Wanda

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Use TeacherCal with Google Calendar!

If you are a teacher STOP what you’re doing and go to edusync.com and check out TeacherCal!

It is so super easy to set up (only takes a couple of minutes) and will be a HUGE benefit to you in running an efficient classroom for the coming school year. Not only will this increase communication and make file sharing easier with your student (especially if you aren’t lucky enough to have access to Google Classroom) but you can add parents to the loop simply by sharing the calendar with them!

Use this one interface to plan your lessons and set up to automatically share with all stakeholders (students, parents, grade-level teams, administrators).

I would go into more detail but, honestly, it is so easy and, because it is designed by teachers for teachers, the website provides an excellent overview.

  • TeacherCal is free!
  • TeacherCal allows teachers to create Google Docs right from their calendar!
  • TeacherCal automatically organizes your content in Google Drive!
  • TeacherCal syncs with Google Calendar!

Soon they will release EddyCal which will give students and parents an intuitive one-stop app.

Yes, it is in Beta but it doesn’t feel like a Beta. It is polished, not buggy at all, and ready for primetime!

Kudos to the EduSync team lead by CEO Ryan Lynch!

 

Scan Barcodes Into a Google Form / Spreadsheet

The Scan to Web (and Scan to Spreadsheet) app has come in very handy for me this year. No need for a small school district to spend lots of money on fancy barcode readers when a few dollars spent on an app will do. Here is a quick video showing what I’ve been doing today as I get our new Chromeboxes set up for our computer labs.

Make a Soldier Smile

Powtoon has a great way to honor our fallen heroes and veterans this Memorial Day by reaching out to those who continue to serve and protect our country!

SmileThey are calling on teachers, students, military family, friends, and anyone else who would like to salute our men and women in uniform (past & present) to create and send a personal video message to a veteran or soldier stationed abroad.

This takes less than 5 minutes.

  1. Select one of their special templates. Templates are available for teachers/students as well as family/friends.
  2. You do need to log in to Powtoon but if you already have a Google account, you can sign in with Google.
  3. Edit the scenes of the template as you wish.

Powtoon workspace

  1. Save and click the Share button. You will be walked through the publishing process.
  2. Get the URL to the video and email it, post to social media, embed on a school website, etc.

Here is one I made in just a couple of minutes.

 

Also, if you know someone in the military who could help Powtoon spread this to more soldiers they would love to hear from you. You can email Ari at support@powtoon.com and they will follow up with you asap!

 

 

Done is better than perfect

I struggle with perfectionism. It causes me an incredible amount of self-induced stress. Maybe these will help. Maybe not.

Done is better than perfect
 

Ira Glass Quote

Create Pseudo Slides from Google Form Submissions

Have you ever wanted to trigger a script on a Google Sheet of Google Form responses that would create a Google Slide containing the submitted information? Try this.

I recently shared a hack that made Google Slides act as a pseudo Google Doc so YouTube videos could be embedded. This post gives Google Docs the chance to fill a need not available in Google Slides – the creation of a new “slide” using autoCrat after a Google Form submission is received.

Let’s say I have a Google Form (inspired by Tom Barrett’s Interesting Ways series) that I ask my PLN use to crowdsource interesting ways to use Google Docs in the classroom. That form currently looks something like this (feel free to make a submission):


 

I would love to be able to trigger a script on the Google Sheet of form responses that would create a Google Slide containing the submitted information. Ideally, it would be a slide appended to an already existing Google Slide presentation. Unfortunately, that is not currently possible.

Yes, I know I could follow the same process Tom did by just making the actual Google Slides file freely editable by anyone but I’d rather have a bit more control and avoid digital vandalism.

Here is my hacked workflow.

When someone submits the Google Form above, the information is sent to a Google Sheet. I could have chosen to have autoCrat run on submission but, dreading spammy submissions, I am going to run the script manually after I review submissions. When I do run the merge script, autoCrat uses this Google Doc (see screenshot below) as the template for the merge. It has been formatted to look like a Google Slide (explained later in this post).

pseudo slide screenshot
 

The resulting autoCrat merge looks like this:

merged slide
 

If a URL to an image is provided in the submitted data, I will probably grab that image and slip it into the document but, for now, that’s the only way an image will get in.

Here is a comparison of what a similar Google Slide would like.

Compare Doc and Slide
 

It’s not perfect but it helps.

FYI: The Google Doc is set to a landscape orientation with all four margins decreased to 0.3 inches. I chose the Executive setting for paper size as it most closely resembled the slide size.

Page set up
 

If you are interested, here is an embedded Google Drive folder containing any of the merged documents I have reviewed and published.

 

I expect that, after reviewing, adding images, I will be converting these Docs to PDF so I can combine the PDFs into one document.

What ideas do you have for making this hack more efficient? I would love to hear them! Share in the comments below.

 

 

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