Embed a Live Google Slide into a Google Doc

This post falls under the "How did I not know this before" category...

Over the last few days, I have been updating my 8th-grade waves unit and will be using this performance task I found online. As I was working, I was going back and forth between the document and a slide deck "template" that I want students to use as a guide to organizing their work. My students tend to lose track of things so this was my way of ensuring that once they got to the end of the task they had everything they needed. Anyway, long story short I placed the document, which is rather long, into my preferred delivery site (WIX) and embedded the slide deck but was not particularly satisfied with the way it looked. I needed side by side and rather specific placements.
I definitely did not want to just give access to the slide deck since I know that my students would just make a copy of the template and use that instead of going through the instructions. I also did not want to add all the instructions to the slide deck. So then I decided that I wanted to add the slide deck to the instructions document.

I know that I could take a screenshot of the slides I wanted to reference and then link them, but while searching I came across the absolute easiest way of doing this:

How to Embed a Google Slide Into a Google Doc

1. Open your Google slide deck.

2. From the left side panel, click and select the slide you want to add to your Google doc. Go up to Menu and select Edit > Copy.

3. Open the Google Doc where you want your slide to be. Place your cursor in the location in the document where you want to add the slide.

4. Go up to the menu and select Edit > Paste. 

5. Choose "Link to presentation" to make it an active link.

Google docs will treat this as any other image, so you can resize, add borders, crop to shape or whatever you want. The absolute beauty of this is that the link not only directs the user (my students) to the specific slide, but also any changes made to the slide in the slide deck are updated in the doc by just clicking on update. You can see how this worked in the document I was talking about before:

I am thinking that this little trick can be used for hyperdocs, instructables or even lab reports. What do you think. What other uses do you see?

Google Draw - the neglected sibling

Click here to go to tips.

For the last several years I have been using Google products for most of my authoring needs. However, my students and I seldom venture outside of the three products that appear when you click that red NEW button on our drives.

Although I also create Forms and have my students create Sites, we have all mostly turned a blind eye to Draw. In fact, up until a few months ago a search of the thousands of documents that I have in my Drive produced maybe 50 or so Draw documents, and those were mostly simple flowcharts or places to host images that I collected to add to Slides and Docs.

This all started changing after I took the "Making Infographics" course at KQED teach. The course itself walked me through the creation process, thinking like a designer, and provided me with many resources for images, icons, fonts and color palettes. From Pixlr to build graphics, to Pexels - a great source of CC0 high def images, to Piktochart - an easy to use infographic maker, the course gave me the tools to start creating.

Now, you may be thinking what does this have to do with Google Draw? Well, once I started on that creative path, I started exploring what I could bring to the classroom. Piktochart, like Canva and Smore (two other sources for creating visually appealing graphics), have two limitations to their use in the classroom - they require an account on the platform and they do not allow multiple editors, or if they do, it cannot be simultaneous. On both those fronts, Google Draw becomes the winner; yes you do need a Google account to use Draw, but most schools have that in place. Before I continue, I do have to give kudos to Canva for two great "side" resources they have - Font Combinations and Color Pallete that you can then use on Google Draw.

Anyway, once it became clear that I would be "limited" to using Draw for creating infographics, I set about figuring out how my students could make them "pretty". Thankfully, many educators and designers have shared their own tips and tricks freely:

• Creating Eyepopping Infographics with Google Drawings - @jmattmiller
• Have Students Create Infographics Using Google Draw - @alicekeeler
• 8 Creative Uses of Google Drawings You Shouldn’t Ignore - @saikytweets
• Google Drawings CHEAT SHEET for Teachers and Students! - @ShakeUpLearning

 Clickable Google Draw Image

Once you familiarize yourself with the basics, the possibilities that open up are endless.Using Google Draw my students and I have created posters, mind maps and trading cards like the ones you see below.

     

Using the technique discussed in "Embedding a Google Drawing with Clickable Links", I've also used it to create clickable learning paths (below) and even display the ranking system for my gamified classroom, which you see at the top of this post.

Motion

Open Motion

Have you found other ways to use Google Draw? I'd love to hear about them.

Embedding a Google Drawing with Clickable Links

I'll start this post by stating the obvious, the easiest way to create a drawing with clickable links/tags is to use Thinglink. This site has been my go-to for any type of image tagging and while I love all their possibilities, including adding custom icons and tagging 360 images, I recently had the issue of wanting to both create the image and the tags at the same time.

A little backstory. 

The culmination of my Interdependence of Organisms unit has my students creating blog posts for different organisms in the Amazonian rainforest where they write about how each organism has a specific role to fulfill in its environment. In class, we then use those posts to create a Google drawing of the food web with links to their work. Everything works great as long as you stay within Google Drawing. It is not until I tried to embed that tagged image the students created anywhere that I realized that those tags the students painstakingly created do not work!

In the past, I've always solved the problem using Thinglink.

But as I mentioned before, this has the "problem" of having to create the image first and then add the tags. In class, this does not always work for a variety of reasons. The most important being that the image is completely static. You cannot change anything on the actual image so the students cannot add any more arrows (or organisms) as they discover other relationships when they discuss their work. Since this is a collaborative end product, the permanence of the image does not work for my purposes.

The workaround

It is a little convoluted, and it requires a little risk-taking simply because of the unfamiliarity you may have with some of the steps, but bear with me. In the end, you will have created the code with working links that can be embedded on any site or platform.

1. Open up a Google drawing. Add your background and items, and tag to your heart's content. In case you do not know how to do this, Karen Ferguson's video does a great job of explaining this.

2. Once you and your students are "done", or even before if you wish, publish your drawing to the web (File>Publish to the web). It does not matter when you do this since any changes you make after the fact will be updated automatically, which is exactly what my students needed. Do not worry about the size or the code at all. You just need it to be "on the web".

3. Go to Google sites, and create a simple blank site. You can name this whatever you like, and edit the homepage to insert your google drawing.

4. Unclick "include border around Google drawing" and "include title". At this point, you will choose your height and width. I recommend setting both to the size of your actual drawing.

5. Save the Google site. This creates a version of the site, with your Google drawing that includes those pesky clickable links you were aiming for.

6. Once you have saved, right-click anywhere on the image and select inspect

7. For those of us not familiar with working with HTML or the developer tools, this is where it gets scary. But don't fret it is simply a matter of finding the code and copy/pasting it in three quick steps:

1. On the tab that appears, select Elements. Find the code where you see <div id="sites-chrome-everything-scrollbar">, and click on it to expand it.
2. Scroll down until you find  <div class = "sites-embed-border-off sites - embed"... style=width 800 (or other number) px;" and right click on that.
3. Select edit as HTML (third option). A box within the space appears, filled with the code you are looking for! Select everything within that box, and copy it.

It should look something like this:

<div class="sites-embed-border-off sites-embed" style="width:600px;"><div class="sites-embed-object-title" style="display:none;">Interdependence Rainforest Blogs</div><div class="sites-embed-content sites-embed-type-sketchy"><iframe src="https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1ELpo7S7a0htZsqckkHkEtaI3KMXORFPStvVZGnVzt_o/preview?authuser=0&amp;h=400&amp;hl=en&amp;w=600" width="600" height="400" title="Interdependence Rainforest Blogs" frameborder="0" id="811835776" allowfullscreen="true" mozallowfullscreen="true" webkitallowfullscreen="true"></iframe></div><div class="sites-embed-footer"><div class="sites-embed-footer-icon sites-sketchy-icon">&nbsp;</div><a href="https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1ELpo7S7a0htZsqckkHkEtaI3KMXORFPStvVZGnVzt_o/edit?authuser=0" target="_blank">Open <i>Interdependence Rainforest Blogs</i></a></div></div>

8. Now you can go ahead and paste that full code anywhere that allows you to edit HTML embeds (Blogger, Wix, Weebly, Wordpress, Emaze to name a few) creating your tagged and clickable Google drawing. 

Open Interdependence Rainforest Blogs

And not only that, any changes you make to the original image immediately populate anywhere you have embedded your image so your students can modify the drawing, adding and deleting elements and tags without any worry about going through the process again!

Additional benefits

Using this method for creating interactive images also has some other "unforeseen" benefits.

• The students can be in total control of the creation process. Any CC0 image is fair game to be used as a background or for tagging purposes. Once you teach your students to crop things in shapes, they can create all sorts of icons without worrying about size limitations.
• Recently my district blocked Thinglink for student use. I can share my tagged images with them, but they cannot create accounts themselves and use it to create their own. 
• Thinglink is not set up to be collaborative, so even if my students went outside of our servers and created personal accounts, they cannot work on one image together. This often defeats my purposes for creating interactive images.
• It is totally free. You only need access to the Google tools mentioned. Most districts nowadays have given students access to the Google suite, so anything they create using them will not need any paid upgrade of any kind.

I hope this is useful to you and your students, and please drop me a line in the comments section if you find an easier way to do this.

Evaluating websites using Google Forms

Keyboard and phone image

We can probably all agree that the internet is a great source of information on all topics. From travel destinations or cute kitten videos to breaking news or the latest scientific discovery, everything is at our fingertips. Content is continuously added, often without any form of review for accuracy or reliability, so it is imperative to teach our students how to evaluate Web sites to determine if the information is reliable and credible.

There are many sites that offer lessons to teach students how to evaluate websites. One of the best tools I found for this is a rubric developed by the Ron E. Lewis Library - based on the CRAAP Test created by Meriam Library at California State University-Chico. Unfortunately, although the acronym is catchy, I cringed at the thought of having my middle-schoolers go home and tell their parents that I had used that specific word. Middle-schoolers are not known for providing context, plus if I know them at all, by the time they got home the CRAAP acronym would probably have changed to something even worse. So I took it upon myself to modify the rubric into something more middle-school appropriate, creating the CITE-IT rubric instead.

Over the last school year, we worked with a paper version of the CITE-IT rubric, and I required that any time that students were referencing sources they had to attach the CITE-IT scores and rubrics for the Web sites they used. This worked quite well, except for the fact that I had to keep a big stack of CITE-IT rubrics on hand. Also, although most students were able to manage this, but a few of them would invariably come towards the end of a project and fill in a bunch of the rubrics, just so they could comply with the requirement.

In a recent training, I learned about using Google forms to create rubrics, and thus be able to grade "on the fly". This means that basically you create a form with a field for student name and a series of multiple choice indicators for each of your criteria. In the end this gives you a spreadsheet where you have collected each student's score on the rubric, and which you can then sort any way you wish. As I mulled this idea as a great way to increase my productivity while grading presentations or essays, a spark of inspiration struck. "What about using that same idea and having students use it for the curation of websites with CITE-IT scores?"

So, this is what I came up with.

• I created a Google form version of the rubric.
• I modified the response sheet so that the last column on it would automatically add the correct columns. I also added a column that would advise the student on whether to use the site or not. This is based on the individual scores the student assigned - just like in the paper version.

The idea is that this will allow the students to have their own version of the CITE-IT form and response sheet, which they can then use as they are doing their research. By adding a text  field for comments, they will also be able to sort the sheet by project title (if that is what they add), share their evaluated sources with me and each other and perhaps, in my utopian dreams, even see trends in the URL addresses that come up as reliable most often.

If you would like to make a copy of the form for your students to use (or modify to suit your needs), it is as easy as navigating to this blank response spreadsheet, clicking on Make a Copy (make sure you are signed in to Google), and then click on View Form. This will maintain all formatting and formulas I used. Feel free to change anything that does not suit you, as this is now your own copy.

I hope you find this useful, and if you have an idea on how to make this better, please share.

Leaderboards with Google Apps, an update

A while back I talked about using Google Spreadsheets to create a leader board. The main drawback I saw in my original version is that students (and me) were unable to see clearly who was in the lead unless I sorted it, which at times created errors in some of the cells. I continued to tinker with it and discovered the pivot table function. This was the answer!

 Here is a video tutorial that shows just how to create the self-ranking leader board.

The formulas that I used to create this are -

Importing ranges of cells:

=arrayformula(index(Leaderboard!A1:A38))

Conditional formula for images:

=IF(C2>=15401, image("https://goo.gl/3Pqxfr"),IF (AND(C2<=15400,C2>=13601), image("https://goo.gl/thtuwd"), IF (AND(C2<=13600,C2>=11901), image("https://goo.gl/2yWS3J"),IF(AND(C2<=11900,C2>=10301),image("https://goo.gl/I76A2i"),IF(AND(C2<=10300,C2>=8801),image("https://goo.gl/ahUpyM"),IF(AND(C2<=8800,C2>=7501),image("https://goo.gl/XyVodq"),IF(AND(C2<=7500, C2>=6301),image("https://goo.gl/ORNbNs"),IF(AND(C2<=6300, C2>=5201),image("https://goo.gl/2VYg9Q"),IF(AND(C2<=5200, C2>=2501),image("https://goo.gl/87vY96"), IF(C2<=2500,image("https://goo.gl/aVgK1f")))))))))))

Modified embed code - I highlighted the part you add:

<iframe src="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1YeCoYjAp_n6d7q9UkmV3-WJ24OtMsHfLR43ryLmy6vA/pubhtml?gid=990555132&amp;single=true&amp;widget=true&amp;headers=false&amp;gid=0&amp;range=A1:D39" width="450" height="2350" ></iframe>

Of course, you can always make a copy of the document I used in the tutorial and modify it to suit your needs.

I invite you to play around with it. For example, you can add avatars or other images using

 =image("https://goo.gl/Bv19zc")

You will again need to host the images in a published document, shorten the URLs, and remember to modify the range, width and height if you are going to embed it anywhere. In this document, I show the avatars in the pivot table, and just like before they are ranked by XP.

I have not found a way to also include items or badges in the pivot page. When I try it, the totals are pushed to the very end, creating a rather messy look. However, you could always publish them in the leader board page, which keeps them in alpha order and could actually be an even better idea.


If you've found different ways of doing this or need some help, leave a comment. Don't be shy. We are in this journey together.

Leaderboards with Google Spreadsheets :)

I have spent the last week gamifying my 5th grade. I developed my theme, posted everything up and so forth. Then I came upon the "Hall of Honor", which is basically the leader board for my game. I had previously created a leaderboard for my blogs (see Gamification, starting really small), but this time, I wanted the sheet to automatically assign all badges (images) in response to inputting the XP scores.

I knew that I could just use something like Edmodo to keep track, but that meant that I would have to create a bunch of small groups and assign the badges manually. As much as I love Edmodo, this seemed like a hassle, and I could just see myself forgetting or clicking one student instead of another. I turned to my trusty internet in search of something already made, and although there were several sites that came up (Badgeville and Leaderboarded, for example), they did not meet my most basic need - "FREE".

So, with a very rudimentary understanding of Google Spreadsheets and the help of Youtube tutorials, I developed my own.

What the students see:

What the students don't see, and might be of interest to you:

The spreadsheet has one dedicated page for the leader board and then 9 others for the different units.
The data is pulled from the different sheets using the ImportRange function
All image URL's were shortened using https://goo.gl/
The images were placed inside the cells using =image("URL")
The ranks were assigned using formulas like :

=IF(B2>=300; "Supreme Grand Master";IF (AND(B2<=349;B2>=201); "Blogging Grand Master";IF (AND(B2<=200;B2>=161);"Master";IF(AND(B2<=160;B2>=121);"Magus";IF(AND(B2<=120; B2>=81);"Adept";IF(AND(B2<=80; B2>=61);"Journeyman";IF(AND(B2<=60; B2>=41);"Initiate";IF(AND(B2<=40; B2>=21);"Apprentice"; IF(B2<=20; "Novice" ; ""))))))))) - For text

 =IF(B2>=850; image("http://goo.gl/lnjj1i");IF (AND(B2<=849;B2>=750); image("http://goo.gl/vWDG5F");IF (AND(B2<=749;B2>=560);image("http://goo.gl/r8CoiU");IF(AND(B2<=559;B2>=420);image("http://goo.gl/MCq2UA");IF(AND(B2<=419; B2>=250);image("http://goo.gl/qQRxrZ");IF(AND(B2<=249; B2>=170);image("http://goo.gl/YtKEjl");IF(AND(B2<=168; B2>=85);image("http://goo.gl/XKdggM"); IF(B2<=84;image("http://goo.gl/JNWjSf") ; "")))))))) - For images

I could not figure out how to use just one formula for text and images AND that responded to the value of an imported range, all at the same time, so I solved the problem by populating an extra set of columns using import range (not shown to students) just with the values and then used =IF(M2>=100;image("http://goo.gl/f8Gjbj"); IF(M2<=99;"Locked";)) to display either the image or the word locked on the Unit cells. This made the look quite cluttered, so I went with white text on those cells.

My end result, a sheet that responds to and assigns badges automatically as soon as I update the individual values for a student. Since all is tied together, I can also sort the columns any which way I need without worrying about "messing up" someone's badges or XP points. Just be aware that changes are not instantaneous; it sometimes takes a little while to load and update everything.

If you would like to view the full spreadsheet, and perhaps make a copy to modify to fit your needs, click on the image.

I will still need to input the individual XP for the assignments myself, but I have saved myself from the tallying and badge awarding. I also think that if I'm careful about naming conventions with the students, I might just be able to automate the input of XP directly from Flubaroo graded assignments, or from Google Form assignments. Now wouldn't that be a dream?

If you find this useful, or if you have found other ways to do this, leave a comment. I know that I will be grateful.