A Few Google Drive Features

Google Forms

When you click the "new" button in your Google Drive, there is a "more" button at the bottom.  When you click it you find many great features including Google Forms.  A teacher can easily create a quiz in Google Forms.  The questions can be multiple-choice or include a checkbox.  You can also require students to answer the questions with a short answer or a paragraph.  However, only quizzes with multiple choice or checkboxes can be made into a self-grading quiz.  Here are the steps to creating a self-grading quiz:

1.  You will click on the settings icon and select quizzes.

2.  You move the slider to the right to indicate that you're making a quiz.

3.  Choose whether you will immediately release the grade or not release it at all.

4.  Lastly, you will choose what your students will see: missed questions, correct answers, and/or point values. 

This video provides more in-depth instructions on how to create quizzes with Google Forms. 

Finally, teachers can also provide their students with answer feedback for both correct and incorrect answers.  Here is the link to one of the quizzes I created for my second-graders: Expanded Form Quiz


 

Google Drawings

Educators can use Google Drawings to create diagrams, charts, mind maps, graphic organizers, Venn diagrams, infographics, and much more.  Teachers can also share their drawings as an assignment through Google Classroom.  I created a graphic organizer that allowed my students to list any adjective they could think of to describe a dog.  When I put this graphic organizer into Google Classroom, I selected "make a copy for each student".  This allows students to edit their own copy without changing the original document.  This is the link to my graphic organizer: Adjectives

 Here is a neat video that provides teachers with 7 ways to include Google Drawings into the classroom:

 Google Drive Add-Ons and Apps

One valuable Google Drive add-on that I found this week is Pear Deck.  Pear Deck allows teachers to create interactive slides for any Google Slides presentation.  These interactive slides keep students fully engaged in the lesson 100% of the time.  Teachers can check for student's understanding throughout the lesson by providing them with questions for certain slides.  You can use number response, multiple-choice, text, and web slide questions.  The student's answers are displayed anonymously on the classroom projector.  Teachers can also use Pear Deck to create exit tickets for their students.

Here is a video to help you get started with Pear Deck:

I also recently found a new app for Google Drive called Fluency Tutor.  One neat aspect of Fluency Tutor is that teachers can import their students directly from Google Classroom.  Fluency Tutor offers over 500 pre-selected Lexile-leveled passages.  Teachers can also select their own passages from web pages.  Teachers share a passage with their students using the Google Classroom "share" button.  Students are then able to record themselves reading the passage.  They are able to read the passage as many times as they want before they submit it to their teacher.  Fluency Tutor also includes a text dictionary, picture dictionary, and a translator tool.  Finally, check out this article for more reasons why you should use Fluency Tutor.