Your Best Classroom Resource

What is the best resource in your classroom?

Is it technology?

Is it your classroom library?

Is it those interactive notebooks?

When I asked teachers on Instagram what they believed was the number one best resource in their classroom, most of them answered with something related to physical environment.

Anchor charts.

Education Posters.

Cute classrooms are fun.  I love to see all the hard work pay off when teachers spend countless hours  making their classroom cute and all themed out.

I do a bit of that myself.

But don't forget your classroom should be a resource for your students.

The best classroom resource I have?

The four walls that make up my classroom.

Not sure what I'm talking about?

Make your classroom fun and bright and welcoming.

Add your own style and flair to it.

But do it in a way that can be useful to students.

I love me some color in my classroom.

I add a lot of color to my walls with these Math ABC posters.

They are both colorful and a great resource for my students.

I cannot tell you how many times my students refer to these posters.

"Oh yeah, that word is on our ABC wall." 

While these posters add a lot of color to our classroom walls, there is also a lot of blank space when my students walk in on the first day of school.

And it isn't because I ran out of time or money to decorate that space.

It's not because I forgot about that part of the room.

It is done intentionally to leave room for all the anchor charts we will create as a class throughout the year.

Give your students visual cues that will help them understand and verbalize their own thinking.

And of course I'm always in favor of using space to encourage students to have a growth mindset.  I believe this is just as important if not more important than content related things on the walls of our classroom.

What's on your classroom walls?

Is your classroom a resource for your students?

Leave me a comment and let me know your number one best resource.

Let's chat again soon.

Elaina

Create A Quiz Using Google Forms

Imagine your students just completed an Exit Ticket.  

Or maybe it was a quiz they just finished.

You need to grade it quickly so your students can have that invaluable feedback.

But you have plans tonight and there is no time for grading over 100 papers.

It's easy to imagine because as teachers we've all been there.

We want our students to have that immediate feedback but that stack of papers that needs grading has never been more daunting.

Friends, I bring good news.

Did you know you can create a quiz (or any type of assessment) using Google Forms?

Y'all!

It will grade the assessment for you and your students get IMMEDIATE feedback.

You don't even need any google extensions or other tools to make it happen.

It's magic.  

Let me show you how to make it happen so you can be as happy as this guy while telling all your teacher friends how you stopped grading that stack of papers.

First open up your Google Form as you normally would and give it a title.

I recommend making the first question a place for students to put their names.

Be sure to mark that REQUIRED button.  You're going to want to do that for all questions.  This ensures that students will answer every single question.

To add another question, click the plus sign on the right.

You might want to add a multiple choice question for class period if you teach multiple sections of the same class.  That is totally your call but it does allow you to sort the responses by class period.

Then add your first assessment question.

Okay...let's  make this thing a quiz and reduce our grading.

Click on your settings in the top right corner.  It's the little gear

You will have a box pop up with three options.

General, Presentations, and Quizzes.

Choose Quizzes.

Click the slider button that says Make This a Quiz.

As you can see you have a few customization options.  

It is automatically set to give students their grade and results immediately after they submit it.  It is also set to show students the questions they missed, the correct answers, and the point value of each question.

Most of the time I use these options and do not change anything.

When you have those options set the way you want them click save.

This makes every question you currently have as well as those you are planning to add part of the quiz.

You should now see a new feature on each question that says Answer Key.

Click on that and you will see where you can put the correct answer in place as well as choose the point value for that question.

Notice that you can add more than one answer.  This is great if you think students might misspell a word and you aren't grading for spelling.  You might also want to take into consideration all the possible ways a student might type an answer.

For example with this integer quiz they might put a space between the negative sign and the number if their answer is -4.  

Because of that I will add a few answers.  -4 and - 4.  

You are now ready to repeat this process with your other questions.

It's that easy.

If you have any questions please don't hesitate to email me or leave them in a comment.

I'd love to help you create your first quiz using Google Forms.

Let's chat again soon!

-Elaina