IHMS Tech Tips

This is primarily for elective classes.  For core classes, you will want students that change hours at semester to unenroll from their 1st semester class and join their 2nd semester class period. The first day back from break is a great day to visually see that all students are still in not only your correct Google Classroom, but that they are enrolled in Knight Time Google Classroom as well. The first thing you, as a teacher, will want to do is Archive your 1st semester classes.  You will want to Archive, not Delete so that you can reuse some of your posts. There's no way to undo deleting a class. If you click Delete, you no longer have access to any class posts or comments. However, you and your students can still access your class files in the class Drive folder. Archive a class: Sign in to Classroom at  classroom.google.com . On the class card, click  and select Archive . To confirm, click  Archive . Next, create your 2nd semes...

As the semester winds down or as you prepare for the start of second semester, consider doing a rebus story in Google Docs.  A rebus is " a puzzle in which words are represented by combinations of pictures and individual letters; for instance,  apex  might be represented by a picture of an ape followed by a letter  X ."   Students are already doing this as they text each other, so try having them create a rebus using your content.   To create a rebus in Google Docs, first open a blank document.  I would suggest having the students write their story first, then figure out which words they can replace with emojis.   To insert emojis into Google Docs select "Insert" then "special characters". To find a correlating emoji, change the first dropdown to "emoji".   You can then search through the emojis by category, by using the keyword search, or by drawing a symbol. Think about using a rebus to have ...

Who has been around long enough to remember the good ole Beyond Question clickers?  While it was a pain to create lessons for and never really worked quite right, I loved how it made test reviews and lessons engaging and interactive...even in the dark ages...as long as you had a pallet of AA batteries.  Mentimeter is a free(ish) website with the exact same concept.   Creating an account is simple and can be connected to your Google account.  To use, teachers create a poll question.  This could be for test review, seeking prior knowledge, or anything that you want to ask your audience.   Students then visit the Mentimeter website and enter the code given to them by the teacher.  They do not need to sign up or create an account.   Teachers and students can watch the results come in in real-time, or you can save the results for later.   There are several different types of questions you can create, ima...