Life in Middle School Giveaway

One of the blogs I read, Life in Middle School, is having a giveaway with a lot of prizes.  The list of prizes include:

$25 Amazon or TPT Gift Card (Winner's Choice)

My entire 35 item TPT Store

Prize donated by Middle School OCD

Prize donated by Joy in 6th Grade

Common Core Task Cards from Carson Dellosa Publishing

Winner's Choice of 2 Items from Teaching Tales Along the Yellow Brick Road's TPT Store

Graphics Set from I'm Lovin' Lit

Paragraph of the Week Kit from Teaching in Room 6

Number of the Day Task Cards from Laffin's Learnings

12 Genre Book Reports from 2 Peas and a Dog 

Winner's Choice of a Math Unit from Ideas by Jivey

It's worth a look!

How to make a grading check-off sheet from an Excel file

If your online grading or attendance program is anything like mine you can download an Excel file with a list of the students' names.  The problem is that is also includes a whole bunch of extra information that you don't need.  Here is a short video to show you how to take that Excel sheet and turn it into a nice check-off or grading recording sheet.

Is there anything else that you are wondering how to do and would like a how to video?  Just let me know.

Top 10 Posts of August

As  round-up to the month I like to post the most popular posts of the past month.  Here is what everyone was reading in August.

1. Instant Screencasts                            
2. Online Planbooks
3. Top 10 Posts of July
4. Bill Nye Worksheets
5. 19 Pencils
6. ChemThink
7. Google Resources
8. Quizdini - online review games
9. Online Textbooks
10. 10 most popular posts of June                  

I look forward to seeing what you all are interested in in September!!  As always if there is something that I can write about to help you out, please let me know!

StudyChamps - worksheets and interactive mini-quizzes

If you are like me, you are always looking for a short worksheet to have for emergency situations or sub plans or for that student who always finishes early.  StudyChamps is a site that has a collection of worksheet and interactive for you to use.  (Besides science, it also has Social Studies, English and Math.)  I would say that this site is aimed mostly for elementary and middle school.  While the interactive are very simple, the nice thing is that the students don't need an account to be able to access them.  Just give the students the link (use a link shortener) and they are good to go!

Where do you look for those "little extras"?

Text your parents and students

Ok, I know you might be thinking "There is NO WAY I am letting my parents/students have my cell phone number!"  That's where Remind101 comes into play!  It's a website that allows you to send texts to parents and students without ever giving out your number and without having to have parents/students give your theirs.

Right now they are running a back to school contest where you can win $500 in classroom supplies just for signing up!

It also gives parents/students an option to receive your messages as e-mails if they don't want the text
messages.  My plan is to use this next year to post my homework.  Remind 101 gives you a widget that shows a summary of the past text messages.  My plan to embed this widget into my webpage so that there is a record of the homework assignments that I send out.  Plus it's a way for students who don't sign up for this to have a place to see the homework if they forget to write it down during class.

Take a look at this short video to learn more.

What is your preferred method of communication with parents/students?

URL shorteners

As you know I love using Google with my classes and often create documents such as Forms that I want to share with multiple people.  Just recently I created a Google Form that I want all of the seniors in my school fill out.  I have no way to electronically send a link so I had to include it in the flyer that gets mailed home.  If I sent a really long link I'm sure there would have be many people who either wouldn't bother typing it in or would type it in wrong.  So I shortened the link so that it is much easier.  Two websites that I use to shorten the links are www.tinyurl.com and http://goo.gl/.

Goo.gl
When you use Goo.gl not only to do you get a shortened link, but you get a QR code for that link as well as some basic analytics about how many times people clicked on your link, what browser they were using and some others.  If you are logged into your Google account (and why wouldn't you be) you can go back to goo.gl and get any of the shortened URLs that you have made in the past.

TinyURL
TinyURL is basically a simpler version of Goo.gl.  You get a shortened URL, but you don't get any of the analytics or a place to go back to access your links.  The one thing that TinyURL does that Goo.gl doesn't is that it gives you the option to use your own word as part of the URL.  For example, you can turn a link into something like http://tinyurl.com/KindleWireless (where you got to pick what you wanted part of the link to be.  Give it is a try below!

Enter a long URL to make tiny:

What can you see yourself using a link shortener for?

My Online Planbook

I have mentioned online planbooks before, and last year I really committed to PlanbookEdu.  At the end of the year they were running a special for a 6 month premium subscription (normally I just use the free subscription), but I figured I'd give it a try.  It was very helpful this year as I was able to roll over my plans from last year to this year (of course only one course that I am teaching is the same as last year's but at least it's a little time saved).
I have science classes with various labs (we call them FLEX) every 4 days.  I am able to make it so that planbook automatically grays out the days that I don't have the lab and labels the ones that I did.

Anyone have any good planning methods they want to share?