Student Engagement Challenges

Alice Keeler shares 8 suggestions for improving student engagement.  While all of them made sense to me, I think I would select one and focus my energies there first.

Elevating Learning with Tech

Alice Keeler shares several suggestions to raise the learning levels in your classroom.  While some of the tools she mentions are not free (Peergrade)  or not allowed in our district ( Flip-  and we could use Screencastify), I think there are still enough suggestions to consider.

What you can do with your Drive

Alice Keeler shares five ideas for your drive- and I’m thrilled with number five (how many times have I opened a file based on the title only to realize it is not the one I wanted- how a description would have helped).

Making the 4 C’s engaging

Looking for a nice outline of the 4 C’s in education?  Check out Alice Keeler’s article here. I like her use of examples and suggestions

10 tips to engage students

In this blog post, Alice Keeler shares simple suggestions to engage students in your classroom.  By making it relevant, using technology, and offering choice, you can help to deepen student interest.  In a kindergarten class this morning, I gave choice to several different videos- I was teaching skills and it didn’t matter to me which videos they watched.  The students were engaged and on task (and they demonstrated the skills).  And they asked me to come back!

Student-Centered Classroom

In this blog post, Alice Keelers shares 8 suggestions for making your classroom more student-centered.  Now, I’m not suggesting you try all of them at once.  But take a look and see if there is something you might try.  I’m big on her second suggestion but I think I could work on #7 a little more often!

This makes so much sense

In her recent blog post, Alice Keeler talks about decomposing fractions in student work.  How great would it be if students learned the why and not just a rote set of rules (that’s where I am).  What do you think?

The Greedy Pig

When I first read this math post from Alice Keeler, I saw it as a math game (you can probably tell I never taught math and probability was always the last chapter in the book and got very little time!). 

But The Greedy Pig is a chance to put probability into play.  One die is rolled and everyone records it. You continue to add on the next 4 rolls (unless a 1 is rolled- then everyone loses their points). Yet you can elect to stop at any point. 

While Alice offers a Google Slides Add in (something that would be hard to do in school), I think the game works just as well without it.  Be sure to see the link (in the first paragraph) with some suggestions on strategy.

5 Quick ShortCuts

Alice Keeler shared  5 great shortcuts - I really like the Ctrl 1 to move through the tabs.  Please see her post here.

Creating (and Organizing) your Jamboards

 

In her post here, Alice Keeler  walks you the Jamboard creation process.

Making things all caps (or not)

While you may be familiar with some of the formatting options in Google, did you know you can easily change the text to ALL CAPS?  Or all lowercase?  Or Just Capitalize The First Letter Of Each Word?  In her blog post here, Alice Keeler explains it all!

From a Class Roster to Slides

Alice Keeler created a Google sheet Add-On (you need to access it from the template in the post here) that will create a slide deck with a student name followed by a blank slide (a place for them to work and create).

This helped solve one of my student collaboration issues.  I want the class to work together but not on each other’s slides.  So rather than me typing in their names, this Add-On will automatically create the slide deck!  Not only will this work for whole-class activities ( I’m doing one on Wednesday where the students are going to add their images) but think how useful it could be for group projects?

(Follow up note- this did work well for the students- it was a little slow to load. Next time I will have them open first and allow time for instructions. I did have a few students try to edit a classmate's slide. This is a challenge in remote instruction. I don't think I would have had as many issues if I had been able to work around the class!)

PDF my folder

Many of you know that I am not a big printer fan- yet I understand the need for educators to print student work.  If you have several documents in a folder, you can print them one at a time. Of use this script from Alice Keeler (PDFmyfolder) and convert your documents in a PDF that you can print all at once.  Please see her blog post here for step by step directions.

Alice Keeler and Halloween!

Make a copy of Alice’s spreadsheet and create away!  The above is a pumpkin I made- just think how your students might show their creativity! After all, who doesn't like a little pixel art! You can even create your own challenges. Please click here for Alice Keeler’s blog post (includes the spreadsheet and suggestions).

Pull a paragraph

What if you could….

- Have your students turn in a paragraph on a doc in Google Classroom,
- Pull each paragraph into a spreadsheet (so you didn’t have to open each document, just one spreadsheet),
- Provide individual feedback to each student,
- Push the feedback to the top of each student’s document.

And all this from one spreadsheet?  Think about exit tickets, quick formative assessments- the options are endless.

Well, you can- just use the coding Alice Keeler has shared.  Here’s the link to her blog post (and it would like, I would be glad to help).