ClassHook - Video clips from Movies and TV shows

ClassHook is an organized resource of video clips from your favorite TV shows and movies that can assist in introducing classroom topics, or extending the learning beyond the lecture.

The videos are first organized by subject area, with the capability of refining your search further by grade level, clip length, or the name of the TV Series or Movie it originated from.

As you begin searching through the database of videos, you may notice that many videos are "restricted", and it may prompt you to sign into a district Google account. Following the process of logging into your Google account AND the ClassHook website, you should have no difficulty viewing the majority of the videos available here.

Using TED-Ed:Lessons Worth Sharing in the classroom

Unlike TED.com: Ideas worth sharing, which often included motivational speeches and topics geared toward adults and specific professionals, TED-Ed can be used by teachers in collaboration with their lesson plans. With hundreds of videos for students from Elementary through the Collegiate level, and topics ranging from the Arts to Philosophy/Religion, there is no shortage of lessons that focus on critical thinking skills and strategies.  

Students start each lesson when they WATCH the short video in any given topic. This is followed by a THINK section, which includes a combination of several Multiple Choice and Open Answer questions.  With these questions being related to the video, each lesson then provides a DIG DEEPER link with more resources to alternate materials on the same topic.  The final step of each lesson includes Guided Questions where students can DISCUSS each topic in more detail to a greater audience.  

All of the lessons provided on TED-Ed are free to use for the public, however teachers have the option of creating an account, and are then allowed full access to customize each lesson.  Using this option, the multiple choice questions and text questions are completely editable, or can also be excluded from the lesson.  When the new lesson is complete, you can choose to keep your lesson private, or UNLISTED to the TED community and will be provided with a unique link that can be shared via Google Classroom, or other LMS, for only your students.  As students progress through the answers, when they click "Save my answer" it will inform them whether or not they are correct, and if they are incorrect, they will receive this message, letting them know to try again, and includes a video hint if necessary.  

If you'd like to learn more about this and other video tools for the classroom, please consider our upcoming Model Schools course, "Interactive Videos: Because Lecture is Never Enough" on January 29th, which can currently be found in the OU Regional Catalog on MyLearningPlan. 

  

Google Code-in

For those teenagers who were motivated by the Hour of Code and want to do more, Google is offering a challenge working on real open source software projects.  Through Google Code-in, teens from around the world will have the chance to learn and develop new CS skills by working on real software projects—with help from mentors along the way.

During the seven weeks of Google Code-in, pre-university students (ages 13-17) can browse hundreds of tasks created by 14 open source organizations. Students then get to choose the tasks they find most intriguing. A wide variety of skills and interests are required to make any software project work, so the tasks in Google Code-in are designed to reflect that diversity. Students can choose to work on projects across documentation, coding, training, research, quality assurance, user interface and outreach tasks.

Google has partnered with 14 organizations from a diverse array of fields: health care for developing countries, learning activities for elementary students, desktop and portable computing, the encouragement of young women in computer science, game development, to operating systems used in satellites and robots. Students can choose which project they are most interested in.

Each task has at least one mentor assigned to it to review the student’s work and also help answer questions along the way. Each organization also offers beginner tasks that give students who are newer to open source development an easy and clear place to get started. One of the stated goals of the contest is to encourage students to find a coding community that they enjoy working with and hopefully become an active contributor for years to come.

Over the last 5 years, over 2,200 students from 87 countries have successfully completed tasks by participating in Google Code-in. To celebrate CS Ed Week this year, please help us introduce even more young minds to open source software development through Google Code-in. To learn more about Google Code-in— including rules and FAQs—please visit the site and the Getting Started Guide.

This post was modified from the Google Code in Blog found at http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/

Google News for Primary Source Documents

Google has been listening to teachers

Google Classroom Updates

Many new changes have been rolled out in the last couple of months that have made Classroom even better in its second year.  While debate still continues about whether or not Classroom is a Learning Management System (LMS) or just a Content Management System (CMS), few could refute that it is the best tool for working with Google Docs with your students. With the new features added this year, it is getting easier to manage assignments, assess students and engage them in discussions.

Assignments:

Move to the top of the stream - for those assignments that last many days or weeks and you need to bring it back to student's attention, you can now move a post to the top of the stream.  If you have a very active Google Classroom with lots of assignments, posts and discussions, important assignments can get

Calendar:

Now you have two ways to view and share assignments.  Whether a student or teacher, you can view the calendar view of just one class or all of your class assignments either within classroom or in your Google Calendar.  There is a separate google calendar created for each class.  The added bonus for this is that you can then embed a google Calendar on your website for a public view of the assignments due for your class.  This way parents can see what their child has due without giving them special access to the online classroom.  The only drawback for those who also want to post class notes and presentations is that the only things that go on the calendar are assignments which have due dates. 

Reuse Posts:

While you could always post assignments and announcements to multiple classes at the same time, there are times that you may need to either repost a similar assignment on a regular basis or want to use a post from a shared class as an assignment in your own class.  Now you have the option to re-use a an assignment or announcement to help save some time.

Questions:

Checking for understanding, exit tickets, Do Now's, class discussions, and the list goes on...  This is one of my favorite new features in Classroom.  This adds a more interactive aspect to Google Classroom allowing for more student-student discussions.  This is also a good tool for formative assessment.  

Posting Forms:

Now when you post just a Google Form to an assignment, Google Classroom will mark that assignment "done" for students when they complete the form.  WooHoo!  Now you can track your students completion of quizzes right within Google Classroom.

Check back again for more (hopefully more timely) updates on what it new with Google Apps and many other tools.