Skip to main content

Weekly Tech Tips 25 October 2020

 Dear Friends,


Thank you to those who have filled out the Google for Education Training form. I got your replies and I am working on a plan. We have about 6 folks interested in a Level 1 Certification and 1 in a Level 2 so far. Most are interested in an after work training session. I will take this all into consideration and get back to you soon. If you would like to express interest the form is still here

https://forms.gle/9Earqqf8nj3EUvkp8

Sorry for not sending an edition out last week. I think we all had a lot on our minds and plates last week. Now that that is finally over and our students are all back with us [YAY!!!🎉🎉🎉] and we can get back to some kind of normal teaching, I hope that tech still plays a role in your more normal classroom. I have felt so great about teaching my 8th graders about spreadsheets during our statistics unit in math. While I cannot honestly say that they will ever have to use mid interval class values to estimate the mean of a sample, I am almost certain they will use a spreadsheet regardless of what they do in life. 


I may have been a bit overzealous when I started this newsletter. I will try to keep the tips down to just a few relevant ones each week instead of blasting away with everything I heard about during the previous week. It’s grading time, I’ve been having a blast teaching my kids about spreadsheets, and Google Sheets has an almost magical new feature; so let’s look at spreadsheets this week.


Weekly Tech Tips


I think most people know that spreadsheets will fill in a series of numbers or dates once there are enough for the app to detect a pattern. This is a huge time saver. Google’s new Smart Fill is next level AI spooky. It can actually go and look up information for you like zip codes and automatically fill in a whole column for you.

This gif is from Review Geek. Their article tells us that we can expect this feature the week after next. I for one cannot wait to try it.


I am not sure how everyone else computes their grades, but I use a spreadsheet. I do not want to rely on having my data locked in a proprietary format that I cannot have absolute control over. Here are a few Google Sheet gradebooks for you to try if you want:


A general gradebook template from Google


A gradebook I modified from one Mr Chun gave me a few years ago. It does IB lookups and comments. It is a bit complicated and would need modifying for your group, grade boundaries, etc…, but if you know what you are doing it could provide some useful parts and formulae. 


A very sophisticated gradebook that Olivia Chan made that can calculate incomplete grades. This gradebook has a sheet for each student. It is for DP.


Other Educational Templates from Google


Expect big changes from Google in the coming weeks and months. A new design has been rolling out called Workspace that will replace G Suite. You may have already noticed the new colorful icons in your tabs.

The idea here is integration. You may have already noticed this too. Meets is now in Gmail and Calendar. This trend will continue. We are also supposed to see Hangouts be replaced by Chats pretty soon. That’s a bit of a shame because many of us use that pretty regularly. Hopefully the transitions will be seamless and painless. I will do my best to help you navigate these changes as they arrive. As much as I love Google, they really are terrible about rolling out new products and killing old ones that everyone seems to love. This should be interesting.


No new apps or tutorials. I do have an inspirationally subversive quote for you though.


“The serious threat to our democracy is not the existence of foreign totalitarian states. It is the existence within our own personal attitudes and within our own institutions of conditions which have given a victory to external authority, discipline, uniformity and dependence upon The Leader in foreign countries. The battlefield is also accordingly here – within ourselves and our institutions”

John Dewey

Freedom and Culture


Have a great week and enjoy having your students back.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Weekly Tech Tips 29 August 2021

  Dear Friends, Welcome to this week’s installment of... Weekly Tech Tips This week is all about speed. See below how you can take a flat file MC quiz and pretty quickly turn it into a  Quizziz. Quizziz is also adding adaptive practice which is nice. Notice how you can copy over ALL the MC options then drag down one at a time to populate the choices instead of copying each one over. I was able to make this 13 question MC quiz from an IB database in about 10 minutes.  So now when I give this quiz tomorrow I don’t have to worry about making copies or if the printer works or forgetting about it because I already scheduled it for exactly 10 minutes after class starts. And my favorite part is that when the student are done I get a fantastic report like this: that tells me not only who missed what, but provides some basic item analysis. I also like the fact that the question pops up in the report so I don't have to note the question and go back to the quiz to find it. Solid...
Post a Comment
Read more

Weekly Tech Tips 9 May 2021

Dear Friends, Man how time flies when you have 1001 things to do!  Weekly Shortcuts  You have to know that if you ever accidentally close one or more tabs in Chrome that you can get them back with CMD + SHIFT + T. You can do this multiple times to get back tabs you may have closed earlier and need back. If you need to go farther back, go over to your history under the “snowman” (three vertical dots in the upper right corner of your browser). Weekly Tech Tips I keep the focus on spreadsheets again this week. I mentioned last week that it's spreadsheet time of year and I think that is the case whenever it's time to log scores and calculate final grades. I don't know of any of my colleagues who use Schoology or PowerSchool to actually calculate grades. I'm not sure how the elementary teachers keep up with it, but as far as I know everyone in secondary has some version of their own spreadsheet to manage all the calculations required by the IB (Intentionally Byzantine?)...
Post a Comment
Read more

Weekly Tech Tips 7 March 2021

  Dear Friends, I hope you are happy. Weekly Shortcut Ever need a scratch pad to work out a calculation or idea on? Especially during grading season I always find that a scratch spreadsheet comes in handy if I am looking at grades and different ways to calculate them. A scratch spreadsheet is always up when I am doing grades. It lets me quickly and accurately copy my grades over from my gradebook and run any calculations or stats I want without fear of messing up my actual gradebook. Instead of going into the matrix (the nine dots in the upper right-hand corner of most Google App windows) or going into Drive and clicking the rainbow plus New button, you can just open a new browser window and type:  sheet.new. You can create a new blank doc with doc.new and yes a new blank slide presentation with slide.new These are by default stored in the upper level of My Drive. If you do this enough you might like to save another step and just make new sheets and docs a part of your New T...
Post a Comment
Read more