Fun with Google: S for SantaTracker

Fun with Google A-Z takes a quick peek at random letters of the alphabet that lead us to fun and quirky things that are (usually) connected to Google. Follow the fun with short videos and informative blog posts randomly featuring a random letter and a Google-y idea that it sparks. Click here to check out the rest of the list: bit.ly/FunWithGoogleA-Z

Watch the video below for a quick overview of what and how:

Watch the video below for a quick overview of what and how: santatracker.google.com

What: A fabulous Santa world with creative tools and spaces and addicting games that build brain muscles!

Audience: You might just get sucked into the vortex of fun yourself, but there are hours of fun for your students and children. This would make a great “may do” activity for those long December days or a fun Christmas center alternative. Big kids will easily get hooked too!

Time to Play: 5 minutes will quickly turn into 25 minutes! I’ve spent a fair bit of time in santatracker.google.com and it seems that there are always new games that I haven’t tried before!

Equipment: Play in a web browser like Google Chrome, of course! Note that you can turn the music off in the top left corner if it gets to be too much!

Click here for the Google A-Z Table of Contents Launch Pad.

Fun with Google A-Z YouTube Playlist.

Collaboratively Created Christmas-Themed Digital Breakout

Just before school started in our district we hosted a full day PD session on creating BreakoutEDU games and investigating all of the great tools that are available for creating Breakout games with and for students at www.BreakoutEDU.com.

Our collaboratively created Christmas-themed Breakout

Of course, PD learning is “stickier” if participants are able to create and “do” as part of their learning. We spent several hours at our session working in small teams to contribute puzzles to what was to eventually be a collaborative Christmas Breakout game.

Here is a link to the ultimate product, with some tinkering, that all participants will have access to. Please give it a try! If you have the BreakoutEDU app, you can scan the image to access the game.

We created in Google Slides, and for some this was the first time they had worked collaboratively on a document like this. Here is our working document. The plan was that these images could be used for either physical or digital games. This was such a great way to slide in some Google Slides tips:

• setting slides to “Custom” page size of 8.5″ x 11″ for easy printing
• saving (downloading) single slides as a .png or .jpg file
• using “Version History”
• setting “expiry” for editing privileges in the share settings
• using the “outside of the slide” to hold answer keys and other notes
• all sorts of tricks for working with images – my favourite is Control +D for any easy duplicate of any image or slide

At the end of our work period, some teachers were dismayed at how little it seemed they had accomplished. Creating clever puzzles and formatting them for sharing is hard work! Fortunately, most attendees will have access to the Premium Platform account at Breakout EDU where they can take advantage of the hard work of others and use the games that have been posted there. In addition, they can use their Platform access to modify our collaborative creation in any way they see fit.