Category: Teaching Tools

Teaching Tools

Enter For a Chance to Win!

Terri Eichholz

I know, I know. If you receive my posts in your school e-mail, the embedded video below from @Abbott ElementaryABC is probably blocked. But I couldn’t resist the clip because it’s equally touching and funny. If you’re a teacher, you know the constant tug of war between your awareness that you never went into this profession for the money and the natural human-need to feel valued. Hopefully, you can visit the link for the video or watch it outside of school if you didn’t have a chance to catch this episode of Abbott Elementary.

@abbottelementaryabc It’s #TeacherAppreciationWeek! Join #AbbottElementary ♬ original sound – Abbott Elementary

In the meantime, I want you to know how much you are appreciated. Over the years, I’ve reached out to some of my former teachers to tell them what they meant to me, and I hope that you receive those reminders, too. From the bottom of my heart, I feel immense gratitude to the teachers who shaped me into the person I am today as well as the incredible colleagues I worked with for 29 years.

To show my appreciation, I am giving away free tuition for two of my online courses: Harnessing Hexagons and Genius Hour. There will be one lucky winner for each, and everyone who enters will receive my newsletter that will contain a coupon code for 50% off each course. Entries need to be received by 5/12 at midnight CST. I’ll use a random drawing extension to choose the two winners. You can still enter to try to win the free courses even if you already receive my newsletter. Since these are online and self-paced, they are the perfect way to earn some credits when you don’t feel rushed this summer or, if you prefer to protect those weeks off by not doing school-related tasks there is no deadline.

It’s hard to find ways to give back to a profession that gave me so much over the years, but I try my best to share free downloads and tips with the hope that you will receive my heart-felt message that I respect and value you so much.

Thank you!

Creative Thinking, K-12, Teaching Tools

May I Help You With Some Resources for This Month?

Terri Eichholz

Well, it happened. May snuck up on me and here we are. It was amusing to wake up to some Twitter drama about Teacher Appreciation Week, which is generally the first week of May, but Google has deemed that it doesn’t start until next week. Supposedly, whoever actually decides these things decided TAW needs to be during the first full week of May, and when the month starts on a Monday instead of a Sunday that doesn’t count. I don’t really know who is in charge of these seemingly arbitrary calendar declarations, but I do think the cherry on top is that it’s actually Principals’ Day. So, Happy Principals’ Day to those of you who are one or are aspiring to be one. And for goodness sake, just appreciate teachers every day and that dilemma will disappear once and for all.

May Wakelet

I do have some Teacher Appreciation links in this month’s Wakelet if you are so inclined. I also have May the 4th (Star Wars Day), Cinco de Mayo, and Mother’s Day resources. And — I know some of you are going to grit your teeth in frustration, but remember some schools actually started their years in late July, early August last year — the link to my End of the School Year Wakelet.

Other Wakelets

If you haven’t checked out my collection of Wakelets, you may find some other desperately needed resources here. From Brainteasers and Puzzles to Fun Stuff, if you are trying to survive testing or just the sheer exhaustion of making it through this many months of the school year, there are plenty of options to help you keep putting some “zing” into your lessons even if you feel like you’ve used them all.

Celebrate with a Pool Party

And, if worse comes to worse you can always download my Summer Pool Party Creative Thinking Packet. It’s free and I’ve used it with all ages to give students the opportunity to practice their S.C.A.M.P.E.R. skills.

from my Summer Pool Party packet
Canva Choice Board made with Bingo Card app
3-12, Creative Thinking, Critical Thinking, Teaching Tools

Make a Canva Bingo Card/Choice Board

Terri Eichholz

Canva for Education has many bingo card templates, but did you know that it also has a Bingo generator app? This means you can not only make Bingo cards, but also even create choice boards that look engaging. I’ll go through the steps that I used to make a choice board in a few minutes.

Get Your Words

What do you want to put on your Bingo Card? Maybe it’s vocabulary or famous people for a bingo game, or maybe it’s tasks for a choice card. Maybe you don’t know. If you don’t already have a list, you can open a Canva Doc and use the Magic Write feature to generate some ideas. (There will also be a limited amount of pre-formatted lists in the Bingo Generator app.) I went ahead and gave Magic Write the following prompt, “9 tasks for 3rd graders to do to demonstrate their understanding of metamorphosis. Each task should be 4 words or less. You will want the prompt to specify the number of words if it’s generating tasks or the sentences will be too long for the generator to fit properly in each cell.

Get Your Template

Once you have the words/short phrases you want on the card listed, highlight and copy them. Then, it’s time to find your Bingo Card template. Do a search on Canva’s home page for “Bingo Card” and choose the one that looks close enough to what you’d like in design and number of cells. Open the template. Delete anything that’s already in the cells, and design your card. If you think you are going to want multiple cards that have the cells randomly rearranged, make that many duplicates of your card when it’s design is ready.

Find the App and Paste in Your List

Since I have been using the app, it appears in my left menu as “Bingo Cards.” I can click on it, and the generator menu that you see above appears. However, you may have to locate the app the first time by clicking on “Apps” in the menu and searching for it. Note that if “Bingo Cards” does not appear in your search, you may be using a design in which that app doesn’t work. For example, you can’t find it when you are making a Doc.

Paste your list in where it prompts you to “Enter some words.” Then select the grid size and number of cards you would like to generate as well as the font. I turned off gridlines because I already have a pretty template and don’t want the lines.

Create Bingo Cards

When you hit the purple button, cards will be generated on the side as you can see below. These are actually transparent images that you can drag over to your template, resize, and fit them as you like.

The generator went a bit wonky with the font sizes, I’m guessing because I went with phrases of different lengths instead of single words. I’m okay with that because it still save me a ton of time, the words are legible, and the template makes it less stark.

Conclusion

Once you do this process one or two times, it gets even faster. You can probably even have older students make their own Bingo Cards or Choice Boards, and they will enjoy the magic. Let me know if you think of any other ways to utilize this Canva App! Check out this post if you want to learn more about how I combined AI with Canva to make differentiated Choice Menus.

K-12, Teaching Tools

Would You Rather AI Generator from Auto Classmate

Terri Eichholz

The “Would You Rather” AI Generator from Auto Classmate was first brought to my attention in a newsletter from the fabulous Donna Lasher over at Big Ideas For Little Scholars. (You should seriously sign up for her newsletter. I learn new things in every edition!)

What is Auto Classmate?

Auto Classmate is one of the millions of sites that have popped up recently in order to leverage the power of AI. However, it is one of the few that has the sole mission of serving educators. “We strive to provide innovative and ethical resources to transform the future of education and–ultimately–the world.”

To that end, the site currently has three AI tools with more on their way. The tools are: Would Rather Question Generator, Activation and Engagement Activity Generator, and Lesson Plan and Activity Forecast Tool. Feeling a bit of spring-time fever, I decided to go with testing out the Would You Rather Questions for a bit of fun. I may feature the other tools on later blog posts.

Would You Rather Wear a Garbage Bag or Pick Up Trash?

The Would You Rather AI Tool is very easy to use. No sign up or registration is required. Just choose the grade level, type in a topic, and decide the tone you want for your questions. I went with 5th grade, Earth Day, and (of course) Absurd and Hilarious.

screenshot from Auto Classmate’s Would You Rather Tool

It took less than 30 seconds for the generator to give me these suggestions which I could then copy and paste, download as a PDF, or add more details to refine the questions:

Why Do This?

The bottom of the response page in this Auto Classmate Tool offers suggestions for using these for warm-ups, as part of an assessment, or as brain breaks. That’s why I love the options for choosing the level of seriousness and the grade levels. If you’d like an idea of how I’ve used Would You Rather questions in math (kind of a combination of the serious and the absurd), check out this post.

More Resources

I’ve written about a few other AI tools specifically designed for teachers such as Curipod and Conker AI. I’ve also written about how I’ve used Chat GPT for differentiation ideas. To find these articles and a plethora of links to sites that will help you teach your students about Artificial Intelligence, you can visit my Wakelet collection here. I’ll be adding this one to it as well as to my “Fun Stuff” Wakelet for those of you in the midst of standardized testing who just want some brain breaks.

Example of Stickity being used to differentiate with colors for different groups of students
Teaching Tools

Stickity for Schools

Terri Eichholz

Stickity for Schools is an add-on for Google Docs and Google Slides. The name practically says it all, as these are virtual “stickers” that you can add to documents and presentations.

Once you get the add-on, you can open a Google Doc or Google Slide presentation, and you can get your Stickity sidebar by going to your Add-Ons in your menu. In the little gray menu under the Stickity logo, you will see icons to indicate the categories of stickers. Choose from one of the categories, and click on a sticker to add to your slide or doc.

But… there’s more! Stickity is thoughtfully designed to help with accessibility, from the alt text that is provided with each sticker for students using a screen reader to the contrasting colors for students/staff with low vision.

The graphics (some with animations) are designed to support learning by helping students who may have hearing loss or are not proficient in English.

There is even a section of timers that were specifically chosen because they do not have distracting music or make loud noises when time is up!

This is a great tool for teachers who implement Universal Design for Learning, special ed teachers, or anyone who differentiates for multiple needs in their classroom (which pretty much every educator needs to do).

To learn more about the features of Stickity, watch this video.

At the moment, Stickity is free. The website is pretty simple, so I believe that it’s relatively new. That being said, remember that whenever you accept a Google Add-On, you are usually giving permission for a 3rd-party to access your Google Drive. For that reason, you may not be able to access Stickity in some school districts, and you should always be cautious about giving such permissions. Be sure to take a look at their Privacy Policy here.

soccer ball bouncing
3-12, Creative Thinking, Student Products, Teaching Tools

Create a Custom Animation in Canva

Terri Eichholz

Along with a number of other new features, Canva just released a new custom animation tool which I think is going to be really useful to teachers — especially when creating presentations and videos. For awhile, Canva has given us the option to animate text and elements with the standard choices you will find in many other programs, such as to have them “pop” or “drift” into the canvas. But now once you choose an element and select, “Animate” from the top menu, you will see a new button that allows you to “Create an Animation” by dragging your element around to design your own path.

If you want to see how useful this can be for education, take a look at the Tweet I’ve embedded below that demonstrates using this feature in a presentation about digestion.

Canva even offers the template to this exact presentation if you’d like to customize it for yourself here.

I believe that you can also do something similar in Powerpoint and Keynote, but not yet in Google Slides (Google for Edu is rolling out a bunch of new upgrades, though, so you should watch for those.) However, Canva’s is the most user-friendly method that I’ve seen so far. Plus, you’ve gotta love those magic keyboard shortcuts you can use when you present!

In case you missed them, here are some of my other articles on unique ways to use Canva, which is FREE for teachers:

  1. Leveraging AI for Learning with ChatGPT or Canva
  2. Canva — Those Three Dots Aren’t Just Decoration
  3. Make a Manifesto with Canva
  4. Presenting with Canva
  5. Bulk Create Valentines with Canva
  6. Create Even More in the Classroom with Canva