Five Things to Try this Week

published by Mike Neumire on 3/9/2023

For all you casual explorers of the internet, here are four resources you can try in your classroom right away:

Classroom Screen

Classroom Screen is simply a collection of widgets that you can display on your board to create clear expectations for students and help manage your classroom. When you navigate to the website, you can login or jump straight into the screen, where you can launch and rearrange any widgets you find useful. Once you’ve selected some widgets from the widget bar, start your lesson! Some of my favorite widgets include:

1. 1. random group maker - paste in a list of names and it will organize them into random groups according to your parameters.

   2. dice roller - select the number and type of dice you want to roll and then roll them to get random numbers.

   3. sound level monitor - use your computer microphone to monitor how noisy the classroom is and set a noise limit that plays an alarm when it is passed. 

   4. random name selector - paste in a list of names and run the widget to get a randomly selected name from the list. 

   5.  traffic light - a simple red, yellow, and green light that you can click between to indicate what type of interaction or behavior is expected at that moment. 

   6. Timer - set a time and start the clock to countdown to zero. 

   7. poll question - put up a quick poll question and allow students to cast their vote by touching an option on the board. This is great as an exit ticket to gather reflections on a lesson or as something students do as they enter the classroom to get a better idea of where to start the lesson. 

   8. Stopwatch - run a stopwatch to keep track of how long it takes students to accomplish a given task. 

Check out these widgets and more to see what works best for your classroom!

Scribble Diffusion

If students are interested in exploring artificial intelligence, they can dip a toe in the water with Scribble Diffusion. This simple AI app asks for two inputs - a simple sketch and a caption for the sketch. It uses these two inputs to generate a more elaborate, refined image. The results are usually odd and entertaining. This could be an engaging option in some cases for a quick check for understanding at the end of a lesson. It also is a great hook for discussions around revision. 

Song Maker by Chrome Music Lab

Chrome Music Lab is a simple song making web app that allows students to click on a grid to add musical notes. Those notes can then be strung together to play a simple song. Obviously, this app is great for introducing simple musical concepts. It could be used in many other ways as well. At the elementary level, it could be used to practice and play with pattern recognition. At the secondary level, students could make quick music to match the tone of a short story or article, which could be paired with a writing exercise explaining their choice.

WeVideo Extension

WeVideo is our web-based video editing tool. It can be a bit intimidating to use for the first time, and even when you’re a WeVideo expert, it can be a bit cumbersome a tool to use when you just want to make a quick screencast. Enter: the WeVideo browser extension! After you install WeVideo’s browser extension, you have a quick button that you can click and launch into a screen recording. Students can also use this extension to make quick explainer videos or GIFs. After you’re done recording, you can take the video clip as is or you can jump straight into the editor to clean it up or add some professional changes.

Scavenger Hunts with Hidden Pages on Google Sites

Google Sites is a powerful yet often overlooked tool in the Google Suite. It is a more robust and dynamic way to display and share information than Google Docs or Google Slides. Students may use Google Sites to create portfolios, reinvigorate a traditional poster activity, or gather and polish resources from a research project. Teachers may use it to display student work, create self-paced lessons that students can revisit and complete at their own pace, or just host a typical classroom website. One feature that opens up new possibilities with Google Sites is the ability to hide pages from navigation. This allows teachers an added measure of control and allows both teachers and students to play with the idea of mystery as a means of engagement. Teachers can create pages on their websites that can only be accessed if they share a direct link to that specific page, or if viewers use the search tool and search text that matches text on that page exactly. This creates an opportunity for some playfulness: teachers may make hidden pages related to different topics or components of a lesson and challenge students to tap into background knowledge to come up with different search parameters to try to discover them, kind of like a scavenger hunt. There are no limits (that I’ve discovered) to how many pages you can create and hide, so maybe some pages are a little easier to find, and others require deep thinking, analysis, or research of a topic to come up with the right search terms. The easy-to-find pages may contain videos, slide decks, or other resources that can spur thinking further to help find the better hidden pages. In this way, students are challenged to see how deep they can go and how much they can discover in a given time frame. This kind of activity can hook students and connect them to the learning goals more deeply. It can also be flipped and left to the students to create learning scavenger hunts to engage each other. Then they must grapple with the content like puzzle pieces to fit this structure in a meaningful way.