My AI Education

So I knew I was onto something for students with Quizlet when my son ran through his flashcards twenty times in one night.  When I asked him why he had done it so many times, he said because his teacher had set it up as a game and he wanted to be the best in the class.  Using competition to get kids to study is a great idea. Quizlet was started eleven years ago by a high schooler who was trying to figure out how to study for a test.  Boasting one hundred million users there are many different uses for it that you can have your students do: Teacher or student can create their own set of flashcards Teachers can then create their own classes which require no login for the students so they can play games (many different ones) You can also just search for ones for your class.  You can also be specific such as typing in the name of your unit and state exam and it will pop up.  Generally the best ones are the top returns.  Then you can just take the li...

Converting Advanced Placement Free Response Questions (FRQ) scores to a percent out of a 100 is a pain.  So my colleagues, Rich Hoppock and Dan Maxwell, came up with this converter .  To use it download it and then re-upload in Google Drive (or perish the thought, Microsoft).  Once you have done that put the FRQ score in the yellow box in the upper right side and it will give you a percent score based on both 100 and 50.  

Alice Keeler has an amazing array of ideas that she is constantly sharing with educators about using Google Drive and Google Classroom which you can find on her webpage . But she also shares lots of her ideas with short videos such as the one above which argues (and I agree) that we need to leave our comfort zone and try looking at different approaches to teaching.   Keeler also has a playlist for using Google Classroom . For me the best thing that Keeler does is Tweet idea after idea on how to do all things Google.  Along with that she offers scripts (prewritten computer language which you can use with little or no training) and at the bottom of the page you will find apps that you can add to Chrome to more easily do some of the things she discusses such as mail merging using Google Drive.  This goes along with her book 50 Things You Can Do With Google Classroom .

The video above gives you a great tutorial of how the Internet works and does it in the first two minutes.  Then it looks at the role of others such as government. The video below gives you a one minute history and then tells you how the Internet works.  Both are great to help you answer what is meant by the Internet. 

Whether you are a flipper or just want to hang onto a group of YouTube videos, creating a play list of your and other people's videos is a necessary part of your daily tasks.  The video above tells you how to do it.  It is also possible to have multiple categories as you can see on my playlist here .  As you can see in the video above, you can also use the YouTube search function to find a video you want to add to your library or you can just paste in a url which is better if you are making your own videos.  

I just found out about Talk Radio from a post on a Facebook page I follow called Teachers Throwing Out Grades .   First off know that there are many Facebook pages that can help educators, be they teachers or administrators.   Talk Radio "shares leadership stories, feature guest interviews and inspire you to lead for the change we need in schools for the digital age" and can be listened to at any time. Just the fact that you are reading this blog post means you agree that we should continuously be learning and expanding our horizon.  So this site might help you.  For example some recent podcasts include:  Hacking Assessment which looks at throwing out the grades in a classroom. Gamify your classroom Personalized learning Evaluating and assessing your digital learning initiative

When my kids were little they used to get on my wife's laptop and accidentally close her webpages. While we solved this by giving them Chromebooks there are free ways to fix this problem as well. First off if you close a tab and want it back just type "Ctrl + Shift + T" and the deleted tab will instantly reappear in Chrome and Firefox.   Here is how you do it in other browsers. To be able to get back a closed browser just go into "Settings" and tap on the radio dial that says "continue where you left off." If you have too many tabs open and your browser is slowing down, you might want to create a folder for some of your tabs .