Teaching Students Email Etiquette

Does it drive you crazy when you get an email from a student and they put the whole message in the subject line?  Or they write like they are talking to a friend, " hey can u plz send the hw thx"

Wayground (you know them, they used to be Quizziz), created a quiz game you can use with your students to help them understand what to do.  You can also edit the quiz to better meet the needs of your class or school. 

Problem-Attic Test Generator

Problem-Attic is a website that provides teachers with a database of questions from state and national assessments to create tests and worksheets. 

If you are looking for a bank of question from the NYS Regents, SAT, AP Exams or other state assessments, Problem-Attic might be what you are looking for.

The video below will give you a quick overview of what it is all about.

Orange Slice: Google Doc Rubric Extention

OrangeSlice is a rubric extension for Google Docs that comes in two parts: a teacher rubric and a student rubric.  The teacher rubric works to provide grades and/or feedback to students.  The student rubric can be used for self or peer review.

There are three types of rubrics: holistic, competency and analysis.  A holistic rubric gives the student an average of their performance across all categories you set up.  Competency rubrics gives the student a score based on their weakest category.  An analysis rubric is the one we most think of when thinking of rubrics and gives a number grade based on the total of all categories.   The nice thing is that you can start off with a holistic rubric during the assignment to provide feedback before the assignment is due and then switch to a competency rubric once a final grade is needed. 

Would you be interested in more posts about creating OrangeSlice Rubrics?  Let me know.  You can also view their help doc here.

Quizlet Teacher is available for Free through June, 30, 2020

During the current outbreak of COVID-19, Quizlet’s goal is to support teachers and students in all impacted areas. To help with remote teaching and student engagement while schools are closed, they are providing free access to Quizlet Teacher through June 30, 2020.

Quizlet Teacher includes Class Progress, a formative assessment tool that can help track students' progress. You'll also get access to advanced content creation tools, such as diagrams and audio, which enable you to create custom study materials for your class.

For more information on how to create better, more dynamic sets or use Class Progress, check out our Help Center.

Student Certification in Digital Citizenship, Study Habits and more

Edpuzzle offers student certifications on a number of topics. If you haven't familiar with Edpuzzle take a look at my previous post about it. Basically it's a way to embed questions into videos and allow you to track students' progress.


You can assign students topics such as: digital citizenship, equal rights, personal finance, emotional intelligence, learning and study habits, health and building character. Each topic has many videos inside it, so you can choose which ones you want to assign to your students. I also like that there are options to add in closed captions and prevent students from skipping ahead.

Turn any video into an assignment

Edpuzzle is a website that you can use to take any video and turn it into an assignment.  This is especially useful if you are using the flipped classroom model.  In a nutshell, Edpuzzle lets you embed questions, audio and notes into the video.  You then assign the video to your class and you get a ton of analytics such as who watched the video and who struggled or did well.  Students can re-watch the video as many times as they need at their own pace, while you can easily check their progress from your account.

Edpuzzle offers free online courses to not only help you understand how to best use Edpuzzle in your classroom, but also includes topics such as the flipped classroom, gamification, project based learning, twenty-first century learning and much more.  What's even better is that they are offered on the Edpuzzle platform so you can experience what your students will. 

How to play Quizlet Live

Quizlet Live launched several years ago, but it's still one of my favorite games to play with my students.  Basically it takes a Quizlet set and turns it into a collaborative game.  Once you open the set that you want to use and select the live option a website and code are presented to students.  Students are assigned to teams and then they they need to work together to answer the questions.  Each student will have a possible response on his/her device, but only one person on the team will have the correct answer.  This means that students need to talk with one another to make sure that the wrong answer isn't selected.  If it is, the team's score resets itself.

When I really want to challenge my students, I don't let them sit with their teams.  This means they really need to know their stuff as they won't be able to talk with their team.  Students run the risk of having the correct answer, but not knowing it or thinking they know the answer when it's actually wrong.

What are some of your favorite review games?

My favorite free online test, quiz and worksheet generator

Take a look at this walk through of Problem - Attic and how to use it.  You will find banks of questions from many state assessments as well as national tests. 

Create informal assessments and homework aligned to your standards

update: OpenEd is now ACT Academy 

OpenEd is a free website that contains educational videos, games and digital tools for classroom use.  You can search by topic, grade level, standard or keyword.  Once you find a resource you like you can favorite it, assign it to your students, add it to your Google Classroom or clone it so you can edit it.  If you want to assign it your students both you and your students will need accounts.  If you are a Google school there is Google single sign on, otherwise students will need to go through the process of creating an account.  The advantage to using the OpenEd platform to assign the activity is that there are premade questions that go along with the resources.

I tend to be a control freak and like to make my own questions (or at least edit the ones there).  I would probably create my own form where I embed the resource and then ask the questions that I want.  The advantage to this is that now I can distribute the form in the same method I share other resources with my students and they don't need to create an account on a new website.  While it is nice that OpenEd can keep track of who has mastered the assignments you give, you can also just do that yourself in the spreadsheet that you get as a result of the form.

For me I like it better as a place to search for resources and then put them on my own platform.  What would your preference be? 

Free Math and Science Online Textbooks

“I can’t find my textbook!” “I don’t remember getting a textbook.” Does this sound familiar to you? That is what I kept hearing at the end of every year. Then I would have to go through a big hassle of collecting money from student to repurchase the outdated textbooks that I had. I hated having to worry about students losing textbooks or that I was always replacing textbooks that I didn’t even want that included too much information or not enough information. Enter FlexBooks. FlexBooks are online textbooks from a company called CK12. I instantly liked them for many reasons, but the two big ones were that I could customize the book and that it could be posted on my website and downloaded by the students. This video does a great job of explaining how they work. While not every subject has a FlexBook they have a large list of books that include math and science books for elementary, middle and high school along with some other areas such as Writing, Astronomy, History and Engineering.

So, this sounds good you say, but how can I really use it in my classroom? I picked out a textbook that I wanted to use and then went through it to delete the things that don’t apply to my curriculum. I also added in some information that wasn’t there that I wanted to make sure my students had in their book. You can also include links to worksheets (CK12 has a workbook that goes along with most of their textbooks). Once it’s created you can save it as a PDF and post it on a web page or e-mail it to students. Even better, students can put the PDF on their computers, phones, Kindles, IPads, Nooks or other eReader. If you don’t want to customize your book you can find select FlexBooks already in Kindle or Nook/IPad/Android format.

Am I convincing you yet? Maybe you want to make sure you have a teacher’s edition to refer to or a book or worksheets or labs. Well, you got it! The workbooks that are available can also be customized so can you make them fit your classroom. I usually post them on my website and the students can have access to them all the time (no more “I lost it.”)

Looking for more? CK12 has a more interactive way of presenting information that allows you pull short concepts along with chapters into an online interactive “book” Many of the concepts include video clips and interactive quizzes.

Do you use textbooks in your classroom? 

crossposted on by Science Blog - SavvySecondaryScience

The easiest, free test and worksheet generator

I haven't mentioned Problem-Attic in several years, but I thought that I'd bring it up again.  Since I mentioned it last the number of questions available has more than doubled.  It is so easy to search through the question bank and create tests and quizzes.  For me, it's the only test generator I use.  With all of the questions available, why would I pay for something else?

Take a look at the video below to see what Problem-Attic is like and how easy it is to use.

If you want to see my previous posts you can find them here and here.

What do you use to create tests and quizzes?

Survey your class - beyond Socrative and Kahoot

Many of you already know about Socrative and Kahoot and, if you are like me, you love them. 
Sometimes I wonder if I'm using Kahoot too much that it's going to lose it's impact.  I found some other websites that you might be interested in using in your classroom.

The first one I am loving is called Acquainted.  Each poll is called a conversation.  The student interface looks like a text message and it's very easy for the teacher to set.  You choose a welcome message, ask the questions and write a goodbye message.  All of the questions are multiple choice and you can choose to put in a response for each answer choice.  So if you are asking students questions about the lesson you can give them feedback as to if they choose the right answer or why their answer is wrong.  You can see the results as a bar graph, but won't be able to identify which student choose which answer.  I still think it's a valuable tool particularly with the feedback that you are able to provide.

Swift is a polling platform that can be used via web and/or text.  It also allowed open ended responses.  You are limited with the free plan and can only have 50 responses per 30 days.  What is nice about it is that you can embed a poll (like I did below) on a website or in a PowerPoint.  The option to send students to a new page after submitting a text response could help you keep your students on task. The option to instantly show poll results could be helpful in starting discussions in your classroom.

Can't see this? Click here

Last up is Poll Everywhere.  This was one of the first surveying/polling website I remember.  What I liked about it was the your students could respond via text messaging.  This was great when students had phone that could only text and not get online.  You can still have student respond via text, but there is also a website that students can use which is ideal if you have laptops or ipads that your students are using.
Poll Everywhere has a lot of different choices and I'm sure you will find one that suits you.

An online classroom preloaded with videos, worksheets and activities

If it hasn't been totally obvious so far, I love using technology in my classroom.  I especially love sites and programs that allow my students to work independently as I can customize learning more and students can work at their own pace.  I recently learned about Study.com and think that it fits the bill of how I want my classroom to run.  I can engage my students with videos, quizzes, worksheets, and activities all online!

There are also videos and instruction for you as the teacher.  You can learn more about incorporating technology in the classroom or brush up on content material (great if you are teaching something new!).  Plus you are able to find worksheets and classroom activities that you can use offline.   Take a look at the video below to get an overview of what Study.com can do for you as a teacher.




Be an Effective Teacher | Study.com's Teacher Plan 


 I suggest checking it out if you are curious about what it's like.  Study.com is also offering my readers 20% their first month if you join via this link.  If you aren't ready to join, try out the free trial to get a sense of what it's like.

Do you think this is something that would be helpful to you? 

A new way to make slide shows - PhotoPeach

I recently found out about PhotoPeach so I figured I would test it out and wanted to share my experience with you.  PhotoPeach allows you to take images and turn them into a slide show.  You can also include captions and quizzes in your slideshows as well.

The basic steps include uploading your images, rearranging them in the order you want, adding a title, setting a speed, adding optionally adding descriptions and music.  Descriptions are captions for each of the slides. You can go in and edit these afterwards to change what they say or choose to have the caption centered or at the bottom of the image.

Captions can be quizzes - a little sound appears when there is a question associated with an image.  The viewer have several seconds to answer the question and then they are presented with the right answer.  As the teacher you don't see a record of the students answers, but it can be a nice review.  I especially like the idea of having students come up with these questions and making these slide shows on their own and then sharing them out with the class.

Once you are done you can share it on Facebook, MySpace (do people still use this?), Twitter, via e-mail or grab the embed code to put on your website or learning management system.  You can set your slide shows to be unlisted, public or by invitation only.  There is another option to download, but that is a paid option.  Other paid options include using more than 30 pictures in your slide show, set transitions between photos,

Quizlet's all-digital unconference

Quizlet is a tool that I love to use in my classroom.  I love that I can use it as an in-class activity and students can use it on their own to review.  There is so much that Quizlet can do that it would take a number of blog posts to go through it all.  Luckily for us, Quizlet is holding a free online unconference.  It will be going on over two days - August 9th and 10th and you can join in on any or all of the sessions.  If you can't make the sessions live, all of them will be up on Quizlet's YouTube channel in the future (no date has been listed yet).

Day 1 sessions include:

• Engaging all students with Quizlet
• Personal and Interpersonal Learning with Quizlet Live
• Fun variations on Quizlet LIfe
• Creating Interactive Study Material with Quizlet
• Organizing and Sharing with Quizless Classes
• Quizlet Hacks for Teachers
• How students use Quizlet
• New Quizlet Feature Sneak Peak

Day 2 sessions include:

• Benefits of Quizlet Teacher
• Time-Saving Hacks for Teachers
• Quizlet and Google Classroom
• Leading PD with Quizlet
• Creating ways to use Quizlet
• New Quizlet Feature Sneak Peak

Annotate Images and Videos

You've heard the expression A picture is worth a thousand words, but it can be so much more!  Thinglink is a site that allows you to take a pictures (or even a video) and annotate it so it's so much more.  The free education plan gives you and up to 100 of your students access to the basic ThingLink platform.  Of course your students can sign up for their own account that isn't connected to you if you have more than 100 students.  The only difference, is that if a student isn't connected to your account you won't be able to see what they have created unless they share the link with you.

The basic program allows you to annotate an image with little hot spots that pop up either a link to a website of your choosing or just some descriptive text.  You can also search for a previously created ThinkLInk images and remix them.  This means you can edit the image to add or remove hotspots to fir your need.   Thinglink is multiplatform and can be used on the computer or with the Android or iOS app.

Below is an example of a ThingLink on the human body (I can't take credit for this, it was created by a student ThingLink user).   As I've done here you can embed ThingLinks into any place that allows HTML code.  She decided to make the hot spots letters and numbers so that you can hover over them for more information.  You can also use small target like circles as the hot spots.  (If the image below isn't working, click here to see it)

QuizBean - great for quick feedback or simple quizzes

QuizBean is a website that you allows you to digitally assess students. You can use this as an actual quiz or for things like in class feedback or something like an exit ticket. As with many similar sites, there is a both a free and paid version. The free version lets you have 3 quizzes at a time, up with to 26 students total. This is not really the most idea for those who teach secondary and have multiple different classes. This might be good, however, if you have one section that is different than the others. (In the past I have taught one section of chemistry and the rest biology so I could use this with just my chemistry class).

The site itself does give you a lot of options for your "quiz." You have the option to scramble choices and choose from three different question types (multiple choice, multiple correct and true/false). I also like that you can add in images and videos in the questions and explanations in the answers.

Once you have the quizzes created you can share it with your students through Quizbean (assign to specific students or classes) or with url (direct link or embed link) . You can also set an expiration date when it will no longer be activate and the maximum number of attempts students can have.

Once the test has been taken the students can see their score and which questions they got right or wrong. You get to see how many students took the quiz, what the average score was and even look at a specific student and see who they did. You can print or export this data as a pdf, csv or excel file.

What's your go to site for online assessment?

A secure way to have students take tests and quizzes online

Microsoft has developed a super easy way to lock down students' computers so that they can also access the webpage that is hosting your online test. Students won't be able to use the clipboard, go to another website or apps, share their screen or print anything. All you need is the link to your online test (it doesn't have to be anything fancy; I use a form I created through Microsoft or Google) and a way to get the link out to the students. Students do need to be on a computer that is running Windows 10. I also recommend that they use the Edge browser as I haven't encountered any errors using it.

The link that you need to share with the students is ms-edu-secureassessment:<URL>!enforceLockdown where you would replace <URL> with the url to the quiz. You want to make sure that there are no spaces in the address. I would also recommend that you set the link to display as a word or phrase so that students don't just copy and paste the quiz url instead of the whole long url. If you are not sure how to do this, leave a comment with how you are sending out the link and I will make a tutorial for you! If you want more information on the Take a Test app, you can read about it here.

This post also appears on my science blog - Savvy Secondary Science

Digital Exit Tickets

Many of us use exit tickets in our classes.  Exit tickets can give us valuable information about students understanding of the topic and how we can adjust our instruction to help students.  While paper based exit tickets are a simple and easy way, they can be time consuming to correct.  Electronic exit tickets can be a great alternative.  There are a number of different ways you can go about this and here are few of my favorites.



1. Google Forms
I would say that Google Forms is the simplest way to collect exit ticket data, but depending on how link will give you more information on creating a Google Form quiz.
you use it, it may not be any easier to grade than a paper exit ticket (although easier to collect).  If you construct a quiz that consists of multiple choice, checkbook ro drop-down questions Google Forms can automatically grade it.  This

2. Poll Everywhere
Poll Everywhere is a great tool if you are looking for something simple.  You can create multiple choice questions, true/false and short answer questions.  What's unique about Poll Everywhere that your students can answer via text if they don't have internet access.  You can even put your polls right into your slideshow so polling students is even easier.  If you decide to project the results you will see them update in real time.



3. Socrative
Socrative is fun way to collect feedback (as well as do a review).  They have four different options to choose from and one of them is called exit ticket.  For this purpose, I would suggest that one.  If you are looking to use it for other purposes, the space race is a fun one and quick questions are good when you want to do an assessment on the fly.
You can learn more about using Socrative by checking out this post and this post.


4. Plickers
If you love the idea of student response systems, but your students don't have individual devices to use plckers is for you! To use Plickers in your classroom you only need one device (apple or here.
android). Students each get a card (that you can print) that looks like a QR code. Depending on the orientation that students hold the card they are presenting a different answer. All it takes is a quick pan across the room with your device and you'll get all of the students responses.  Read my full blog post about plickers

This post is cross-posted on my science blog Savvy Secondary Science

Edmodo is more than just for your students - it can be professional development as well.

Some of you may have heard of Edmodo and might even be using it in your classes.  Those of you who aren't using it probably think that it's just for your students.  Edmodo is so much for than that and can actually be a great tool for professional development.  You can join groups for things like middle school science or technology in the classroom.
Of course you can also create classroom groups to assign homework, quizzes, track performances and award badges.