🏠 Google Classroom + 🏀 March Madness

Lots of tips to use in class right away!

Author

Matt Miller
March 21, 2024

🏀 March Madness has arrived

It’s March. The college basketball tournaments are here! (Plus, I live in Indiana, where we live, eat, and sleep basketball …)

March Madness starts in full swing today. Below, we have some basketball fun to incorporate in lessons in the next week or two.

🏀 The Achievery has tons of free video lessons — pre-written lesson plans with video clips from popular movies and TV shows.

(In an earlier email, this was the “I can’t believe this is free” site I shared.)

The basketball lessons in The Achievery are geared toward NBA, but the concepts will feel right at home during the NCAA tournaments.

🏀 The March Book Madness idea in the DTT Digest (below) can also bring some of the March Madness magic into your classroom — or library!

🏀 Have you filled out an NCAA tournament bracket? (This is where you pick the winners of all of the games in the tournament.)

My principal sets up a bracket challenge for the whole school on ESPN’s website. Students, teachers, everyone — we fill out brackets (no money exchanged, of course) to see who can pick the most accurate bracket.

This year, Purdue is one of four #1 seeds … and Purdue is only 45 minutes away from my house. (And my daughter will be a freshman there next year.)

So, I picked Purdue to win it all, right?

Nope.

My heart says Purdue, but my head says UConn. I have them meeting in the championship game with UConn winning. (Yes, I know Purdue’s recent tournament history is really bad. I’m hoping it’s different this year!)

Inside:

  • 📺 Free instructional videos for class

  • 👀 DTT Digest: Women’s History, March Book Madness

  • 💡 The Big Idea: Make great use of your “prime real estate”

  • 💻 Tech Tip: Bring March Madness into your Classroom

  • 😄 Smile of the day: 90s graphic design greatness

  • 👋 How we can help

📺 Free instructional videos for class

Teachflix (teachflix.org) is a collection of hundreds of teacher-suggested instructional videos — with activities to pair with them.

We asked teachers, “What are the videos you’d actually show real human children in the classroom?” The results are organized on Teachflix by …

  • Search: Look for videos with a keyword

  • Grade level: Choose elementary, middle, or high school

  • Category: Browse by content area (math, science, etc.)

  • Subcategory: Inside a category, you can sort by subcategories

When you find a video, use the red button to get a pack of activities that’ll work for most every video in Teachflix.

Go to Teachflix.org to check it out — all for free!

👀 DTT Digest

4 teaching resources worth checking out today

  • 👩🏿‍🚀 Celebrate Women's History Month with Google Applied Digital Skills — Inspire your students to dive into topics honoring women’s achievements. Research a topic related to Women's History and create a report to communicate your findings.

  • 📕 Start some Book Madness in your class! — Shannon McClintock Miller shares her templates and ideas on how to incorporate March Book Madness into your class. (Scroll down to our Tech Tip to see more March Madness classroom ideas)

  • ▶️ Create quizzes from YouTube videos in seconds — This post from TCEA breaks down some AI powered tools to help you create quizzes from YouTube videos effortlessly.

  • 🪪 ICYMI Job card templates — Last week we shared a new post, Getting started with classroom jobs, inside it we shared a template with 20 job cards that can be modified and edited for your classroom.

💡 THE BIG IDEA 💡

Image created with Microsoft Designer

🏠 Make great use of your “prime real estate”

Certain parts of your LMS are very visible to your students. These parts are often at the top of the page or in a place where students often look. In my book, Do More with Google Classroom, I call these places “prime real estate.” They’re in an important, helpful spot. We should make the most of our prime real estate and make it work for us!

🪧 Examples of prime real estate

Some examples of prime real estate include a class banner image (the top part of your Google Classroom or LMS main page), the top of your classwork/assignments page, and the titles of your assignments.

That's just scratching the surface, and depending on your particular LMS, you may find that students' eyes are often on certain areas. Maximize them!

🗄️ Templates to help maximize prime real estate

⬇️ Go deeper

💻 Tech Tip

🏀 Bring March Madness into your Classroom

⛹️ STEM + NBA

March Madness is upon us, and what better way to engage your students than by bringing the excitement of basketball into the classroom? The Achievery has partnered with Learn Fresh to show you how to use real-world NBA data and storylines to bring the power of March Madness into your class with 28 free STEM lessons!

🚀Getting started with The Achievery

The Achievery is completely free to use! Simply visit The Achievery and create a free account. Once you're in, you'll have access to a vast library of content, organized by grade level and subject.

You can search by the collaborator “Learn Fresh” to find all of the NBA lessons. You can narrow the search even more by searching by grade level, category and more.

📄 Get more FREE lessons from Achievery!

Read our post 35+ engaging lessons you can use in class tomorrow to read about some of the lessons that The Achievery has to offer.

😄 Smile of the day

These kicked your graphic design skills up a notch …

h/t TeacherGoals via Twitter/X

👋 How we can help

There are even more ways I can support you in the important work you do in education:

  1. Read one of my six books about meaningful teaching with tech.

  2. Take one of our online courses about practical and popular topics in education.

  3. Bring me to your school, district or event to speak. I love working with educators!

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