Befuddled

One of my favorite online tools, Google Docs, has added a new feature, apparently, as of this morning. In their word processor section they’ve added an option to “insert drawing.” This nifty little feature allows you to create and insert simple drawings into your word processing documents. As with any other Google Doc, the drawings can be made collaboratively.

It seems that the feature is still a bit on the experimental side. While my browser will let me create the drawings in my document, my printer won’t let me print them. All I get is the text that I wrote and not the picture I tried to insert.

It’s perplexing, but I imagine it will all get sorted out in a few days.

When teaching kids about what effect they can have on the larger world, there’s three websites that come to mind. Free Rice is a simple little vocab game that lets you pick the correct definition for a fairly obscure word. For every correct guess, 10 grains of rice are donated to the UN World Food Program. In addition to English vocabulary drill, you can do words in German, Italian, French and Spanish as well as math.

New to the charity scene is Free Poverty which donates up to ten cups of water for every place you can locate in its geography quiz. The further you are from the site, the fewer glasses of water donated. At the moment it’s not clear who the donations are being funnelled through since Free Poverty seems to be “between” collaborating organizations.

Good Search is also a great place to go to make a difference. You choose the registered charity you want to support – it appears to be only American ones – and then using Yahoo! Search you hunt for whatever you’re after. Each search seems to donate about 1 cent to your charity. That may not seem like much, but imagine if 100 people in your school used this search service once per day for 200 school days per year. That would be a nifty $200 donation simply for searching the Internet. Good Search also shows you how to install their search box into your web browser (replacing the default box) and thereby makes it incredibly easy to donate money as you search.

The good folk/s at Common Craft have been at it again. They’ve made the mysteries of a working computer seem simple. It’s hard for two people to talk about how to upgrade the school computers for your next project if one of them doesn’t understand the very basics of a computer. In their very simple, down-to-earth way, Common Craft has solved that problem.

I really hate marking. I procrastinate until it’s nearly too late and then get overwhelmed by it. It’s stupid of me, but it’s a pattern I can’t seem to snap out of.

However, I saw a video this morning that gives me hope. It’s possible, and even pretty easy, to create a form in Google and a connected spreadsheet that will grade tests on its own. Of course, the questions have to have only one right answer (True or False, Multiple Choice, etc) and can’t be essay-like in style.

This has real possibilities for a guy like me.

The full version of the video (with better resolution) can be found here. Unfortunately, I couldn’t embed this full length version despite many attempts.