Issue 12 • September 11, 2024

I gave my first presentation in 2000 at the Nebraska Educational and Technology Association’s Spring Conference, where I shared my classroom website, Planet 5th. In 2002, I delivered my first keynote at a "handhelds in education" conference in Michigan.

Since then, I’ve presented hundreds of workshops, keynotes, and sessions across the U.S. and internationally. I’d love to bring my expertise to your conference or event. My schedule is open for spring and summer, and I greatly appreciate it whenever you recommend me as a speaker. 😊

Fun Fact: Learning in Hand started in 2002 as a page on the Planet 5th website as a way to share how my students were using Palm Pilots in class.

Ticket Templates 🎟️

Exit tickets are a quick way to check if students understood the lesson or how they felt about their learning. Teachers can use this information to adjust their teaching and provide extra help to students who might need it.

The EdTech & Design Team at San Antonio ISD has shared a beautiful collection of exit ticket templates (among other graphic organizer templates) in Canva.

After clicking the Use template in a new design button, a copy is placed in your Canva account. If you have a Canva for Education account, you can publish the exit ticket as a class assignment. Learn how.

Claude-Crafted Creations 👨‍💻

I co-authored a visual estimation game called Glance and Guess. It’s a way to help young mathematicians develop better number sense.

The game consists of 5 rounds. Each round shows a random number of shapes on the screen. You have 10 seconds to estimate the number of shapes. Your score is the difference between your guess and the actual number of shapes. The scores from all 5 rounds are added together to give a final score.

It’s fun to play. I suggest you give it a go.

You probably noticed that this game was coded with Claude AI. Claude also hosts the code. This interactive webpage is called an artifact, and it’s a web app created from prompting the Claude chatbot.

It all started with the prompt: “Code an estimation game where the screen is filled with a random number of shapes (between 20 and 100). The player inputs their guess for the number of shapes because the 10 second timer goes off. If they enter a guess before the timer ends, then show them the exact number of shapes on the screen. The score for the round is the difference between the real number and the guess. There are 5 rounds to the game. If no guess is entered before the timer goes off, that adds 100 to the score.”

Because I asked it to code, Claude opened a Preview side panel after it finished writing the code. The code runs in the Preview panel so I could test it. After testing, I resumed my chat and asked for changes, which produced a new code and a new preview.

The Preview panel has a Publish button. This allowed me to get a public link to my artifact, enabling anyone with the link to play Glance and Guess.

Refining an artifact can require a lot of back-and-forth with the chatbot. Those interactions deplete your daily message limit and can put the chat over the context window. If you upgrade for $20 a month, you get 5 times more usage. I ended up upgrading for the month because I wanted to complete work on my artifact.

I’ve written about coding with AI where I embed the HTML code into Google Sites. Claude Artifacts streamlines this process and can do more complex tasks. There’s so much potential here! Teachers can create games and other interactives through conversation (rather than through writing the code themselves).

I would love to hear your artifact ideas!

Note that users of Claude must be 18 years or older.

Fun with Photo Fixing 🪄

The Google Photos app for iOS and Android has a Magic Editor. Similar to the Magic Studio tools in Canva, Google’s Magic Editor can erase or reposition and resize people and objects. It also can improve lighting and blur backgrounds. 

If you have a Google One Premium or AI Premium subscription, you can save as many edited photos as you like. If you don’t have a subscription, you are limited to 10 saves per month.

Badge Backstory 📛

Palette Picks 🎨

The Noun Project posted 7 of the Best Color Palette Generators. Author Jeremy Elliots directs us to online tools that help us “quickly find beautiful, harmonious color schemes to use in your designs – without all the guesswork.”

I’d like to showcase 4 of the generators.

1. Coolors: Paste the hex code(s) of colors you want to use in your design, click the lock icon, and press spacebar to generate a palette that includes your locked-in colors. Not happy with the result? Press spacebar again.

2. Canva Color Wheel: Pick a color and choose a combination (complementary, monochromatic, analogous, triadic, tetradic) to see the resulting color palette. 

3. Colormind: Lock in one or more colors and Colormind uses AI to generate color sets based on styles it’s learned from photos, movies, and popular art.

4. Color Hunt: Browse a collection of trendy color combinations, hand picked by designers.

These generators give you the hex codes for the colors in the scheme you create. While it’s not difficult to copy and paste hex codes to use as custom colors, I have an even more convenient solution. I download or take a screenshot of the color palette and insert it into my design app (like Google Slides, Canva, Keynote, or PowerPoint). I use the color drop tool to grab colors from the palette as I work on my design. I delete the inserted image of the palette after I no longer need it.

Label Love ❤️

I have an older version of the Brother QL-600. It’s a thermal printer, so I never have to buy ink for it. I save money by purchasing compatible DK-2205 2.4 inch white label paper tape in builk instead of the more expensive genuine Brother labels.

The printer automatically cuts the tape, so I can easily print multiple copies. I love that I don’t have to cut anything apart myself.

As a substitute teacher, I know that things go a lot better when I can call students by name. Teachers usually don’t supply name tags, so I make my own. I am able to copy the class list from PowerSchool and paste into a spreadsheet. I save the spreadsheet as a CSV and use it with the Brother P-Touch app on my computer. I can use any font I have installed on my computer. I try to choose a font that complements something I’ll be teaching that day. For instance, I used a font called Cracked when I subbed in a classroom learning about plate tectonics. 

The labels don’t stick very well to clothing, so I instruct students to stick their tags to once and not move it. The labels really don’t re-stick very well. I offer incentives for students who manage to keep their name tags on all day. Side note: There’s always one kid who immediately sticks their name tag to their forehead. 🙄

P-touch, the printer’s app, is only for Mac and Windows computers. You cannot print from Chromebook, Android, or iOS devices unless you have the Brother QL810W printer. The QL810W is wireless and double the price of the QL-600.

Thanks for reading, and I hope to see you at an upcoming event. Maybe something this spring or summer? 😉

Smiles from Iowa,

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