the classroom, I hope you and yours are safe, healthy, and happy.

Today, I will be sharing a simple, easy, and interactive presentation that can be given during professional development. The district in which I work is huge with the 4 C’s which, eventually, morphed into a personal passion through my Google Innovator project. I truly believe the 4 C’s in an excellent way to evaluate the depth of teacher lessons and improve these lessons for the future.

Recently, I delivered some PD to our new teachers breaking down the 4 C’s into a simple, short presentation. The 4 C’s can be a really deep and complex concept, so I tried to break it down to its simplest form, while also providing more depth for the future. In this presentation, you will find that it is broken into three parts:

1. What are the 4 C’s?
   • In this section, teachers are introduced to the lowest level and highest level of the 4 C’s, as well as provided rubrics for breaking down each C.
2. How Can I Assess the 4 C’s in my Lessons?
   • In this section, teachers are challenged to evaluate the current depth of 4 C’s in their own lessons and find next steps for improving their lessons.
3. Resources for Lesson Design
   • In the last section, teachers are provided links to lesson design ideas, websites, and resources.

Below, you will find a preview of the presentation, the view access, and a link to make your own copy:

(View) (Make Your Own Copy!)

I hope you find this presentation beneficial and feel free to drop any comments, ideas, or suggestions below!

When I first began working at my school site, our students were given a year-long, physical agenda to track their daily assignments.  As a school policy, our students were required to fill this out and teachers would sign/stamp that students had filled out the daily agenda at the beginning of class.  It was a great system for students and taught them how to be organized.  Over the last two years, we have not purchased these agendas since we now have technology that can replace what we were doing for no cost, such as Google Calendar or Google Keep.  However, I have noticed that using Google Calendar is not exactly what the teachers are looking to use in their classrooms and/or they are not comfortable using it themselves.  Although I am a big Google Calendar user and have had success with my students, I can see their concern.  The calendar isn’t broken up by subject type and all of the information a student writes does not show up on the calendar view.  For my students, they are used to navigating Google Calendar but I decided to create something that more teachers would want to use with their students.

So…Over the last couple of months, I have been brainstorming ways to help keep my students organized during the school year and while working on projects, as well as creating something that is user-friendly to the student and teacher.

Here is what I created:

2017/2018 Weekly Academic Calendar (Link)

• Students can use this Slide Deck to track assignments, plan for projects, and more!
• Students can quickly navigate by clicking on the months at the beginning of the Slide Deck or in the “Timeline” at the bottom of each slide.
• Students/Teachers can delete any unused months from the template.

2017/2018 Monthly Academic Calendar (Link)

• Students can use this Slide Deck to track assignments, plan for projects, and more!
• Students can quickly navigate by clicking on the months at the beginning of the Slide Deck or in the “Timeline” at the bottom of each slide.
• Students/Teachers can delete any unused months from the template.

The calendars above were primarily created to help students track assignments.  Once I started building those calendars, I started thinking about how I could create something for the 20Time Projects that my students would be doing in my AVID and Tech classes next year.  Immediately, I realized I had already created something useful while working on my Google Innovator Project.  For my project, I created a monthly planning process with new goals, ongoing goals, questions/comments/ideas, and status check.

Below are some “project planning” Slide Decks:

Weekly Project Planning Goals (Link)

• Students can use this Slide Deck when planning weekly goals for 20 Time Projects, Genius Hour, and PBL.
• Students can duplicate the following slide for the number of weeks of the project.
• When students complete tasks on the “New” and “Ongoing Goals”, students can right click and change to check marks.

Monthly Project Planning Goals (Link)

• Students can use this Slide Deck when planning weekly goals for 20 Time Projects, Genius Hour, and PBL.
• Students can duplicate the following slide for the number of weeks of the project.
• When students complete tasks on the “New” and “Ongoing Goals”, students can right click and change to check marks.

Feel free to use these with your class.  If you do, I would love your feedback and any ideas that you have to improve these resources!

Let’s Get Them Exploring

One of my goals this year was to create more activities for students to explore upcoming content.  I want the students to interact with the material, think about it, and explore the content before they are taught those concepts.  As I have mentioned in previous posts, I truly believe that there is a balance that must occur in math education.  It is the balance between exploring, direct teaching, skills practice, application of concepts and project-based learning.  For myself, I felt that one of my greater areas of focus this year needed to be on creating activities for students to interact with the material in a way that would pique their interest.  How could I create activities to help them explore?  How could I help them visualize these concepts?

Last week, my students were introduced to surface area, which tends to be one of the more difficult sections of Geometry.  It is very difficult for students to visualize the surface area of figures such as rectangular prisms, triangular prisms, and pyramids.  If they can’t visualize these shapes and their nets, then it becomes even more difficult for them to calculate the areas of the faces and find the total surface area.  In the past, I have had students create the nets of the shapes by drawing it on paper but, even though that was a visual exercise, the students still struggled with drawing these images.  More importantly, it took a lot of class time for students to draw them, cut them out, and then glue/tape them together.  The amount of time spent on the activity was not producing the learning outcomes that the students needed before diving deeper into the content.

This year, I decided to create an activity on Google Slides to help the students explore surface area.  I wanted them to go through the process of calculating surface area without even realizing that the have never been taught this concept.  So, I came up with three steps that I wanted them to complete through Google Slides to explore surface area.

Exploring Surface Area: A Google Slides Activity

Step #1: Create the nets of rectangular prisms, triangular prisms, and pyramids.

The students were provided with the net that is shown below.  Their goal was to drag and drop the shapes and measurements to create the net of the rectangular prism.

Once they were done, they should have a shape similar to the one shown below.  It’s important to note that the net shown below is not the only way to create the net – there are so many different ways to create nets for the rectangular prism.  So, if your student’s nets do not look exactly like your net, it doesn’t mean it is wrong.

I was really impressed with how well the students did with this activity.  Of course, there were some students who picked it up quickly and others who did not but, overall, they seemed to get a good grasp of creating nets.  By providing the shapes, it helped them to not get stuck on drawing, cutting, or gluing.  Instead, they were focusing only on creating the net.

Step #2: Calculate the area for each shape on the net.

Once the students created the nets, they were able to see that there were six rectangles that formed the rectangular prism.  From there, the students used the area formula to calculate the area of each rectangle.

By this time, the students had already been introduced to area so they were able to quickly calculate the areas of each rectangle.  One of the best learning moments on this slide is when students realize that each area is repeated.  For instance, the students were able to discover that if the front was 24in², then the back would also be 24in².  This led into a great conversation when the students were introduced to the surface area formula.

Step #3: Calculate the total surface area.

Finally, students calculated the total surface area by finding the sum of the areas of the six faces.  At this point, many of the students were realizing that surface area was just an extension of area – a concept in which they felt very confident.

To access this activity, click HERE and create your own copy.

Final Thoughts

After this activity was completed, my students still completed notes (through flipped instruction), completed some skill practice, and participated in some application based problems.  (Again, it’s all about balancing!)  However,  I feel like this group of students had a stronger understanding of surface area than previous groups by participating in this activity.  They were able to explore the concepts before they were taught which created a great interest and understanding of the material.

As always, no activity is ever perfect.  So – issues?  Time was an issue again.  The students all completed the rectangular prism and square prism but many students did not have a chance to complete the last two shapes.  Although I wish they had the opportunity, I would rather have them get a strong understanding of the first two, then a decent understanding of all four.  Another issue is our trackpads.  Our lease is up for our current set of Chromebooks and we are about to send them back to get the next set.  This is great because the Chromebooks are starting to get older, the screws keep falling out, and the trackpads are starting to not work.  Don’t get me wrong – I would rather of this technology than nothing at all.  However, it is a reality that some students had issues dragging and dropping the shapes due to the trackpads not working.  Although I keep encouraging them to purchase a mouse, that is not always feasible for every student.

As I’ve mentioned before, feel free to use this activity in your classroom and post comments below.  I love any feedback to improve these activities for future students!

The Follow Up:

A couple of weeks ago, I shared an Area of Shapes Scavenger Hunt that I created for my students to use during our upcoming Geometry Unit.  (To read more about this activity, view my “Area of Shapes Scavenger Hunt via Google Slides” post.  As always, I find it is important to reflect on what worked, what didn’t work, and what I would do in the future.

Originally, my intention was for my students to complete this activity over a two day period in our math class.  However, I was unexpectedly out of the classroom and had to modify my plans.  My modification was that this activity would become an “enrichment activity” for my students who had completed their assignments while I worked with my “intervention” group in small group tutorials.  Although it was not my original intention, I found that this worked really well as an enrichment activity.

Student Samples:

Five Takeaways:

So, here are my five takeaways from this activity:

1.) Students needed the two days that I originally planned on giving them.

Even as an enrichment activity, one day was not enough for students to finish this activity.  Finding the shapes and uploading them into the Google Slide took some time, so it would have been beneficial to have more time to complete this activity in class.

2.) Students need time to reflect on their learning.

Next year, I want to add a reflection piece to the Google Slide to challenge students to reflect on what they learned from this activity and how calculating the area of shapes in the “real world” would be important.  At the moment, I am imagining a slide at the end of the Slide Deck that has questions and/or a text box for a written reflection.  Nothing to complicated – but something that does require them to reflect on what they have learned from this activity.

3.) Student wanted to go outside the classroom and explore the shapes on campus.

Since I had students in tutorial groups, we were limited to exploring the shapes on campus.  Mostly, the students found shapes in our classroom and right outside the door of our classroom.  It worked but the students really wanted to go outside and find other shapes.  This would be one of those amazing activities to get students out of our “four walls” and into the world.

4.) Trapezoids are difficult to find in the “real world”.

So…Trapezoids are really difficult to find on campus.  Next time, I need to spend some time looking for trapezoids on our campus to give the students some clues.  Since we couldn’t seem to find a lot of trapezoids in our classroom, some of the students reverted to creating their own trapezoids, finding them online, or in a textbook.

5.) I should have bought more measuring tapes from the Dollar Tree.

At one point, I had about 12+ measuring tapes that I had bought from the Dollar Tree but I think the wear and tear of student use has brought my count down to 5-6 measuring tapes.  Students were able to use rulers to measure the shapes but it became difficult when some of the shapes were over 1 foot.  There are so many measuring tapes at the Dollar Tree for (duh) $1, so I need to purchase more in advance for the next time we do this activity.

Overall, I felt like this activity has a lot of potential, even though I did not feel like I had the time to allow all my students to participate in the scavenger hunt.  However, it did prove to be a great “beta” test with my student that challenged them to think about Geometry that is in the “real world” rather than just on their Chromebook or in a textbook.

Each week, myself and my fellow TTL (Team Technology Leader) send out an EdTech Tip to our staff members to assist with technology integration.  In this EdTech Tip, I was excited to share some amazing (but somewhat hidden) tips and tricks that are a part of Google Slides.

As you have probably realized from my posts, I am a HUGE fan of just about anything Google related.  For myself, I tend to use all the Google Apps on a regular basis but Google Slides and Google Forms are most likely the ones that I use every day.  Both of these apps support the environment that I create in my classroom, so I love when I find new tricks that I can use to support my students and to streamline the creation of lessons, activities, and projects.  Plus, some of these tricks are just too cool.

In the following presentation/video, I will cover how to:

1. Insert images into Google Slides without leaving your current tab.
2. Mask and modify images into specific and unique shapes from those images.
3. Link to slides within your slide (a little bit Inception-y, right?).
4. Edit the master slide (template) to change colors, fonts, etc.
5. Set up autoplay and trim YouTube videos from within Google Slides.

I have shared both the YouTube video and Google Slide presentation.  Just as our students learn differently, so do we!  If you are visual/auditory learner, I highly suggest that you check out the YouTube video.

If you do not have the patience for the entire video, feel free to check out the presentation below.  It contains the directions + gifs on how to use the tips and tricks.

Enjoy!