Thing 33: eBook Creation

So in my Anything Goes Google post I decided to check out How to Create an ebook with Google Slides because I wondered it I could share student work that way.  I would love to post some of the research projects that my students have been creating on my website.  Here is the link to a sample eBook I made with Google Slides.  It explains some of my thinking: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5r5qV7yug_iZ01XNkU1RnF0Y2s/view?usp=sharing

That detour made me explore some other eBook-type options.

I went to 2 BRAND NEW tools to help students display work, reflect which discusses Drive Slides a new extension that makes slides out of the images in a specific folder on your Drive account, as well as Slide Shot which takes screen shots of your computer every minute and makes them into a presentation  I don’t really see myself using either of these tools, however.  It had the bonus of telling me about PhotosForClass.com.  Another CC site to send my students to.  My sixth graders would have loved it for their river project presentations.  I’m not sure that all of the images they included in their Google Slides were ones that they had the rights to use despite my education on the topic.  Does anyone else ever have the problem?

So, in Polly’s eBook Creation post, I realized that I can download my Google Docs as PDFs, too, as well as in ePub format.  I guess I don’t have to get too fancy to make this work.  I didn’t bother to try the ePub format at this point, but I wanted to make sure I could find it later.

I decided to try just converting a Google Doc to PDF.  Here is the link to it that describes what I learned in the process: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5r5qV7yug_ieFF2QUlndHpKTEk/view?usp=sharing

Reading the assignment further brought me to Comics – Great way to combine storyboarding, drawing and writing. Ironically, I was looking into comics yesterday for a lesson with a first grade class.  Since it is the end of the year and we want to do something fun, the teacher wants to students to have her students fill in speech bubbles to make short stories.  I was able to download a few paper templates, but I wondered what was available online that wouldn’t be too hard for the students. 

I decided to try out one I had explored years ago: www.MakeBeliefsComix.com I made this comic without too much trouble:

You can print, save, or email, but the site doesn’t save the comic for you.  You can also choose the number of panels you wish to have.

Then, I went to Read Write Thinks’s Comic Creator.  I usually like this site for its simplicity.  I have used the pamphlet creator with my fourth graders before. The characters are not as nicely drawn, but the site is easier to use.  They say you can only print it, but you could always save as a PDF which I did here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5r5qV7yug_ialhHT0lEOTNwcWs/view?usp=sharing

I went from Thing 33 eBook Creation to Thing 4: Digital Storytelling Tools and then to Thing 5: Presentation Tools because they all seem so related, at least to me.  In Presentation Tools, there was a mention of using Google Slides with a link to Slides Carnival – free templates for Google Slides. There I found a terrific comic tool!  The Crab presentation template which has adorable animals with speech bubbles!  It is perfect for little learners!  We could use it online or even print it out in full page size so they don’t have trouble writing in the small spaces.  Here is a link to the comic I made:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5r5qV7yug_iMm1YMHlOWkxJQ0E/view?usp=sharing

(BTW, I do know how to shorten the URLs, but I also know that my school’s NERIC filter doesn’t allow access to shortened URLs, so I just don’t.)

Slides Carnival’s Crab presentation template also taught me how to add Special Characters into a Google Slide presentation. Specifically, it taught me to add emojis.  This will be very cool for my future lessons! 

The Book Creators for Chromebooks link pretty much confirmed for me that Google Docs is probably the easiest way to go to achieve my goal.  But it was still a very good link to follow.  I am planning to work toward buying the library our own set of Chromebooks.  It is hard to share with the other teachers and still have the equipment to use with all of my classes.  

Thing 41: Anything Goes Google

I started by looking at DocStickers: A Docs + Keep Integration for Old School feedback.  These seem interesting, but I haven't fully embraced the Google Classroom yet.  I'm working my way, but... Depending on how my sixth grade classes end up going, I may do it next year.  I certainly could have gone fully with Google Classroom this year as most of my lessons are in Google Drive.  Aside from sixth grade, I am currently having my second and third graders type in Google Docs, so I am doing a lot of commenting there to help them revise.   I'm not sure if I should DocSticker them before they are completed or not.  A thought to ponder.

DocStickers are based on Google Keep which I had heard mention of, but not used.  That led me to read 10 ways Google Keep can help streamline life at school.  I am definitely interested in this tool.  I also checked out Using Google Keep for Grading Comments in Docs which is from the Control Alt Achieve blog.  (I have been to this blog before and Eric Curts really seems to have a lot of valuable posts on it.) I am going to email one of the HS English teachers to be sure that she knows about Google Keep for Grading Comments as I know she likes to comment on or mark papers on her tablet at home.

I had already decided to check out Spreadsheet Activities for all Subjects which is from the same blog.  It mentioned Flippity which I already posted on, but also has Random Generators, too.  Flippity has a random student generator tool, but you have to publish your spreadsheet to the web and hence to the world to do it.  I just worry about putting student names out there. Obviously every John doesn't matter so long as you don't add last names, but there are students with much more unique names  in school too and since parents are now saying that they don't even want us to take a picture of their child much less publish them to the web, I don't want to be in a sticky situation.  Since the students already have Google accounts through the district, using a Random Generator on Google Drive is not creating any more vulnerability.

I decided to check out How to Create an ebook with Google Slides because I wondered it I could share student work that way.  I would love to post some of the research projects that my students have been creating on my website.  Here is the link to a sample eBook I made with Google Slides.  It explains some of my thinking: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5r5qV7yug_iZ01XNkU1RnF0Y2s/view?usp=sharing

I have finally really used Google Classroom with my students. I always have big plans, but I guess I was concerned about the roll-out of it.  I used it with my fifth graders to create the citation pages for their ecosystem inquiry projects.  I made a template though it wasn’t quite right because it didn’t say where they were to place their copy.  I have to do some more reading on this before next year, but I think that I will try to use Google Classroom more.  It certainly was easier in some ways than my guided citation lessons.  I wrote the descriptions of how to do each step into the template (then told them to erase the directions when they were done) so that if they failed to listen +/or watch as I demonstrated on the SMARTboard, they still had a fallback. Not that any of my students would ever daydream. 😃

I also really got into using suggesting and commenting on Google Docs this spring.  I had my second and third graders type their projects into Google Docs.  Then, I went through each one suggesting the convention corrections (spelling, punctuation, grammar) and commenting on missing information (topic sentences, concluding sentences, details, etc.) All in all it was pretty successful, though an awful lot of work. The link to Google Classroom: Pull Student Paragraphs and Give Feedback caught my eye.  I will want to look at it again, but I don’t think it will work for these second and third graders as it doesn’t show them where the problem is.  The feedback is just put at the top of their doc.

A detour was prompted by a quick check of  What’s New in Google led me to another post Create Cloze Reading Activities with Google Sheets and Other Tools.  I used his first suggestion, http://l.georges.online.fr/tools/cloze.html, to make a Cloze activity.  You can see it here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/15skb4kXOpIi4ccd4Kao1g9cnmXsr8ptwyGlxp0kGSmg/edit?usp=sharing This seems to be a great tool for teachers as you can choose every nth word, articles, prepositions, wh- words, and more OR you can choose your own words to eliminate.  These could be your target spelling/vocabulary words of the week.  The Google Sheet Template he offers does not seem as good because you have to specify the number word you want to delete, such as every 8^th word.

I know I am jumping around a little, but an incident at school really got me worrying about security with Google Drive.  Not that I am keeping anything personally valuable there, but as a school we are sharing more student data via Google Drive for RtI and DDI purposes, for example.  We know that there was some sort of error in sharing at school and it seems like it would be SOOOO easy to click the wrong name when you are sharing if you are at all distracted (which for me is any time before 4 pm as everyone and there brother comes into the library to ask me for help!) I did decide to create two big folders for my school Drive account: Student and Teacher with the teacher folder being view only at the get-go, but I am sure that there must be a better way to go about this.  I asked the IT guys to explore/create Google groups in the hopes that we could somehow restrict access to things via Google group (Student, Teacher, etc.), but that won’t help for a while –if they get to it at all. Does anyone have any advice on where to learn more about this?  I will post on the discussion board as well.

A quick search led me to 4 Important Google Drive Skills for Teachers to Learn by @LauraCallisen She made the following suggestions:

• Make sure your Google account is secure and that you use a strong password. It is also a good idea to set any devices that you may use to access the Google account you use as teacher to not save passwords.
• If you have documents that are for your eyes only, keep them on Google drive folders that you do not share. 
• Create multiple folders for different users and different purposes. Don’t try to put everything in or two places and hope that you’ve secured things correctly. A general rule of thumb is that if you allow someone access to a folder, you should assume they will be able to access all of the documents within that folder.
• Create groups so that you do not have to set permissions on an individual level
• Finally, select permissions by selecting the folder, clicking into the share button and then setting permissions.

A lot of that went along with what I was already thinking.

I also checked out 10 Tips for Folders in Google Drive.  Although it didn’t really give me any good ideas, it is a good source of info about how to use Google Drive, organize it, and change permissions.

Well, all in all, I think this Thing gave me a lot to work with.