Interactive Padlet Activity for Google Meets/Zoom

Like many of you, I've been trying to figure out how to make my Google Meets interactive and fun. We've done digital breakouts, Kahoot, Quizziz, Legends of Learning, scavenger hunts, and the like, but most of these have still lacked the conversation piece that I crave. Half the time it feels like I'm sitting in front of a one-way conversation, and while there are some conversations in the chat, I am mostly holding a soliloquy while students are working through those activities.

This week I am going to try something a little different, and am excited about the possibilities. Taking inspiration from NASA's Image of the day and the Change My Mind meme that keeps popping up in several of my Social Media feeds, I created the column Padlet where I placed three images and ask the students to respond to each without naming the content of the image. The way I envision this is that students will be able to do a reverse image search, find out what the picture is showing and open up an article/webpage with some information that they can read and share as a comment.  The "Change My Mind" column is an addition that I envision working much the same way, where students can do a quick search on the topic (or use their background knowledge) and write a sentence or two backed up with facts/graphs to support their claim.

If you are interested in doing something like this, good places to search for those images to share with students include:

Earth Observatory Image of the Day
NASA's Image of the day
What's going on in this Picture - New Your Times
Electron Microscope Photography - Twisted Sifter and Getty Images
Smithsonian Magazine Photo of the Day

Let me know what you think. What other interactive activities are you doing during your GoogleMeets/Zoom calls?

First Perfect Hit - The Match Function

A couple of months ago I shared with you how to create Boss Battles using Google Forms and Sheets and assign XP automatically using the Vlookup function. I spent most of my summer creating all the Boss Battles I intended to use this school year and tweaking my individual student sheets so that if a student scored a "perfect" hit on the boss they would capture it and add it to their collection.

The response of my students to this whole idea has been very encouraging. They actually look forward to Boss Battle days, literally rushing to class to participate in what you and I would actually call a testing day. However, there were a couple of little nagging issues that my more hardcore gamers immediately asked for: Extra XP for "first hit" and/or for "first perfect hit". Apparently, this is a "thing", and while they were satisfied with my answer at the time "Don't know how to do that other than scouring the sheet, which I do not want to do. If you figure it out, we can implement it", it stayed in the back of my head. 

A couple of days ago, I once again sat down to try to figure it out, and it finally crystallized.

On one of my existing Boss Battle Sheets I added:

- First hit: Easy, since you only need to bring up the first entry on the form

='Form Responses 1'!$B$2

- First perfect hit: This formula looks up the e-mail of the student Form Responses sheet (column B) and returns the value found in column C when it equals 10 (the perfect score for this Boss battle). Once it finds the first one, it stops.

=index('Form Responses 1'!B:B, match(true, 'Form Responses 1'!C:C=10, 0))  

These two formulas made the students happy since at least they now had the "bragging rights". The addition of extra XP for those two instances can be done manually, or by adding a "Perfect" sheet to your BossBattle (as in the example), where you again report those two values and input whatever XP you wish for them. You can then use the Vlookup function explained in my previous post to have Google sheets find the value for you. That formula in your leaderboard would look something like:

=IFERROR(VLOOKUP(A2,IMPORTRANGE("GoogleSheetID","Perfect!A:B"),2,0), 0)

I now have to add those formulas to all my Boss Battles, but I know that it will be a nice surprise when we come back from break. What about you, any other tweaks to share?