GitMind is a great, free tool for mind maps and brainstorming. You can easily sign-up with your Google account. There are several templates ready for use and they have a category for education. Below is a video overview.
There are no ads on the page. The only “paywall” I can find is the ability to export in other formats, which you can do with “points” you earn by using the platform. You can easily share work with a link and you can add collaborators.
Ideas for Classroom Use
If you teach younger students you might not have them create their own, but you can work as a class. There are templates for the elements of a story and working with words.
Older students could create their own, there a templates for timelines and essay structures. At the year’s end students could create a mind map to review material from the entire course. You can also edit your mind map by editing or importing an outline and the program will add it to your mind map.
On Monday, April 19th, the district’s landing page for MISTAR-Q will be updated. WayneRESA staff are also working on a mobile version which will direct to mobile apps, to be installed at a later date.
The current landing page that has been around for quite a while looks like this:
Visuals are an important element to help all people understand the message we are trying to convey. Finding good icons on the internet can be tricky as many sites want you to pay to use their icons and the emoji keyboard options starts to feel a little stale. The creator of the popular site SlidesMania (has a wide range of Google Slides/PPT templates that are free to use) has brought us IconsMania. These icons are beautiful, editable, and free. Just like SlidesMania (which she created during the pandemic, designing slides that her elementary student would enjoy), these are built with educators in mind and the collections will continue to grow.
Simply go to IconsMania and search for what you need or browse the collections. While browsing you can limit the options to colorful, outline, or monochromatic. For example if I want icons to help communicate the schedule for the day, I can use the school icon collection.
If you select that you are a Google user, it will give you a template that will open in Google Slides. From there you can copy/paste them. If you wish, you can copy them into Google Drawings and save them individually as a PNG. Doing it this way makes it easy to resize or customize as you need. If you don’t want to customize them you can click “I just want the PNGs” will allow you to download a zip file containing all the icons.
Student Project Idea
This can also be a great resource for student creation. One of my favorite possibilities is the Number Mania eduprotocol. In short, students fill out a Google Form with one fact about a topic. Then they look at a view only spreadsheet of facts collected by the class and design an infographic in Google slides. The Slides template can be pre-populated with relevant icons to streamline the creation process, eduprotocols are meant to be implemented in one class period. This a great way to build some background knowledge and interest around a new topic.
Slide made by Amanda Sandoval. Click it to view the templates and examples up close.
If you interested in trying this activity, reach out to Kaelyn Bullock by submitting a tech ticket and selecting “Technology Integration.” I’d love to help you plan this out for your grade level/content area.
On Sunday, April 25th Zoom will be enabling new ZoomPhone features in the Zoom for GSuite Add-On that will prompt all staff users under our account to reauthorize Zoom for GSuite Add-On’s access. All Zoom for GSuite Add-On users will be prompted to reauthorize access to contacts and the company directory when attempting to schedule a Zoom meeting within Google Calendar; staff can also reauthorize in the Google Sidebar (see image below). Users will only need to reauthorize once. Because we are not a Zoom Phone customer, the add-on will not actually access our contacts or district directory, but reauthorization will nonetheless be required in order to continue using the add-on’s schedule meetings functionality.
If a user declines the reauthorization, the Zoom for GSuite Add-On will no longer be able to be used to schedule meetings.
Many teachers have found Jamboard to be a flexible tool for students. However, it does not have a lot of tools for Math. Teachers can utilize the free-for-teachers Equatio extension to bring in many more math tools to enhance student learning. The Mathspace feature allows teachers to incorporate shapes for all levels of math from shapes to clocks, coins, and protractors. It also have some great Science shapes like pulleys, gear wheels, magnets and more. To learn more about how to add Equatio and use it in Jamboard, check out the post by Eric Curts.
If you or your students are looking for practice and immediate feedback, look no further than Google. For example, if you type “FOIL practice problem” in the Google search bar, students and teachers can find topic explanations and practice problems right on the results page. See the image below for sample results from such a search.
Students that need help can get a quick overview of the topic and try several practice problems with immediate feedback.
These particular problems are sourced from ck-12, a reputable open-education resource.
Other topics you search for may come up with practice problems from other recognizable resources like Kahoot!
This can be a quick resource for students that need some extra support or are studying for upcoming tests. Math and science topics seemed to be most successful in getting results.
Canvas recently came out with an update that allows students to screen capture on their Chromebooks using Studio. We have tested this, and it works beautifully.
No joking, there are exciting updates that have come to popular Google tools.
First, Version History is finally available on Jamboard! Now, if you or a student accidentally clear a frame, you can easily restore it. Also, if you re-use a Jamboard with different classes throughout the day, you no longer need to create a version for each class. You can name each version and restore the original. If you need some ideas for how to use Jamboard, check out these great templates for SEL activities. For a quick video on how to use Version History, check out this video.
Second, when you click present on a Google Slides presentation you will have a cleaner menu for advancing slides. The old version was rather big and had a tendency to get in the way. Below is the new menu in the bottom, left corner. If there are other controls you need to access, click the “More Actions” option (three dots, snowman, TimBits).
