Podcast Series: Innovations in Education

Explore the full series of eSchool News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.

These Google Forms turn video from passive to active learning

For as long as I have been a teacher, I have been showing videos in class. While not a revolutionary idea, back when I first started I would show a video related to the lesson and hand out an accompanying question sheet to make sure the students were focusing on the main ideas. I would call out helpful reminders like “Number 3 is coming up!” to ensure that students were paying attention.

They were not.

My high school students were sometimes doodling on the paper, staring out the window, or hoping to just get the answers at the end from myself or a friend. But the content was so good and so relevant! I thought. These were primary source accounts! How could students not be engaged? What could I change to make the topic and delivery more relevant? That’s when the lightbulb went off.…Read More

Google adds new features to Classroom, Forms, and more Copy

As back-to-school approaches, Google has just released a grab-bag of new features aimed at K-12 educators—mostly upgrades to existing Google products like Classroom and Expeditions—announced in a new blog post.

For Classroom, Google’s still relatively new LMS, the company is adding summaries of student work that can be automatically shared with parents by teachers, who can send the summaries (or classroom announcements) daily or weekly as they choose.

Classroom’s mobile app is also getting some tweaks, namely the new ability to annotate documents, turning them into whiteboard-like screens. Teachers, too, can use the annotations to grade assignments, highlight passages, or demonstrate concepts. To help organize classrooms, teachers can now also add topics to posts and students can filter their streams for specific topics.…Read More

Google adds new features to Classroom, Forms, and more

As back-to-school approaches, Google has just released a grab-bag of new features aimed at K-12 educators—mostly upgrades to existing Google products like Classroom and Expeditions—announced in a new blog post.

For Classroom, Google’s still relatively new LMS, the company is adding summaries of student work that can be automatically shared with parents by teachers, who can send the summaries (or classroom announcements) daily or weekly as they choose.

Classroom’s mobile app is also getting some tweaks, namely the new ability to annotate documents, turning them into whiteboard-like screens. Teachers, too, can use the annotations to grade assignments, highlight passages, or demonstrate concepts. To help organize classrooms, teachers can now also add topics to posts and students can filter their streams for specific topics.…Read More