Weekly Tech Tips and News for November 17, 2017

Photo from Church Iglesia via Flickr

There will be no post next week, due to the short Thanksgiving week. I'll take a moment now to wish you a happy Thanksgiving. Hopefully you will be able to spend some quality time with your family, and find many reasons to be thankful. Maybe you'll find some tips to be thankful for in this post - or answers to questions. Have you ever wondered why you have to wait for your computer to go through the whole shut down process? Perhaps you've been looking for ways to make it easier for your younger students, or students who struggle with keyboarding, to more easily type in their assignments? Are you looking for a way to make it easier for you or your students to manage larger projects and keep track of people and resources? With Thanksgiving coming up, are you interested in a way to incorporate that theme into your lessons? Are you just looking for ideas to make your lessons more fun? Read on!

• What Happens if You Don't Shut Down Your Computer Properly?
• EDU in 90:  Google Keep in the Classroom
• Using Google Voice Typing in Docs with Elementary Students
• 5 Ways to Use Comic Creation in Elementary School Classrooms
• Multiple Correct Answers in Google Forms Quizzes
• Interactive Learning Menus (Choice Boards) with G Suite
• Kanbanchi Project Management Tool
• Search and Find Educational Games on Classtools.net
• New Challenges and Thanksgiving Collection from Kahoot!

What Happens if You Don't Shut Down Your Computer Properly?

Spend 4 minutes finding out why it's important to shut down properly - disregard the commercial at the end.

EDU in 90:  Google Keep in the Classroom 

Using Google Voice Typing in Docs with Elementary Students

Using Google Voice Typing in Docs with Elementary Students, from Teaching Little Techies by Robin Limpert
Do your students get frustrated when typing in their thoughts or stories? Perhaps you have students with special needs? Introduce Google's Voice Typing tool to help them until their keyboarding skills improve.

5 Ways to Use Comic Creation in Elementary School Classrooms

5 Ways to Use Comic Creation in Elementary School Classrooms, from Free Technology for Teachers by Richard Byrne with guest post by Stephanie Krisulevicz
Kids love comics - both reading them and creating them. Why not infuse some fun into your lessons to keep them engaged. There are suggestions for using them in just about every subject.

Multiple Correct Answers in Google Forms Quizzes

Multiple Correct Answers in Google Forms Quizzes, from Control Alt Achieve by Eric Curts
This is a wonderful enhancement to Google Forms Quizzes. The ability to automatically grade short answer quesitons, and allow for more than one correct answer is so helpful.

Interactive Learning Menus (Choice Boards) with G Suite

Interactive Learning Menus (Choice Boards) with G Suite, from Shake Up Learning with Kasey Bell
Make your choice boards interactive with G Suite. There are free templates available in this post, so you won't even need to start from scratch.

Kanbanchi Project Management Tool

Kanbanchi Project Management Tool from Free Technology for Teachers by Richard Byrne
Kanbanchi integrates with Google Drive, and is perfect to use with either your students or co-workers. It will help tame big projects by assigning tasks to others, pushing due dates out to a Google Calendar, attaching Google Drive files, etc.

Search and Find Educational Games on Classtools.net

New Challenges and Thanksgiving Collection from Kahoot!

Kahoot! is offering 20 Thanksgiving themed games, just in time for the big day next week. Some are about Thanksgiving for kids, trivia, customs, and history, but there are also Thanksgiving themed Kahoot!s for math and science. Check out the Thanksgiving collection. Another new offering are the Kahoot! Challenges. Students can complete a Kahoot! quiz on their own or at home, and it will grade itself. It's both fun and a time saver! The challenges will work on the new Kahoot! app, so if students don't have internet access at home, but someone in their family has a smart phone, they can still participate.