Good Chicken Resources

Symbaloo is a bookmarking website where you can collect website links in one place.  By doing this you are creating what they call a webmix. You can share your webmixes through a shared link or embedding them into a website. You can also search other people's webmixes to find resources they have collected. Symbaloo is great if you want to curate a list of websites for your students. I start by creating a general Symbaloo for my class that has links to websites they might need all year.  These include links to the school library catalog,  resources they may need such as the Purdue OWL Writing Center, and websites we use frequently like Kahoot.  I then post the link to the Symbaloo in my Google Classroom "Classroom Materials" topic. Symbaloo even has a "Share to Google Classroom" button in their sharing options. I also really like Symbaloo when doing major projects.  I will create a Symbaloo specifically for research projects that include some websites for them to...

O ne of the many things that set Google Chrome apart from other browsers is the use of Google Chrome extensions. These extensions are easy to install, free (some can be upgraded with a fee), and can be powerful tools to help you and your students get more done. Here are my top five picks for both teachers and students.  We also did a YouTube video on this topic. You can watch it below. Top 5 Google Chrome Extensions for Teachers & Students Grammarly - Grammarly is spell check on steroids and a must-have for everyone. Not only does it check spelling mistakes, but also frequent grammar errors. I also think it is more accurate than the spelling/grammar checkers included with Microsoft Word or Google Docs. When you have it turned on it works on almost every website (including social media platforms) and inside Google Docs. We all make mistakes while we are typing, and Grammarly helps us avoid embarrassing ones. (I am using it right now while writing this blog.)  Instant Dictio...

Students of all ages struggle with writing sentences.  It could be a tendency to write in sentence fragments or run-ons or only using simple sentences in their writing.  Students need to be able to understand how to craft different types of sentences in order to make their writing more engaging and fluent. For a long time, I struggled with how to teach this until a fellow English teacher shared with me some tips on how to teach sentence structure.  Ever since then, I used some of these tricks in my own teaching. Here is a quick overview of how I teach sentence types and some activities you can do in your classroom.  Independent and Dependent Clauses The foundation of teaching sentence structure is to ensure that students can recognize independent and dependent clauses. Students need to be able to recognize these in sentences to distinguish the type of sentence.  A clause is a group of words that contain a subject and a predicate (noun and verb). Independent cla...

When using Google Classroom, organizing your classroom assignments and materials is a must. Otherwise, it devolves into utter chaos making locating materials difficult for you and your students. Luckily, you can easily create topics to help you maintain the order for both you and your students.  Any organizational system is easier to implement if you start it at the beginning of the year.  That doesn't mean you can't change and adapt it to make it more functional as the year continues, but you do want to make sure you have at least some type of plan.  You will want to think about what your goals are for Google Classroom, how you want to use it, and how often you will use it.  Below are two ways I have organized my Google Classroom that I have found effective. (Note: Because of my own classroom experience, this suggestions may be more suitable for secondary teachers.) General Information Both of my organization plans start the same way.  I create a topic called "...