I love finding awesome new resources. You can say that I am a bit of an internet junkie, always searching for new content information and sources to use in my classroom. Why? I don’t know. I already have so many websites bookmarked and more sources than I could ever possibly use. Yet for some reason, I don’t stop searching.

And thus I do appreciate when I get sent good sources from others.  A few months ago I was sent an email from a mother who has a son that loves forensic science. After some searching of his own, he came across a good forensic information website, and the mom sent it over to me to include on my site. I will admit that this email sat in my inbox for longer than I wanted (planning and prepping this school year seems to have taken over my life), but today I was determined to finally explore that site on my own.

When I began to look through the Under the Magnifying Glass: Forensic Science website page, I had to agree that this was a good resource, so thank you Anna and Tyler for sending this my way. It includes resources to understand what happens at the site of the crime, back in the lab, and at the morgue. It covers digital forensics, and even has links to a few forensic games. (Note – one game link no longer works and two of the games use flash, which is now retired.)

When I looked at the header on this page, I saw that it is part of a larger website called, O.Berk, Leaders in Packaging Solutions. Now I was intrigued. What is a forensics page doing on a packaging company’s website? I began to wonder if this was legit, or if something odd was going on here. I began my inquiry by using the internal site search bar to see what came up. I entered the words “forensic science”…nothing. I tried searching “Under the Magnifying Glass”…nothing. I clicked on the company name in the header and saw a drop down menu, but again, there was nothing that I could see that would lead me to their forensic science page. I scrolled down to the bottom to the footer section, but didn’t see anything of note there, either. I finally decided to click on the site map in the footer section. Scrolling quickly through the site map I saw many things that specifically related to the packaging industry. I went through it again, this time slower, and came across a section called, “Additional Pages”.

Aha. Mystery solved.

This section on additional pages did include the Under the Magnifying Glass Forensic Science page, but I saw that it was not the only resource page on the O.Berk Packaging website. Do you want to learn about ancient Egyptian discoveries? Go here. Antique bottle hunting? Marine plastic pollution? The history of glass blowing? Metal detecting? Jar canning and preservation? Recycling and litter? The history of maple syrup? All can be found on this site. Apparently this is the site you need to visit to learn about these things, as well as other tidbits about glass containers and their history. A very unlikely source to house some of this information, but apparently secrets lie everywhere.

And so ends my exploration for this Sunday morning… a good exploration spent with a cup of coffee.

Now on to baking.

I have been collecting resource links for a very long time. I had some of them organized into various math, science, and technology categories, but those categories could have been a lot more specific. I also have a folder titled, “To Explore”. That folder contained many links from the last few years. There were also links that I had bookmarked on Chrome, as well as the various links that I had collected in a Google Document during remote teaching this past spring. Planning and marking and just life prevented me from properly sorting those links, and so the number of unorganized links was getting out of hand. Realizing that this school year will probably be demanding in new ways, I decided that at the very least, my computer should be well organized. And so I went about the task of re-organizing everything on my desktop, resource links and all. The files were easy to sort, but the resource links were harder. I couldn’t decide on the best method to house these links. Should I keep them within desktop files, or should I move them online?  I decided to move them online. The next question was which platform to use. Padlet? Google Document? Google Sheets? Google Slides? So many choices…..

I started to make a Google Sheets document, but quickly abandoned it. I am not sure why, it just didn’t feel right. I finally decided to use Google Slides. It took a while, but I have now finished transferring most of my saved resource links to this document. My “To Explore” folder looks better, but I have recognized that it will probably never be empty. I have made hyperlinks to move between parts of the document, and I have indicated where there are more than one page within a category. For now it works for me. You can grab a copy for yourself here.

I should be planning lessons. I should be figuring out how to adapt my curriculum for the necessary changes in our new Covid world. But that feels a little overwhelming right now, and so instead I am going through all of my many (MANY) Twitter bookmarks. I came across one that I had saved from Ben Orlin titled “Six Strategic Pen-and-Paper Games (from a Strange and Bottomless Mind)“. In his post, he shares six different games from game and puzzle creator, Walter Joris. I especially liked the final one that he wrote about, called The Collector. Knowing that I need to limit the physical interactions amongst my students, and not being an expert with Desmos, I decided to see how I could adapt this for Google Slides. I first made the six-by-six grid, then I created the grey box for eliminating squares, then created the blue and green game pieces, and then finally made the title and instructions. For the grey, blue, and green pieces, I wanted to have multiple copies so that the students could drag them out without having to copy and paste within the document. I googled to see if there was a “cloning” capability in Google Slides similar to the one in Notebook software (I sort of knew there wasn’t, but a girl can dream….).  I came across this video which describes how to make multiple copies of an object and stack them as if there were only one copy. I then realized that there were too many “moving parts” that could be accidentally repositioned on the page, and so I made the grid and instructions part of the background.

The result is here. I am open to suggestions as to how to make it better.

This past spring, I spent time trying to find the best tools for teaching online. In many ways, I feel that I didn’t progress much in my search. To be clear, I have lists and lists of tools, some my own and some of others, but within those lists there aren’t many tools that I loved and that effectively solved the challenges of student engagement while learning over Zoom. Today I will highlight one of the tools that I found and used repeatedly.

While teaching on Zoom I often used the built in whiteboard. I used it for my own modelling and explaining and I used it often when working one-on-one with students, but I rarely used it in full class scenarios. Students knew how to annotate on it, but if all students tried to write at once, it just became a mess. Instead, when I wanted to see students responses to the same question all at once, I went to whiteboard.fi. This online whiteboard tool creates individual whiteboards for each student. The teacher sets up the virtual classroom and a class code is generated. Once shared, this code allows students to become part of the classroom where they can view both their own whiteboard, as well as the teacher board. The teacher can see the whiteboards of every student at once. There are limited settings (including waiting room, ability for students to upload images, locking the room, pdf’ing the whiteboards), but I found those settings to be enough to get what I needed for the lesson. The only downside is that there is no login and thus no saving of boards. If you want to go back to see what was on the boards (assuming students do not clear their boards) then you need to save the url for that session.

Using this tool allowed me to present a math question (either on the teacher whiteboard or on another source) and then have students answer it on their own. I could give feedback to students as they were completing the work, just like I would in the classroom. When a student finished one question I could have that student clear his or her board, then begin the next question. I saw student work in real time and was able to give feedback in real time, redirecting student thinking as needed.  I haven’t seen a better site that allows me to see all of my students’ work at once, but I certainly welcome your recommendations.