November 15, 2016

Improve Reading Comprehension with Google Docs "Black Out"

This idea was shared on the G+ for Education Group by Eric Curtis from his blog titled Control Alt Achieve.

Basically, he heard about a way for students to identify main ideas, and summarization skills to help with their reading comprehension called the “Text Reduction Strategy” by Andrea Heick in a post at TeachThought. 
(link to original article: https://goo.gl/8Rs0Xe

Here is how it works. Students are given a piece of text and a black marker. They are instructed to read the article and to decide what information is critical and what is not. Then they re-read the article and black out all text that is not critical leaving behind just the main ideas.

In the original article, Andrea Heick suggested giving students a magazine article and a black marker. However, Eric Curtis suggested sharing a Google Doc with the students and having them use the highlighting feature that is built into the program.

Eric Curtis does an excellent job of showing step-by-step instructions on where to find articles of interest for the students, how to share the document and finally how to “black out” what is not critical. Read his post here: https://goo.gl/5FbZN6 

November 15, 2016

Tricks for Searching in Google Drive

Have you ever had a file or document in your Google Drive but suddenly can't find it? Did you know you can use the search bar at the very top to help?

In this article from Educational Technology comes 8 easy Google Drive search tips every teacher should know.