Tales of a Techy Teacher

I am so excited to be going digital with my lab books this year. Despite being a "techy teacher", I have always had my students keep a graph paper composition notebook for labs in chemistry.

Provide Lab as a Google Doc Copy
For this lab, my students were provided with a lab handout as a Google Doc that would force them to make a copy. This was done by sharing the link to the doc and changing the word "edit" to "copy". It was my first time doing it and it worked like a charm!

Students Record Data in Doc
Students then used their copy to write their purpose, answer their pre-lab questions, and record their dat while working in lab. My students all have an iPad, so that is the device they were working on.

Create a Class Data Table in Sheets
In a shared folder with my class, I created a class data sheet. Each group typed their data into the sheet and we ended up with a beautiful collaborative data table.

Create Individual Data Tables in Sheets
I wanted each studen…

"Do you get it?""Does that make sense?" "Do you understand?" Since I can't actually get inside my students heads, I find myself constantly asking myself and asking my students these questions. I want to ensure they understand the concept and be able to work in small groups with the students that need additional assistance. When technology was introduced into my classroom, I knew there had to be a better way.
I discovered these three tools and my classroom has never been the same!
Socrative
Socrative is a great option for getting student feedback right away. Teachers can create quizzes, polls, or activities and launch them from the teacher version. Students join the "Room" and are able to answer the questions. My favorite things about Socrative are the wide variety of question types (MC, FR, TF, etc) and the "See How We Did" button. The button allows you to not only see how many got it right and how many got it wrong, but also how man…

For the last several years I have maintained a Google Site that functioned as a content storage system for my classes. At the time, my school was working with an older learning management system (LMS) that could not support the size of the files and videos I was trying to post for my students. While working with my Google Site, I learned how to embed items into a webpage. I made a Google Form to serve as a "Contact Me" page and embedded it into a page of the site.

Fast forward 4 years... We are now using Blackbaud's onCampus as our LMS and I am transferring my content to my pages there. (More to come on using onCampus in a future post.) Last year was our first year with this system and I continued to run my Google Site side by side with my course page. This year, I am all in on onCampus! I am setting up pages for each of my classes and will continue to provide a user friendly way for my students to access their content.

This week, I embedded my first form into my onCampu…