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?

Eight reasons to love GoFormative

In a recent tweet, my good friend and colleague @JudyZaccheo posted the following "challenge"

After trying @Goformative years ago and hating it....I think I’m finally ready to give it another try 🤔 Tell me what you LOVE about it people! #Goformative @MarianaGSerrato

— Judy Zaccheo (@judyzaccheo) September 15, 2018

Since this cannot be answered in a mere 240 characters or less, I had to respond "long text", and what better way than a post that can then be shared with all of you.

Much like Judy, my first foray into GoFormative was perhaps a bit bumpy. At the time, I loved the idea of some of the question types I saw ("show your work", for example) so much that chose to present about it at a district PD, but I did not really use it much myself. This had nothing to do with the platform itself, but rather with my unfamiliarity with it. Back then, you created an account and landed on the home page but there was not much to see in terms of its capabilities, and my account remained dormant for a while.

About a year ago while participating in a Twitter chat, GoFormative came up quite a few times, and I went back in if only to see what people were talking about. That led me to the first reason why I love GoFormative:

1. The Formative Community Center: A vibrant community of educators that share content, best practices, implementation ideas and all sorts of ideas on everything from pedagogy to the latest in #edtech. What makes this community unique from others is that it also provides you with a direct line to GoFormative's amazing team of developers, who listen and respond with a "can do" attitude. To most of my "it would be wonderful if..." posts I have gotten a "we'll make that happen!" or at least a "we cannot do that right now, but what if we ...; would this be useful?"

Within that community and before some of the more recent changes that have made GoFormative super user-friendly, I found a great introduction to GoFormative made by Michael Lutz:
 Formative within a Formative, which helped me explore all the different things that could be done with formative, which leads me to the 7 other reasons why I love GoFormative:

2. Ability to create multimedia-rich lessons with just a few clicks. Not only does GoFormative allow you to include a wide variety of question types, you can also embed all sorts of media. It is almost an "if it is on the web, you can add it to a Formative".

Even if there is no obvious embed code on whatever you want to add, a simple iframe generated using the tricks learned in the Formative within a Formative mentioned above makes everything embeddable. In this "Relationship between Organisms" example, I have not only a presentation and videos, but also LearningApps and a Flipgrid.

3. Along the same lines, the "enhance a PDF/Doc feature", which allows you to digitally gather answers to anything you are already using, or add reflection questions to any formative, much like Rebecca Mann did in this example:

Our Formative Educator of The Day is Rebecca Mann! She uses #goformative to help her students self-assess their progress on learning standards!#formativechat#studentcenteredlearning#mathchat#hsmath pic.twitter.com/KauVLnlIjm

— formative (@goformative) April 25, 2018

4. Ability to assess and provide feedback in real time, with no lag! Gone are the days when you have to wait for a student to submit a paper or finish the digital work. With GoFormative you can immediately send feedback to a student or group of students - even whole class, while they are working on a formative.

5. Identify the struggling student, find patterns in answers and be ready to pull a small group or even get everyone's attention to clarify a misconception or difficult concept.

6. Track student progress towards mastery of standards. All you need to do is tag your standards, and Formative will summarize all the data for you!

7. Short on time? GoFormative now has a searchable library of ready-made formatives submitted by educators, searchable by grade level and content. No need to reinvent the wheel when you can clone to use as is and/or adapt to your particular situation

8. Google classroom integration. Whether you want to import your classes from GC or you want your formatives posted directly to GC, it is all available to your students with the click of a button. No need to remember passwords or try to find "what they are supposed to do".

Now, this is not to say that you have to do all of this. GoFormative is so versatile that you can even produce a quick GoFormative on the fly to act as an exit ticket or as a "Do Now" in a matter of seconds. That versatility is the reason why my students now equate GoFormative with being successful in my classroom.

Appsmash your narrative

One of the biggest struggles I've had in the whole gamification business has been the narrative aspect of the gamified classroom. As many before me have suggested, a good narrative engages the students and helps drive the game forward. (The importance of narrative in the student-centered classroom - Adam Powley). The narrative gives meaning to the whole idea of why we are collecting points and/or struggling to reach the top of a leaderboard.

As my games have evolved through the years, I've used different themes and attempts at narratives. We've trained dragons, explored idyllic islands and even survived a zombie apocalypse, however, in all of these my narrative has been a secondary consideration, mainly due to not having figured out a way to deliver that narrative consistently. In fact, it was not until the end of the zombie apocalypse (last year) that I re-discovered the mini-videos I had created to accompany the original narrative. In the day to day business of teaching they had been left behind and by then my students had lost interest in the story they had pushed for when we started. They saw the leaderboard and acquisition of privileges as the only end goal of the game, and though this was enough for some of them, for others it became nothing more than "regular" school with a few bells added.

In an effort to remedy this, I started looking for ways to have everything I needed to move the story forward from the beginning. Now, this meant that I needed not only a changeable storyline, a place to hold everything, and a way to hold myself accountable (lest I forget again) but at the same time keep the story hidden from students with enough crumbs so that if I did forget they would ask about it.

The changeable storyline was easy. I had already decided that we would be space explorers giving me the ability to add or remove planets to explore through the different units I teach. Star Trek and its "continuing mission" being the obvious choice for this. You land on a planet, meet a new civilization perhaps capture a couple of aliens in our Boss Battles, and on to the next one. Best part, you can always revisit a planet or remain there longer if needed. With this in mind, and using LunaPic (as illustrated by Mr. Powley in his ClassroomPowerUps blog), I started a Google slide deck to house the complete story. Each slide is a mission log, has a quick recap of events and hints at what's coming next as the ship moves through its assigned sector. The idea is that it would read like a serial comic book of sorts (or like the logs entered by the different captains in the series).

I was busy with this for a few days, but the main issue remained... How could I publish only the portions of the story that have been visited ("the story o far") while letting the students know that there is more to come. After much Googling, I found that there is no easy way to password protect only portions of a slide deck, there are many ways to prevent people from editing, but not from moving forward on a deck. That being the case, I transformed a slide into a Google drawing, and that was strike two. Not only can you not directly password protect the drawing, you cannot open it directly when published to the web, it will always be a download. Not being one to give up, I finally came across a handy tutorial appropriately called "How to Password Protect ANY File in Google Drive" from Flipped Classroom Tutorials, which uses Google Forms' response validation to ask for a password and deliver a link if correct. Although using this, I still had to have individual artifacts for each part of the story, at least now I could hide them in plain sight.

As it usually happens, I got distracted with something else and left this alone for a few days, as the back of my head considered where to house all of this in a way that would be consistent with the space narrative. I considered places like Deck Toys or Symbaloo's Learning Paths which would give this a "gamy" look, but I wanted an even more engaging feel to it that would also not require students to log in to read the logs (other than what they already had with Google). Serendipitously, I came across Roberto Fantini's VR Tour "Space conquest" on Thinglink 360. Now, if you've read my posts before you know that I avoid using paid for stuff, but I have Thinglink premium already so I took it as a sign that this should be an avenue to explore. So I finished up most of the narrative for one grade level (still debating whether we will come back to earth or not) and "remixed" the image to come up with this:

The first "hidden" part of the narrative is item 3, and in case you would like to see the story the passwords are:
3) hydrogen
4) lithium
5) sodium
6) potassium
7) rubidium
8) cesium
9) francium
10) beryllium

The added benefit of this is that I can also add Easter Eggs and links to directed side quests to the narrative slides, or add elements to the story as needed, which gives me the flexibility I was looking for in my narrative.

I am happy with this solution, but wonder whether there is a less time-intensive or totally free way. If you've found it, please share. In the meantime, I' still have to do this for three other grade levels :)

Hyperdocs using Formative

Formative (which you may know it as goFormative) is a platform that allows you to create assignments, assessments, and homework for your students. It is easy to use and frees up your grading time with their automatic grading feature. Most importantly, and one of the reasons I love it, it allows you to see live responses and with just one click identify the areas of struggle or misconceptions for your students so you can quickly pull a small group or even address the whole class before they leave for the day.

10 Reasons Why Teachers Use Formative (Goformative.Com)

Their wide variety of embeddable items and question types, make it an easy fit for creating Hyperdocs. Let me show you what I mean by using my Forces Mastery Quest Hyperdoc



I start by creating a Google Docs clickable image (like the one you see above), making it embeddable in the same way as I explained in "Embedding a Google Drawing with Clickable Links". Remember that the beauty of doing it this way is that once generated, you can go ahead and change any and everything, modifying the background or adding more clickable items as you go along, even including some Easter eggs if you wish. All changes populate automatically to anywhere you embed the image to, including Formative.

Once I have my main image, and I obtain the embed code,  I add it to what I call a Mastery Quest Formative (MQF). This MQF also houses my summative assessment, which most often is automatically graded by Formative.
The instructions at the top let students know that in order to click on the image inside Formative they will need to right-click and open in a new tab or window.

I then create each of the Formatives that will house the documents, images and activities the students will need to interact and respond to. In this case:

Engage, which includes an embedded Flipgrid
Explore and Explain which houses embedded videos and readings, all with checks for understanding along the way
Apply, includes an embedded Phet simulator
Share, housing a gif image and a Padlet that allows students not only to respond but to vote on each other's responses.
I do not include a reflection piece since my students write reflective posts each week as a matter of course. However, the Extend portion is hidden away in one of the Easter eggs (the little blue bird you see on the top right), and I provide a hint to its existence at the end of the Share formative. There are two other Easter eggs that I embedded as quick surprises for the students.

As with many other Hyperdocs that you may have seen, it is the planning and finding the content that you want your students to see what will take up most of your time. If you have your links, adding them to your image and putting the Formative Hyperdoc together is rather quick.

You may be thinking of those things that do not have a readily accessible embed code, like Gizmos for example. There are several Embed Code Generators out there, which are super easy to use. That is what I used to generate the embed codes I used in this Cell Cycle Formative, which like the Hyperdocs we are talking about is a Formative composed of several Formatives.





Although not as easy as providing links and tasks on a Google doc or slides, the end product(s) is actually much easier to asses.

In traditional Hyperdocs, every student gets a copy and submits it in some way, but you still have to open up each individual student Hyperdoc to see what they are doing and provide feedback. On Formative, this time-consuming task is eliminated since you can see all students' work in the corresponding formative at once. Easy to see that most students are having trouble with question 2 (for example),  and address the problem immediately, or that everyone is on the right track, but that whole back table has not registered an answer on item 4, prompting a visit from you.You can even display the chart, hiding names of course, and discuss a particularly challenging question or task, switching to your own preview so that everyone sees exactly what you mean as you explain or discuss with the students.

For those of you that may have given Formative a try in the past and have some questions or are simply curious to learn more about it, there is a growing community of Formative educators that is ready to welcome you. Hope you can join.

Appsmash to Gamify - From Leaderboards to Quests

Although many of us agree that gamifying your classroom can provide benefits in terms of engagement and relevance for the students. Many of the teachers I have talked to have this idea that gamification is too hard, or that you can only do it by purchasing an app or some other tool, which may or may not limit what you can do. However, this is simply not true. With the myriad of free tools at our disposal and a little creativity, you can create your own gamified world for little to no money. Gamification is about creating a game-like experience, not about creating an actual game.

Before we go any further, take a peek at my "Island of AdVENTURE", where our ultimate goal is to take over the world. That is the simple storyline for my classroom. The benefit of such a broad and vague topic is that it will never be "done", and gaming elements can easily be added as they are needed. I talked about the decision to adopt a single storyline for all my classes in a previous post. If interested, you can visit Gamification Year 2 - The quest continues.

So, what was needed to create the Islands of AdVENTURE experience?

Game Website:  

If you have been here before, you know that my go to place for this is WIX, because it allows for ultimate flexibility in item placing, allowing you to embed practically anything you may wish to add. WIX is free to use, and gives you one place to create as many web sites and subpages within a site  as you need. On the game website itself, I like to add links to my blog, class calendar, and all of our classroom policies, procedures and even the green sheet. This gives the students a central place to go for everything related to the gamified classroom, and completely eliminates any "but I didn't know..." moments. These different documents are added as tabs, or in the case of the classroom management stuff, an interactive Thinglink image that gives access to all documents with a simple click.

Maps: 

This is the only item in my gamification arsenal that I paid for: Profantasy Campaign Cartographer. I could have used art from other sources and/or even used maps from Google Mapmaker, but creating my own allowed me utmost flexibility to include what I wanted, down to shaping the islands to represent grade levels, and creating distinct homes for each class.

This was also where I began to Appsmash. The islands on the game website are linked to the grade level houses and leaderboard using "invisible" shapes that act as buttons. The quests inside the houses are linked using interactive Thinglink images. The reasoning for this is simple. I wanted the students to be able to quickly and easily identify the quests they have, without cluttering the images with a lot of text or buttons. By hovering over each icon, students can quickly access the quests they are undertaking without any instructions from me regarding the icon that was used to represent a specific assignment.

XP and Leaderboards:

In my class, students gain experience points (XP) by blogging consistently and by completing the different projects they work on. Whatever you choose for XP, I recommend that you do not tie it to behavior, but rather mastery of skills or concepts. Just like in games and real life, XP does not "go down". Once you gain experience, you never get experience taken away. 

To create the leaderboard(s), I use Google sheets. I previously shared how to create one for a single class. This year, I am adding a leaderboard that functions much the same way, but since I am working with a single storyline, I needed to create one that could rank all my students from different classes and give us a way to compare classes. The following video will show you how.

Quests:

In my project based learning (PBL) environment we have two types of quests. The PBL Quests that culminate in a Boss Battle (i.e. the project product itself) and Mastery Quests. The PBL Quests are created using WIX for the bigger projects or Tackk for smaller assignments. Both allow embedding and manipulation of the color schemes, backgrounds, etc. giving you the opportunity to create a different aesthetic feel for each quest. The PBL Quests are embedded into the class game site and linked through Thinglink.

The Mastery Quests are the worksheets (level 1), quizzes (level 2) and tests (level 3) I use with students.  This simple renaming and leveling of the different types of work, tells the students how they need to prepare, and gets them excited about completing them. Don't you agree that it is much cooler to complete a Mastery Quest Level 3 than to take a test?

To create the first two types of Mastery Quests, I use the capabilities of Wizer.me. Mastery Quests Level 1 usually have links, videos and/or simulations embedded (example) and Level 2 may still have some supports (example). For Level 3, you can still use Wizer.me if you wish to give access to articles or graphs that the students must analyze. For a more "traditional" level 3 Mastery Quest, however, I use Google forms.

I usually do not embed the Mastery Quests in the game website itself, but rather give access to them by posting the individual URLs for the different assignments on our Edmodo stream. Of course, they can be shared in Google classroom or whatever other way you currently have to distribute online work.

Class Currency:

The behavior rewards, if you would like to have them, can be handled in several ways. In the interest of Appsmashing, you could use Class Dojo, and have it embedded into your WIX page. However, that has never really worked for me. I find it cumbersome to walk around with a device and scrolling when I want to assign behavior points. For this I go old-school, and use my school's paper based currency (Patriot Bucks), giving them out as needed. Since they are physical objects, I do not have to create a way to manage them. The "store" is created again using a Thinglink  embedded into the WIX class game page so that students can simply hover over the different items, and check "prices". 

What do you think? Have you tried gamification in your class? Please share your experiences.

Student AppSmash - A PBL success story

https://goo.gl/Gni2Bl

Many of you may have experienced that gut wrenching moment where, before the students have even begun to understand what the PBL experience they are in entails, they have already opened Google slides. The blank stares I get when I dare ask, "Are you sure that a slide deck is the best way to go?", tell me that they are much more product driven than I hope, and that most have been exposed to the "wrong" answer shown in the image above. Presentation equals slides! This is what has driven me to make sure that my driving questions are as vague as possible, at least with respect to the type of product the students create, which brings me to the real reason behind today's post.

A couple of weeks ago, my students began their exploration in our Interdependence of Organisms unit, which culminated in the students "Convincing the general public to care about an endangered species, and developing a realistic plan to bring it back from the brink of extinction".  As always my students launched into "presentation" mode, which was when I officially stated that I was incredibly tired of sitting through slides, so anyone "caught" even thinking about creating a slide deck without a storyboard would lose their tech. I then added that I expected to be entertained, because "no one cares about what is being presented if they are bored, so if the goal was to convince people to care, boring them to tears with slides was definitely not the way to go". What followed was a flurry of student engagement that culminated in one of my favorite student app-smashes of all time - the AyeAye Need You website

http://goo.gl/Z5LVrb

The Aye Aye Need you WIX website includes a student produced screencast-o-matic video, two Thinglinks (one of them used simply as a presentation aid), a HSTRY timeline and a Piktochart infographic.

I unfortunately did not think to record the students' presentation of their work, but their recovery plan included comments like:

- The US and Madagascar are not "besties", so they will need to put aside their differences and work together to restore the forest.

-  Why do we need charcoal? That just pollutes the air. What we need is more Aye-Aye's!



Did the student's achieve the goal of raising awareness, driving action and starting conversations to save the lowly Aye Aye? Yes.
Did they use technology to do it? Yes.
Did they "make a Google slide deck"? Most certainly not.

Now, on to the next step in this PBL evolution - guiding students to develop empathy for the user of a product before even thinking about what the product is/should look like/do.