Whispers From Your Librarian

These trips are perfect for the days when you need to be out of the classroom or leading up to winter break. Find tours on space, the cloud, music, an Amazon fulfillment center, and more. 

🚀 Turn your Google Doc into Google Slides! 

Install Doc to Slides - Google Extension

Open ANY Google Doc and use the Extensions menu to select "Doc to Slides." 

❡ Each paragraph becomes a new slide. 

👇 Tip: Hold down the SHIFT key when press ENTER. 

This puts your text on a new line BUT does NOT start a new paragraph.

👻 TRY IT!  

Encourage your students to become more environmentally conscious. Earth Day 2023 is this week! If you want your classroom to have a discussion on conservation, there are several resources you can use. Share these on Earth Day or save them for year-round lesson plans. Discovery provides Infographics, videos, lesson plans and more.

Featured Topics: The Environment, A Warming World, 

Featured Units: Earth, Conservation

Featured Videos: Sustainability, How Photosynthesis Works

Use Google's Arts & Culture. Find more than 60 collections (including virtual tours), about 500 stories (including online exhibits to visit virtually), thousands of photos, and 65 museums by typing “Washington, D.C.” into the search on the top right side of your screen.  Access free lessons and activities on Teachers First. (Good for grades 3-12)

Use these free materials from Teachers First as the starting point for any lessons on the Holocaust. Go on a virtual field trip of the museum.  Learn about the Holocaust through the Holocaust Museum’s digital resources. Explore the museum's collections to view documents, artifacts, and online exhibits and discover the first-hand stories of those that survived the Holocaust.  (Good for grades 7-12)

What happens when your middle school students reinterpret Shakespeare and host their own production?  According to the recent post by Matthew James Friday in edutopia, you can help your students get hooked on the Bard. What do you think?

(Barbara De Santis, 2/9/2022)

A daily podcast (suggested for grades 5-12) produced by the Center for Civic Education. This podcast provides a quick and convenient way for students to learn about the U.S. government, the Constitution, and American history.  How could you use it in your class?  Consider having your students answer the question and then listen to the podcast.  You can find it at 60 Second Civics and read the review in TeachersFirst  here. 

In a recent Edutopia article, Joanna Schwartz provides a list of 10 strategies you can employ to create  a diverse environment for instruction. The article focuses on ELL's but the strategies listed allow you to meet the needs of  every kind of learner.

Our school subscribes to Newsela, a database with over 15,000 articles, covering 20+ genres of instructional content. Newsela content includes current events stories, each available at 5 lexile reading levels. Stories are indexed by theme (e.g. War and Peace, Arts, Science, Health, Law, Money), and content is updated daily. You can login to Newsela with your school-provided Google account. Please click the link below and follow the steps provided to get logged in and sync your Google classes over to Newsela: Using Newsela with Google Classroom & Getting Started with Newsela

Some of us have been turned off of using Google meet due to the echo factor during the calls. Google has added a tool to help you identify echos on your call as well as suggestions to correct it!  Please see the Google blog post here. 

Learn more about offerings to teachers and students during the school year, please visit their newly published “How to Use The Learning Network” page. It provides a quick tour of an abundance of activities for students and resources for teachers, all of which are completely free. 

Check out these new On-Demand eLearning Modules that are easy to follow and great to share with anyone, staff & students alike, who want to learn how to use Sora and feel confident when using it.

Educator Modules

Student Modules

Narrative/Personal Narrative genre for MP 1 ELA.  We have books that you may want to use pieces from to introduce and teach the units. Come check out our collection! 

If you have any questions or  concerns please let me know.

Flying lessons & Other stories (F FLY)

Our Story Begins (920 OUR)

Been There Done That: Writing Stories from Real Life (813 BEE)

Tip: STAR YOUR ORIGINALS! In Google Drive, single click on the file title and press S to star the file. This makes it a lot easier to find your documents, instead of student work, next year. Filter your Google Drive for files that are starred, this will remove from view all student work and non important documents keeping your Drive clean and organized.

Since Word central is no more consider linking Wordsmyth.net to your classrooms as a student friendly & appropriate online dictionary. Although you can use Merriam Webster (I suggest their Learners Dictionary )or Dictionary.com getting to a kid friendly definition takes more work. 

Merriam- Webster Dictionary site provides weekly word lists for improving your students vocabularies.  Find words frequently encountered in age-appropriate texts and  books for middle grade students. Learn eight new words each week with Merriam-Webster definitions and pronunciations, plus a fun crossword! Please note Word Central is no more (site discontinued 6/30/21)

Create original poems by moving tiles around on the screen. Click the more words option for additional words to use. When your finished, take a screenshot to save and share. THe option for saving and sharing on the site links to Facebook and email will not work for students using our Google platform.

This site includes advertising.

HOORAY! Google has finally updated Google Classroom. You can now use Rich Text features - BOLD, Italicize, Underline, and add a bulleted list into your Announcements and Assignments on Google Classroom. These features are available as quick keys on both PC & Macs. Unfortunately you cannot add Rich Text features to the Private Comments.

For those struggling with student motivation and engagement try integrating Alice Keeler’s "Level Up Game” (Google Sheets) for assignments. It allows you to enter assignments from your google classroom gradebook and have students earn achievements for completing the assignments then they level up just like in video games. Take a look at her blog post regarding the process and let me know if you need help setting it up. 

Discovery Education and Itron have partnered to create Conservation Station: Creating a More Resourceful World, a program that fosters STEM Investigations and encourages us to discover how we (you and your students) can conserve water and energy at school and at home. Some of the topics covered include water purity, solar energy and energy conversion. Take a virtual field trip and find educator materials.

Presented by the CDC a kid friendly site for information and webquests designed for students in 4th - 6th grades. Teachers can modify the materials to meet students’ learning styles and levels. The Quests can be used in lessons about health, social studies, and tolerance in society.

Physics Girl Dianna Cowern is an MIT graduate and YouTuber who shares videos explaining various physical phenomena. She worked in partnership with PBS Digital Studios channel Physics Girl until 2020 when she started her own channel. She also collaborates with other STEM-based YouTube personalities, including science communicator Derek Muller of the channel Veritasium and mathematics animator Grant Sanderson of 3Blue1Brown. 

Manipulatives are an essential tool for every math class. Help your students become active learners working with this collection of free resources organized by mathematical content.    

Google recently announced several new products in their G Suite offerings. Now instead of 2, there are 4 options.  It is important to remember that if you have the unpaid version (like we do), you want to look for the word Fundamentals.  Google is going to rollout multiple upgrades during the next year- if it doesn't indicate Fundamentals- it will not be for our platform.

Our free edition G Suite for Education will be renamed to Google Workspace for Education Fundamentals.

Kristen Acosta from Edutopia has several ideas for using images in math (at various grade levels).  It provides the perfect introduction for your visual learners. 

Teach effectively  and support meaningful learning with authentic resources by creating your own interactive learning experiences or infuse exemplars made by teachers and Smithsonian experts.

Black History Month

Science Engineering & Technology

Mathematics

Social Studies

English Language Arts

World Languages

The Arts

Health & Physical Education

Professional Development

How to Tech for Education has created an easy tutorial for you to follow and learn how to create fun activities using Google Jamboard. You can now insert images into Jamboard so students will not be able to move items around on your templates. Jamboard is a space that makes it easy to have kids collaborate in the virtual learning environment. 

Here are some sample templates created by the teacher behind How to Tech for Education.

Most of you have more than 20 students in your class, Barbara DeSantis created a bingo board on google slides. You can also have the students create their own bingo boards. Try an activity using a Discovery Education or BrainPop video and ask them questions from the video. The answers are the keywords used for their boards. They will love it!!! 

Gail Komm a Science teacher at Sayerville MS created a Bingo board you could copy!  Open this file and make a copy- you will be on your way to your first game!

Brigid Duncan shares a slide template to help make station rotation virtual in her recent guest blog post. Here is a link to create a copy of the slides. Consider incorporating this as a weekly event and allowing students to select what they want to complete. Students are accountable (‘Fill your name in a blank box…”). There are only 14 slots- you will likely need to make two copies depending on your class size and how long you want the stations to last.