Tired of losing books from your classroom library? Have a checkout system for students that's just not working? Wish you had a quick and easy way to figure out who checked out which book and when?
GOOGLE TO THE RESCUE!
Here's a great way to think about your classroom library check-out system for the upcoming school year!
Recently I've met with teachers to discuss the easiest way to organize groups. HA! I know that's a totally loaded topic, and there are about a million ways to organize groups in your classroom.... But here's one way to use Google Forms and Google Sheets to organize students quickly and not waste any extra unnecessary time! This is especially useful when you're working with other teachers, and students are moving in and out of your classroom! Check it out!
Part of my job is to do professional development with teachers this year! I always learn so much on these days from the amazing teachers I work with. And this idea came from a Google PD we did a few weeks ago!
It's the Tattle Form!
For all of the little tattles, that students just love have to share with you, because to a seven year old, when Billy accidentally sneezes on you, it's pretty much the end of the world....
Students can scan a Tattle Form QR Code which will take them to a Google Form that looks like this:
Which they can then fill out.... And you can assure them that you will handle it immediately. ;-)
It gives the students a chance to feel heard and validated, and it also gives you a pretty spiffy record. A record of who's doing all or most or lots of tattling, AND who is being tattled on. This can be helpful when meeting with parents, or deciding what steps to take next, as you have a written record of the tattling! #winwin The new Forms gives you some pretty neat data too! You can see who's doing all the tattling:
You can see who the tattlees are:
You can see what happened:
And what your class needs to work on:
Here's a quick video tutorial on how we created this form!
Hopefully this will help eliminate *some* of the tattling as we head towards Spring Break! Have a great week!
Watch this short 3 minute video to see how to transfer the info from a Google Spreadsheet to a Google Doc! This can come in handy when you'd like to see all of the info from one responder without having to scroll over or wrap text!
Last week I did a post on how to create a Google Form to share with your parents to fill out during Back to School time. You can check out the post {HERE}. This makes it easy to collect important information from your parents and store it all in one, easily accessible spot! You can read the post by clicking the picture below:
Once you have all of your information, here are a few tips and tricks to help get you organized as we all head back to school (bleh). Here's a video tutorial. There are also step by step instructions and you can download the instructions at the end of the post!
This can come in handy when you're trying to alphabetize your students by first or last name, and assign them a number!
Share your spreadsheet with your teaching team! (And have them share theirs with you too!) They'll be able to access any changed you've made to your spreadsheet in real time (like if a child moves away or you get a new student in your class). If there is ever an emergency, your teaching team, secretary, and principal will have access to your student's important information!
Okay- this is probably one of my favorite features of Google Spreadsheets. Color code! Anything you want!!!! And as much as you want!!!! In as many colors as you want!!!!!
Download this tutorial by clicking the picture below:
Do you have any favorite Google Forms/Spreadsheets tips or tricks!?!?! Please share in the comments! I'd love to hear from you!!!!!
Heading back to school can be completely overwhelming. With everything that is expected of teachers- PD, meetings, setting up a classroom, meetings, PD, getting ready for your new class, meetings, meetings, and more meetings.... It's incredible we even make it through the month of September.
Usually for me, the paperwork can be the most headache inducing part of Back to School season!
Google Forms can be a great way to eliminate *some* of the paperwork, and get yourself organized without having to do a whole lot of unnecessary work.
One way to use Google Forms is to have parents fill out all of the Back to School information you need via Forms! It's easy!
1. You create the form. (I'll help you with that below!)
2. You share the form with your parents through a link (I'll help you with that too!)
3. Viola! Parents just need to fill out the form and ALL of the information you need is organized and housed in one spot like this:
No more piles and piles of paperwork. No more organizing the piles and piles of paperwork. No more sending it home and receiving 12 out of 25 papers back, and of the 12, eight of them are incomplete and sending those back home... No more throwing yourself in front of cars during bus duty to ask parents where their information sheet is... (Yes, I've done that...)
I'll take you step by step through the process- there's a picture tutorial below, a PDF tutorial you can download and print at the end of this post, and here's a video tutorial to get your started!
You'll need to make sure you have a Google account set up first. Once you do, go to drive.google.com
I always give parents TIME to fill this out during the first few minutes of Back to School Night, which is like our orientation.
You can click the picture below to download the PDF of this tutorial!
Once you've got the hang of creating Google Forms, there are endless possibilities. Here are a few other ideas!
Get to know your students by creating a Back to School survey for your students to complete!
Set up a form for parents to sign up to volunteer!
Take class survey's about books! (We used this during March Book Madness last year!)
And when you really feel like you've got the hang of it, you can even have students create their OWN forms!!! (HELLO Data and Analysis standards!!!)
Have you used Google Forms in your classroom??? I'd LOVE to hear how!!!
I'll be back soon with more tips and tricks for Google Forms.
About a month ago, my wonderful teaching buddy and I had an opportunity to present at the CUE conference in Palm Springs! It was SO much fun!!! We presented "iPad Projects for the 21st Century Classroom" and {we think!} it was a hit! I wanted to share one of the projects we presented on, and share this weather freebie with you!
In our new Wonders curriculum, there is a unit on weather, and how weather affects our everyday life. We did lots of close reading, shared reading, and guided reading about weather. We're so lucky to live in beautiful Southern California, so many of the types of weather we read about were very unfamiliar to the students.
For this project, students were randomly placed into groups of four.
We wanted students to create a virtual "wall" using Padlet, which is a website that allows you to post "stickies" to the wall. {HAVE YOU USED PADLET BEFORE!!!!?} One group member created the wall, then shared it with the other group members using the easy share feature! This meant that all students in the group were on the same wall, and could collaborate with each other and see one another's ideas!
Once in groups of four, students chose from a bag to determine which weather type they would be the "expert" on.
Once students knew which type of weather they were responsible for, they began scanning the QR codes that matched their weather type.
Each QR code would take them to a slide I created using PowerPoint. The slides were then exported as a PDF and uploaded to my Dropbox account. I then "shared" the link through Dropbox to create the QR codes.
The actual slides look like this, and there were six slides for each weather type (so this is what the kids saw when they scanned the QR codes):
Once they scanned the QR codes, they added the information they had learned to their Padlet wall to share with their other groups members. (Any sticky one kiddo posts, all of the other students in the group can see it on their device as well!)
Some kids even got really tech savvy, took a screen shot of the slide, and added it to the Padlet wall as a photo! By the end, some of them had even added videos of themselves SPEAKING about what they had learned! They also found photos and drew pictures!
You can download all of the QR code resources for this project here!
To evaluate how the project went, students took a survey on Google to determine how working with their group went that day.
You can check out a video of this lesson here!
As a follow up activity, students worked with their groups to create newscasts about their weather type! We used a green screen and iMovie!
Check out one of the group's videos here! (I'm working on a how-to post on iMovie and green screening! Look for it soon!)
Here is the outline kids used to organize their news reports!
(Click to download!)
Finally, we had a wonderful opportunity to Mystery Skype with Kate from Purely Paperless's class in Montana! You can check Kate out here (she's wonderful!!!!!):
When you Mystery Skype, you connect with another class around the country (or world!) through Skype or Google Hangouts (we used Google Hangouts- it was really easy!) and students ask questions to figure out where the other class is located.
This was an amazing opportunity because while we were enjoying 80 degree weather in Southern California, our buddy class' playground was covered in inches of snow! We got see what it looks like to have a playground covered in snow, and we got to ask questions about what it's like going to school in the snow! They also got to ask us all about the beach! This was such a fun way to collaborate and communicate with students from another part of the country!
***If you're looking for a class to Mystery Skype with, a great resource is Twitter and Instagram with the hashtag #mysteryskype! Blogging is also a great way to connect with other teachers who might be interested!
If you'd like more technology project ideas, or to see our resources from the CUE presentation, hop on over to
