Congrats to our 2018 Big Fish Winners!
Inspiring Nebraska teachers with innovative ideas! See winning entries below!
Chad Mattox,
York Middle School U.S. President's Fair Summary of activity- Our students are split into groups (can be 1, 2, or 3 students), randomly assigned a U.S. President (45 in total) and begin to work on a project that encompasses public speaking skills, research skills, teamwork, and artistic skills. The purpose of the project is for students to research a U.S. President, gather information about the person's work in ten different areas outlined by the teacher, and then give the President a "grade" based off of how the student's believe the President did in office. We culminate the project with community event that combines students being judged by a teacher at YPS and then having an open house for the people of the community to come in and see the great work our students have done! |
Samantha McCarville,
Barr Middle School "Students often struggle to understand that dilemma people in the past faced when making decisions simply because students already know how these major historical events turned out. To help my students understand the decision making problems faced by people in the past, I have introduced "Choose Your Own Adventure" activities into my Social Studies classroom. These activities are created using Google Forms. Students are presented with a historical situation and then click on their choice. Depending on which answer students choose, they are taken to a different answer. Students could also use this to create their own stories." |
Jessa Yager,
Barr Middle School Our Google Drives are getting filled up by copy after copy of lessons and daily work! Our wifi connections are getting bogged down by the running documents. With the "Rename to Stop the Drain" tool you can now keep THE SAME DOCUMENT (for Google Docs, Slides, or Sheets) for YEARS! This feature allows you to RENAME your version history so that you can "restore" or "view" past work quickly without having to open a new document. For educators this helps you to make tweaks on last year's assignments to upload to Google Classroom without having to "make a copy" and try to organize in a folder. For students this makes their life easy to refer to only the ONE DOCUMENT all year for the daily work or weekly formative assessment. In turn, teaching the students how to use the feature gives them a chance to see how to be better organizers for their future selves. The best part is that the teacher can always refer to student work quickly without fussing with multiple links to open! The RENAME feature on Google Slides, Docs, and Sheets saves times, saves memory space, saves loading slowness, AND creates the convenient reference to past work! |