Assessment + Feedback in EdPuzzle

When I started using Edpuzzle years ago it was, I’ll shamefully admit, to make sure my students were complying with my directions to watch a video. But I soon discovered that the questions that you can embed in those videos are really good for formative assessment and providing feedback (or feedforward as I often call it).

There are 4 different ways that you can assess your students and/or give them feedback in Edpuzzle:

  1. Multiple-choice questions are auto-graded.
  2. You can mark questions correct (✔️) or incorrect (✖️).
  3. You can assign a percentage score to a response (i.e., 50% for half-correct).
  4. You can provide typed feedback.

My secret weapon, though, is this little efficiency hack. As you’ll see in the EduGIF below, marking questions as correct using the ✔️ can be kind of time-consuming. Instead, I skip over any correct answers and, once I’ve looked at them all, I click the “Mark Ungraded as Correct” button. And voila, Edpuzzle takes it from there!

It does take a handful of seconds, or even a few minutes, to go magically mark them as correct, but I can use that time to get a sip of coffee or eat a few peanut butter M&Ms.

Check out this process in the EduGIF below:

This animated GIF shows a screencast of the assessment and feedback options in Edpuzzle.

#EduDuctTape BONUS: The Suite Talk, “Kick Of Your Lessons with Fun Activities”

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In January 2021, I had the opportunity to be on one of my favorite sources of educational technology learning: Kimberly Mattina’s YouTube Live + Podcast, The Suite Talk. In this appearance, I share some of my favorite ways to kick off my class periods with smiles and laughs. I focus on Pear Deck, but the ideas can be used in other platforms, too.
Continue reading #EduDuctTape BONUS: The Suite Talk, “Kick Of Your Lessons with Fun Activities”

#EduDuctTape – Dr. Monica Burns – Leveraging Choice & Agency to Hear from All Students

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EdTech and Curriculum Consultant and Easy EdTech Podcast host Dr. Monica Burns joins me to identify ways that we can hear from ALL of our students. Her suggestion? Select tools that can give our learners choice and agency in how we hear from them! Tune in to hear what tools she suggests!

Continue reading #EduDuctTape – Dr. Monica Burns – Leveraging Choice & Agency to Hear from All Students

#EduDuctTape – Eric Curts – Creative Projects with Docs, Slides, and Sheets

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Control Alt Achieve author Eric Curts joins me to talk about creative projects with Docs, Slides, and Sheets including Stop Motion Animation, Choose Your Own Adventure Activities, Emoji Learning Activities, Rebus Stories, Blackout Poetry, and Pixel Art! We also touch on Canva for Education, Adobe Spark for Education, Google Forms headers, flashcard makers like Quizlet and Flippity.net, and more!

Continue reading #EduDuctTape – Eric Curts – Creative Projects with Docs, Slides, and Sheets

The EquatIO® Web Toolbar

This is a sponsored post. All opinions, however, are my own.

A while back, I shared about using EquatIO in Google Forms. I also mentioned how well it works in Google Slides, Docs, Sheets, and Drawings, as well as Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, and Office 365 applications.

But what about elsewhere? What about Jamboard? Whiteboard.Chat? Whiteboard.fi? Gmail? You guessed it: the web toolbar didn’t work in those spots. But now it does!!!

Recently, Texthelp announced that the web toolbar works elsewhere in Google Chrome!

  • Need to add the Quadratic Formula in your Jamboard? You can!
  • Need to show the Pythagorean Theorem in Whiteboard.chat? You can!
  • Need to show a graph of a trigonometric function in Classkick? You can!
  • Need to send a chemical equation to your chemistry student in Gmail? You can!

In the EduGIF below, you’ll see how you can easily copy and paste your math as images (into sites like Jamboard, Slides, and whiteboard tools) as well as how you can easily share them as links in sites that aren’t meant as image-friendly (like Classroom)!

Check out a preview of how it works in the EduGIF below! And then, below the EduGIF, you can sign up for a free teacher EquatIO account!

This animated GIF shows the process of using the EquatIO Web Toolbar in Google Chrome to add mathematical equations and graphs to a number of platforms.

You can sign up for a free teacher account here!

#EduDuctTape – Dr. Natasha Rachell – Engaging Instruction with Student Choice and EdTech

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Dr. Natasha Rachell joins me in this episode for lots of laughs, but also to share some of her strategies for making instruction engaging. Natasha shares about student choice, choice boards, the Flipgrid Discovery Library, Microsoft Sway, Wakelet, Mentimeter, Buncee, and the awesome Minecraft Good Trouble project!

Continue reading #EduDuctTape – Dr. Natasha Rachell – Engaging Instruction with Student Choice and EdTech

#EduDuctTape – Joe Marquez – Strategies for UDL-Friendly Learning Experiences

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Joe Marquez delivers powerful tips for designing instructional experiences that are accessible for all learners and are pedagogically effective. He also brings it with ideas for how students can process and represent their learning in UDL-friendly ways. Tune in to hear Joe’s wisdom and our discussion that touches on Edji, Pear Deck, Nearpod, Flipgrid, the Record to Slides extension, and more!

Continue reading #EduDuctTape – Joe Marquez – Strategies for UDL-Friendly Learning Experiences

The 2021 Boomwriter Writing Bee!

This is a sponsored post. All opinions, however, are my own.

Image shows pictures of author's Jeff Kinney and Jerry Craft along with the text "Boomwriter Writing Bee: The biggest writing bee in the world! For grades 3-8. Over 10,000 students expected to participate. It's free! Register by April 30!" Boomwriter.com/writingbee
More info here.

One of my favorite things about hosting the Educational Duct Tape podcast is how often my guests surprise me with tech tools that I’ve never heard of. One of my favorite surprises came 2 years ago (almost to the day!) when my friend Angela Wojtecki told me about Boomwriter. As with every EduDuctTape episode, I asked Angela a “teacher question” that could be answered with educational technology. The question that I asked Angela, a school librarian, was “How can we have our students create ebooks?”

She gave me 4 options, but the one that delighted me with its fresh take on the process was Boomwriter. While the tool has multiple ways that it can be used to enhance students’ experiences with writing, the one that stands out to me is their collaborative book writing activity.  Imagine each of your students writing drafts for every chapter of a collaborative book, getting teacher feedback, revising reading their classmates’ chapters anonymously, and then voting to select the ones that become a part of the final text! The writing skills involved in this process are innumerable!

A few months ago, when my 4th-grade daughter told me that they were using it in her class, I could barely contain my excitement. (She marveled at me already knowing what it was 😊)

But that excitement was nothing compared to when I told her and her brothers about The Boomwriter Writing Bee. She was giddy about the competition and her big brother was impressed by the two authors who are involved (more on that below). Little bro was disappointed to be too young to participate this year, but he’ll have his chance soon enough!

So, what’s The Writing Bee? Continue reading The 2021 Boomwriter Writing Bee!

Present Google Slides in a Partial Screen

If you’re anything like me, you need more when you’re teaching, especially if it’s remote, hybrid, or concurrent teaching. More coffee. More time. More money in your paycheck. More aspirin. More screen space.

Well, I can’t help with the first 4, but I can help you with the last one.

Did you know that you can present Google Slides without using your entire screen?

This is super helpful in a handful of scenarios.

One of those scenarios is when you want to share Slides in Zoom, Google Meet, or any other videoconferencing solution, but don’t want to “lose” an entire screen just to your presentation. If you share just that presentation window and not your entire screen, you’ll be able to use your screen for 2 purposes! This is especially helpful if you only have one screen. In that situation, if you run your slides fullscreen, then you can’t see your students or the chat!  Use this tip to let you do both on the same screen!

What if you want to present two things and one is a presentation? If your presentation is fullscreen, you’ll have to toggle back and forth. Use this tip to present them side-by-side!

Check out this EduGIF to see how it works. Underneath the EduGIF, you can find a link to a “pausable” version and the step-by-step instructions.

This animated GIF shows the process for putting Google Slides in present view without using your entire screen!
View a “Pausable” version of this EduGIF here.

Continue reading Present Google Slides in a Partial Screen