Anthi's ed tech notes: July 2017

Wednesday 19 July 2017

Random Name Picker

Here's another tip I liked while I was watching Tony Vincent's periscope. You can create a random name picker with flippity.net. You can also have the options of having your students automatically divided into groups or getting a random seating chart.
Here is a summary of the steps you should follow to make your own name picker adapted from http://www.flippity.net/RandomNamePicker.asp

Make a copy of the template provided by flippity.net. The link to the template is here: https://goo.gl/ckauML. Edit the names and label your class by changing the name of the worksheet at the bottom.
Publish your spreadsheet to the web.
Get your flippity.net link at the bottom
Bookmark your link. Make use of the options provided at the top bar.

Here's the link to the Name Picker I created for one of my classes MY RANDOM NAME PICKER.

Animating an image with google slides

Yesterday I stumbled upon one of Tony Vincent's periscopes on twitter. I was impressed by one of the presenters, Kasey Bell, who explained how you can create animation using google slides. I had read about this hack somewhere else as well, but yesterday I consolidated the way you can achieve this effect. And as the title of my blog suggests it is designed for my tech notes; thus, I would like to post this tip here so that I can remember it in the future!

To start with, I inserted a free creative commons image on a google slide and a butterfly png (an image without a background). Then I duplicated the slide (Ctrl+D) and I dragged the butterfly a little farther than its original position. I duplicated the new slide and moved the butterfly a little bit again. I followed the same process creating eight slides - I absolutely believe the result will be much better if you create more slides, though! After this, I published the google slides (File- Publish to the web). I changed the auto-advance slides to 'every second' both for the link and the embed code options and here I embed the result: