Did You Miss Google On Air: It Takes a Teacher?

Held on December 3, 2016

You can still experience and attend great global professional development sessions online and on demand. Scroll down on the Google On Air website to see which breakout sessions are available for viewing.

Link to Google On Air Presentations

   

Look For the Access Materials and Watch Recording Links

BrainPop Jr. Make-A-Map

After watching the Brainpopjr video about the states of matter, students loved creating mind maps. The website gives them templates to choose from, or they can create their own. They brainstormed using the keywords on the side as well as the pictures. Some students dragged pictures and even parts of the video into their diagram.

Google Slides for Drawing Dichotomous Keys

Google Slides can be used for other purposes than a presentation because of all its Draw features, as well as creating custom sizes and the ability to use animations. In this Dichotomous Key lesson students were engaged and excited to create their own dichotomous keys, more so than previous years when they used pencil and a paper template.

The important change was that each student could customize how they wanted to present their information with text, words, photos, and colors.

 

Creating Revolutionary Timelines with Google Draw

Using Google Classroom to assign and "make a copy," students were asked to create their own timeline using dates and events preloaded into their draw document. The focus of the lesson was thoughtful creation of a timeline--not whether they could type the required dates into the document.

Given the freedom to choose colors, orientation, and images, finished timelines showed a wide variety of styles and focus. Students were able to articulate and explain their thought process in the creation of their timelines.

Wide Variety of Timelines to Show Individual Students' Thought Process and Visual Thinking

Various Student Examples

LEGO WeDo Coding

Students in second grade used  Lego WeDo to program Legos to kick a soccer ball! Students first built their soccer player using Legos. Then they were introduced to the WeDo software. This software uses drag-and-drop blocks. Students explored and discovered the different functions of the blocks, used the engineering process to try out a code of their choice, and eventually every student designed a soccer player who could kick a paper ball!

 

Programming "Small Moment" Stories with Scratch Jr.

Students adapted a Small Moment story they had written into a Scratch Jr. animation. First, students created backgrounds. Scratch Jr. has some backgrounds to choose. Students were shown how to modify a background or even create one from scratch. It's a good idea to emphasize that a background should only contain items that will not be animated. Scratch Jr. allows up to four backgrounds in a project. Next, students added characters. A character can be a person, animal or object (anything that is animated). Characters can also be modified or created from scratch.

Each character must be animated independently. A useful tip is to broadcast messages to sequence or synchronize actions, either from the same character or between different characters. Another useful tip is make sure you are putting the end action block after the last action in each section. Otherwise, actions or audio can get cut short.

Sharing is projects is a little tricky since Scratch Jr. doesn't have an export to video option. Only a project project file can be shared, which can only be played back by a device with Scratch Jr. This is probably because the program includes interactive programming blocks that would be lost if exported to video. We tried making videos by playing back a project on one iPad and recording it with another. However, the audio suffered significantly. There was already classroom ambiance in the original projects and recording the final product with another iPad doubled the classroom ambiance. To get around this problem, we used a rather complicated system which involved recording the Airplay stream with a computer program called Reflector 2.

Although the audio and video quality were much better recording the Airplay stream, the setup makes this solution very difficult. In the future, I will probably just upload the project files to Google Drive and instruct parents to download Scratch Jr. on their device to view their child's project. Scratch Jr. is now available on several mobile platforms, including iOS, Android, and ChromeOS.

Acts of Kindness

In the Illustrating and Differentiating with Google Drawings post, I shared some examples of drawings from third graders. Since then, I've introduced Google Drawings to first grade students. I wanted something easy for them to draw the first time, since Google Drawings is different from many other drawing programs for children.

In Acts of Kindness, students created "shape dudes", which is simply a basic shape with arms, legs, eyes and a mouth, to illustrate their idea. First students typed a sentence stating an act of kindness they would do in their own life. Next, they drew a shape dudes that represented themselves. Finally, they created a second item, a prop or another shape dude, to illustrate the kind act.

Persuasive Video: Should Minecraft be Used as an Educational Tool?

Students were asked to persuade others whether or not Minecraft should be played by students in school. After doing some research, they brainstormed their ideas, and eventually used iMovie to record a trailer video.

Weather Reports using Doink and Explain Everything

Fifth grade students created weather reports using Explain Everything. They added slides about cold and warm fronts in the U.S., temperatures throughout the country, and a 5-day forecast in a regional location.The students then created a script to include themselves reporting the forecast using the Doink app and a green screen.