April 20

Website Worth Sharing: Google Experiments

Google encourages experimentation with their staff and other contributors. I found this collection called “Creatability” which incorporates music with visual arts and movement. I think the kids might have fun with some of these: https://experiments.withgoogle.com/collection/creatability

The Arts and Culture Experiments also look interesting: https://experiments.withgoogle.com/collection/arts-culture

Digital Wellbeing experiments would be good for older students: https://experiments.withgoogle.com/collection/digitalwellbeing

For the older students, it could be interesting to have them explore one of these and share with the class.

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May 7

App Worth Investigating: Glide

I’ve been playing with a cool app that creates phone apps from Google Sheet data. It is called Glide: https://www.glideapps.com/ Here is a sample one I created for Kelso Schools: https://go.glideapps.com/play/H9VV5EhOetFsMd4EbUFg

It works really well on phones (scan the QR code to test it out). I thought it might be an interesting tool for some of your more advanced students to work with (it’s not hard, programming wise- they  just would need to work on pulling together the data and image links). Here are some samples of how it can be used: https://www.glideapps.com/

For a high shcool, one could be created for the various clubs and could include advisors, officers, meeting times, etc. Same with sports. A community service activity would be to create one our city– maybe historical sites, places of interest, parks?

Here is a nice tutorial explaining how it works

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQPRVtxI1gM

and some ideas on how you could use it from Richard Byrne https://www.freetech4teachers.com/2019/04/5-ideas-for-using-glide-to-create-your.html

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November 29

Hour of Code Resources 2018

Whether or not you are planning activities for Computer Science Week next week, you might want to check out some new resources from our friends at Code.org and CSFirst.

An exciting new Hour of Code activity is the Dance Party challenge https://hourofcode.com/danceparty. I love that this activity will appeal to a new audience of coders, dancers and musicians,- there are lots of good songs and the latest dance moves (yes, flossing is there!) to choose from. (You’ll want headphones for this one!)

They have added a 4th Minecraft activity: Minecraft Voyage Aquatic: https://studio.code.org/s/aquatic/stage/1/puzzle/1 which will keep your Minecraft lovers challenged.

Remember that you can use the grade level filters at the top of the page  on https://code.org/learn  to sift through the ever growing selection of coding activities.

CS First has launched a new Scratch based activity called  “An Unusual Discovery”. The video tutorials really walk you through the activities and give you a solid foundation in how to code with Scratch: https://csfirst.withgoogle.com/c/cs-first/en/an-unusual-discovery/an-unusual-discovery/an-unusual-discovery.html You may want to explore the resources on their teacher page first: https://csfirst.withgoogle.com/s/en/discovery-teachers

Remember that the Computer Science Symbaloo has a bunch of resources that you can use: https://www.symbaloo.com/mix/computerscience-maker

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June 12

Website Worth Sharing: Google Feud

If you’re looking for a fun activity to use as a reward or to finish out the day/period, you might want to check out Google Feud. It’s like Family Feud, but you guess the most frequently used Google Autocompletes for certain categories. http://www.googlefeud.com/

UPDATE: While most teachers found this to be OK, one user shared that she came across some pretty racy answers that weren’t appropriate for school. You may be able to avoid this by passing on the prompts that seem a bit iffy. You can also freeze your projector to make sure that the answers that come up are appropriate and move on if they are not. If you freeze it, you’ll see the answers on your laptop, but they won’t be projected until you unfreeze the screen.

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