November – Remembrance Day

Wow – how quickly the year is passing!  Already into November!

Through searching the we since my last blog entry, as usual, I’ve come across some links that you might find helpful as you are working your way through the school year.

For those of you who might be using or considering the use of the Chromebook (CB’s), here is a link to get the discussions going – http://technobiologi.st/articles/2013/reading-into-the-value-and-limitations-of-chromebooks/.  In Palliser, we have various school sites using the CB’s and from all accounts, teachers AND students love them.  In one school, the entire junior high has gone one-to-one with the CB’s.  Just the other day, I worked my way around to the different classrooms and in each, the students had the CB’s open and working on them.  Most of the activity was collaborative based – which is the direction we want to be going in light of the 21st century classroom!

If you get a chance, check out Kathy Schrock’s site (Kathy Schrock’s Guide to Everything) – http://www.schrockguide.net/.  Kathy has done a great job of providing information for a wide range of classroom activities using technology.  This is from the start up page for her site:

“As an educational technologist, I keep learning each day.
As I develop new presentations or interests, I create a page of support resources and this site will serve as the entry point to these links, ideas, tips, and tricks!”

I follow Richard Byrne (Free Tech for Teachers – http://freetech4teachers.com/) on twitter and from his site, I found the following links for Google Apps related topics:

• How to Automatically Close Google Forms at Specific Times – Richard indicates that through the use of a script ‘FormLimiter’, one can limit the number of responses to a form, the number of characters in a response and set a time for the form to automatically stop accepting responses.  For those of you who are users of Forms (and if you haven’t checked these out – YOU SHOULD!!), this script could prove very useful.

(On a side note – on December 21st at the University of Alberta, there is a FREE full day workshop with a focus on Google Scripts.  The time of year isn’t great but I’m going.  I’ve always wanted to get into and explore this area because it would create even more functionality within the GAFE environment.)

•  How to Insert Images into Google Forms
• How to Insert Videos into a Google Form – as one would expect, Google keeps evolving and in doing so, we benefit from this.  It’s just a matter of trying to keep up with the changes!
• A Short Guide to Creating and Grading Quizzes Through Google Forms
• Google Tutorials
• Google Sites

Tomorrow is Remembrance Day – don’t let us forget the sacrifices that were made for us!!!