Teacher Tech blog with Alice Keeler

Paperless Is Not a Pedagogy

Alice Keeler

Automagically Create a Spiral Warm Up

Automagically create a spiral review
Automagically Create a Spiral Warm Up

Automagically create a spiral review

Create a 5 a Day with Spiral Questions

Spirling is an important technique to make learning sticky. Keep a list of questions or problems in a spreadsheet, randomly choose 5 questions, push to Google Slides and have ready for the morning warm up. I coded the ability to do this automagically.

Template

alicekeeler.com/spiralreview

Look for the Spiral Questions menu next to the Help menu.
Setup Spiral Questions

It may take a few seconds for the menu to load. Once it loads choose “Setup.”

Note that you will need to authorize the script. Click on the link that says “Advanced” and then underneath that click on “Spiral Questions (unsafe).” It is safe, I coded it myself. Google has not reviewed my code so they are not vouching for me.
Unverified




Google Slides Created

A Google Slides presentation is automatically created when choose Setup. The link to the Slides presentation is in cell A1. Click on this to open. Notice it is blank.
Google Slides Created

Add Your Questions

Once you have setup the spreadsheet you can add your questions to column A. 5 questions are automagically added to the Google Slides, you will want to have at least 5 questions. You do not need to do anything. The 5 questions will be randomly chosen on an interval. Your blank slides will populate with your questions.
Add questions to column A

Bookmark the Spreadsheet

Since the idea is to automatically create a spiral review list of questions you will want to regularly add to the list. Suggestion to bookmark the spreadsheet to allow you to easily come back and add new questions.

Add More Questions

Spiral review involves revisiting topics/questions. You will want to keep adding new questions to the spreadsheet as you teach new content. This allows you to easily come back to those questions by presenting the Google Slides.

Link to the Google Slides Presentation

Notice the link to the Google Slides presentation in cell A1. Click on this link to bring up your warm up slides.
Questions added to Google Slides

Every Hour Refresh

To keep the spiral review fresh, it will automatically display a new 5 questions every hour. This allows you to use the exact same Google Slides over and over to share 5 questions with students. Without effort, you are ready to give a new 5 questions.

Manually Refresh

If you would like to manually push new questions to the Google Slides, use the menu and choose “New Spiral.” Note that this does not refresh the timer. It will still choose 5 new slides every hour automatically. If it changes when you did not want it to, use the version history to restore the Slides back to the previous questions.

New Spiral

Presentation Mode or Published Mode

When presenting the questions, the presented slides do not change. Pressing escape to leave presentation mode may reveal 5 new questions if it has been an hour. If you use the same presentation all day in presentation mode it will display the same questions.

Using the File menu to “Publish to the web” will allow you to embed the slides on a website. When students or parents visit the website they will see a new spiral review every hour UNLESS they do not refresh the website. Just like presentation mode of Google Slides, published mode slides do not change until refreshed. Notice the embedded Google Slides above. Leave this website up and come back in an hour. The same 5 slides will be displayed. If you refresh the page though, you will see a different 5 questions.

Push new spiral review questions

In this animation, I am using the Spiral Questions menu to manually push 5 random questions to the Google Slides. Remember though, this will automagically happen every hour.




10 thoughts on “Automagically Create a Spiral Warm Up

  1. if we start a spiral right now, I have a lot of questions for yearly review – can we delete questions to start the new year or would it be better to start a new spiral?

  2. This is one of the most useful and easy to implement things. Thank you so much! I can’t wait to use this next year – I can spend my summer developing questions to easily add… Is there a way to add math equations/problems/pictures as questions? I want to create tabs across the bottom for each topic and then I can add them in as we progress throughout the year.

  3. Hi there! I teach high school math…do you think I can insert math problems into this using maybe eqatio? Also, I just started playing with this and cell A1 doesn’t show me any link. What can I be doing incorrectly? Did you perhaps make a video of this process? Thanks bunches.

  4. Hey Alice, this is amazing!! Well done, I will be using this with my Chinese language students, its a great program. Thanks for sharing!

  5. Love the idea of this, but was wondering if there was a way to turn off the automatic creation of a new slideshow every hour. I would like to use this tool about once a week and would rather the sheet keep track of what questions it used once a week, so each week it was a new set of questions until they were ready to be recycled. As it is, when I am ready to put the slideshow up, the students are getting some of the same questions as last time rather than ones they haven’t seen yet.

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