FTT - PearPop!

Watch Student Engagement Happen In An Instant With PearPop!

@LisaBerghoff/@MrKimDHS

It is so exciting to see the many uses of PearDeck in our classrooms.  Thanks to a generous grant from the District 113 Education Foundation, we now have a district-wide premium license for PearDeck. Watching teachers learn about PearDeck and then report back on the success of those lessons has been so thrilling.  If you haven't given it a try yet, I highly encourage you to check it out. 

Just a few days ago, PearDeck announced a new tool called Pear Pop.  I had to give it a try! Here is how it works. If you don't want or feel the need for a whole Google Slides presentation, you can just use Pear Pop to ask an interactive question. This is also a great tool to get some formative information on the fly.

It is designed to be quick and easy. 

Just go to Peardeck.com and where it says Pear Pop just click Choose A Prompt.

When you do that you will see several pre-made question slides.

All you need to do is click on one to choose it. When you do that, it automatically goes into presentation mode. You will see the join code on the screen and once your students enter that code at joinpd.com, they will be able to respond to the question. If you don't love using the code, you can use the link. Once your students are there, you will see the dashboard and all of the fantastic features that we love about PearDeck for Google Slides. You can ask another question on the fly, give the students a time limit, lock their screens, show responses or make it student-paced. 

This basically allows you to use some interactivity without needing to create an entire presentation because sometimes you just want to toss a question to your class and using PearPop is a great way to make sure everyone is actually participating instead of you verbally asking a question and hearing from the same four kids who always answer you.

The pre-made templates are divided into categories of "before class" "during class" and "end of class" which makes them perfect to use as bell-ringers, exit tickets, or formative assessments. However, if you don't want to use one of those, you can scroll to the next screen where you will find blank options of each of the possible question types: multiple choice, text, draggable, drawing, and number. 

Go ahead and give PearPop a try and let us know how it goes! Want some help? Feel free to contact one of us, we're happy to help!

FTT - LucidChart

LucidChart: Visual models for visual students.

@LisaBerghoff/@MrKimDHS

At our most recent building administration meeting, an incredibly talented district technology staff member walked us through what digitizing schedule changes would look like. While it doesn't sound all that interesting, it is a fairly complicated and work intensive process that affects all levels of our school. Needless to say, there were dozens of different processes that would trigger events like requested digital authorization, or auto-generated emails. What impressed me the most was just how easy it was to follow the myriad steps due to the simple yet powerful flowchart our tech guru used. So step one: let's make some charts.

LucidChart.com is one of many visual model platforms out there, and while any of them will do the job, LucidChart does the best job providing free templates that can anticipate your needs. So while you can start something from scratch, it'll be beneficial to peruse through the hundreds of templates and customize from there. LucidChart is all about communicating visual data and thus you can create some of the following:

• Flowcharts
• Timelines
• Schedules
• Pyramids
• Mind maps
• Floor plans
• Venn Diagrams
• Cause and Effect charts
• Data flows
• Family trees
• Sequences
• KWL Charts
• Supply and Demand graphs
• Study Guides
• Heat Maps
• and more!

From Scratch

All of this is mostly straight forward. When you choose to create one from scratch, they give you a blank diagram with every conceivable variation of symbols, shapes, patterns, colors, and a full HTML text editor to create with. I would start here to practice using the user interface of the platform. To continue your flowcharts, just hover over your text boxes, and directional points will appear. You can also simply click and drag arrows to fit all of your needs.

Once created, you can easily present, export, or share your creations. You can present full screen to a projector, you can send a live link, embed with a customizable HTML code, or export as a PDF/Image file. You can even save directly to Google Drive!

Templates

As mentioned above, there are literally hundreds of well made templates that can fit all most of your needs. Coaches can use the goal setting templates for their athletes, or even floor plans to prepare large sporting events. Teachers can have their students utilize and most importantly customize different charts like essay planning, or cause and effects maps.

Professional looking visualizations can definitely capture your audience's attentions and convey data and information in efficient, effective ways. Go ahead and explore. You will realize there are visual models for needs you didn't even think you had.

FTT - How to make Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Drive Available Offline

How To Make

 Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Drive 

Available Offline In 3 Easy Steps

@LisaBerghoff/@MrKimDHS

@LisaBerghoff/@MrKimDHS

Ben Franklin said there were only two things certain in life: death and taxes. I would add a third certainty to that list. The internet will go down at some point and you will lose connectivity.

With these uncertain times, it is good to have a  plan for technology use when the wifi is not working. I have presented at technology conferences and the wifi has gone down! I typically will save my slide decks as a pdf just in case.

You may be in a situation where you are in the middle of a multi-day project with a classroom full of students and suddenly there is no internet connection. This is one of those times when your students are watching you closely. Are you going to panic? Will you declare the day a total waste?  Are you going to have extra lesson plans just in case?

Fortunately, Google docs, sheets, and slides can easily be accessed offline.  This allows both you and your students to continue working on Google docs, sheets, slides, and access your drive even without the internet. When your device does connect, all of the work that you did offline with sync and it will be like the whole ordeal never happened.

You do need to take some initial steps while you are connected in order to enable offline editing. This is well worth doing as a precautionary measure. It will only take 2 minutes. You will be glad you did!

Enable Offline Google Docs, Slides, Sheets, and Drive In 3 Easy Steps!

1. Make sure you are using Google Chrome! This will only work in Chrome. If you have students using their own computers, make sure they have Chrome loaded on their machine.

2. Install the Google docs offline extension. You can get to it by clicking here

Ok. Now you are all set! If you are offline, or want to enable for offline use, launch Chrome and go to your Google drive settings. Not sure how to get there?  Click on the gear in Google drive or go to drive.google.com/drive/settings. Check the box that says “Create, open and edit your recent Google docs, sheets, and slides files on this device while offline”. 

3. Ok. Now you are all set! If you are offline, or want to enable for offline use, launch Chrome and go to your Google drive settings. Not sure how to get there?  Click on the gear in Google drive or go to drive.google.com/drive/settings. Check the box that says “Create, open and edit your recent Google docs, sheets, and slides files on this device while offline”.

*If you have a specific file that you want to make sure is available offline, you can go to File and click Make Available Offline.

Want some help figuring this out?

Let us know!