Tips on Google Apps, PBL and Coding

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Every Tuesday SmartBrief on EdTech runs Tech Tips, a column featuring practical advice from school technologists and tech-using educators. This month, we are running a roundup of the top tips from the year. Below are ideas for adopting project-based learning, introducing coding to students and using Google Sheets, Docs and add-ons in your classroom. 

3 steps to creating interactive timelines

Interactive timelines can be effective teaching tools, writes Gail Desler, a technology-integration specialist for the Elk Grove Unified School District in California. In this blog post, Desler shares three steps to creating a timeline using Google Sheets.

Tool lets teachers organize assignments through Google Drive

Diane Main, of the Harker School in San Jose, Calif., details how to use Doctopus, a Google add-on, to help manage, organize and grade student projects through Google Drive. The add-on also lets students edit work, she notes in this blog post.

Tips to use Google Docs for grading

Teachers can create grading shortcuts using Google Documents, suggests Catlin Tucker, an author, international trainer, education-technology speaker and Google Certified Teacher. In this blog post, she shares a guide to using shortcuts and offers a few of her own favorites.

Teacher makes the case for project-based learning

Teachers should adopt project-based learning to improve learning and engagement among students, writes Nick Provenzano, an English teacher and technology curriculum specialist at Grosse Point Public Schools in Michigan. In this blog post, he describes a project in which students were given autonomy to identify a problem and use technology to solve it.

3 games to help teach coding

Games can provide new ways to introduce students to coding, principal Kami Thordarson writes in this blog post. She describes three such games, including Google's Made with Code, which features characters from Pixar's "Inside Out.