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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 gold.


Do you have your students make collaborative slide decks? Do you hate the way they all look different? Introducing PLACEHOLDERS. Now you can provide the kids a template that they can easily, for example, drop an image into. This gives your kids structure and makes the final product look much neater. First go to View>> Theme Builder



Then go Insert>> Placeholder and choose one.



Now the students can just click the placeholder and choose the source of the image. Formatting intact.


Don’t have time to finish filling out a form? Google Forms now saves your progress for up to 30 days as long as you are logged into your account while filling out the form.




This Week’s Apps and Resources


This is a fun periodic table and can be used by students of all ages:

https://elements.wlonk.com/ElementsTable.htm?ck_subscriber_id=1305623047


Articles

Something we probably all already know, but new research with a COVID twist.

Why students learn better when they move their bodies – instead of sitting still at their desks


Announcements


Flippity is broken. Oh no! Something about Google Sheet security updates not allowing Flippity access to the lists it needs to generate the different name selectors. They have some non-spreadsheet tools on their very simple website. You can just paste a list and get an instant word-search, game of hangman (called snowman, cause you know, hanging is pretty violent, but then I think I'd rather hang than melt) anyway, Flippity is broken, but it can still do some cool useful stuff if you have lists ready to drop in. And, it’s very very speedy!



Do you ever want to talk about topics and ideas in education with your fellow teachers? Please consider contributing to the Google Group GSIS 2020 to discuss education and goings on at GSIS. Share your opinion on one of the existing threads, or better yet, start one of your own. 



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