The Buzz : Quick Tips

How do I get the most out of Gizmos?

ExploreLearning Gizmos are great learning tools, but how you get the most out of them? How do you make time spent with a Gizmo effective learning time for your students? These are questions we've heard a lot from teachers, and they are crucial questions.  No tool automatically causes students to learn.What approaches seem to work for a lesson using Gizmos?

We've put together three documents that we hope will help answer those questions.

• Part 1, The Purpose of Gizmos
• Part 2, Using the Exploration Guide and Assessment Questions
• Part 3, Using Gizmos in Different Settings

Using the Gizmo Screen-Capture Feature

Did you know that all the ExploreLearning Gizmos have a nifty screen-capture feature, built in? With only a couple clicks, you can place a custom, professional-looking image, taken from a Gizmo, into your worksheets, quizzes, and tests!

Here are some sample quizzes we created, with help from the Gizmo snapshot feature:

• Sample Quiz: Slope Intercept Form of a Line, download file: .pdf | .doc | shorter version (.doc)
• Sample Quiz: Introductory Physics, Freefall Laboratory, download file: .pdf

Here's how to do it:

Step 1 – Set the Gizmo up however you want.

Any snapshot you take of a Gizmo will capture the current state of the Gizmo. So, anything you can set up in a Gizmo can also become a snapshot!

Step 2 – Take the "snapshot"

fig. 1

To take a snapshot of the entire Gizmo, click the "Copy Screen" [fig. 1] button at the bottom of the Gizmo.

fig. 2

Many Gizmos also give you the option of taking a snapshot of just a portion of the Gizmo, like a graph, bar chart, etc. To copy the snapshot area, click on the camera icon (fig. 2).

fig. 3

(Note: In our older Gizmos, click the icon shown in Figure 3 to take a snapshot of the entire Gizmo, or click the clipboard icon [Figure 4] to capture the snapshot area of the Gizmo.)

Now the snapshot is stored on your computer's clipboard.

fig. 4

Step 3 – Paste the snapshot

Open a word processing document, such as a Microsoft Word file, place your cursor where you'd like the snapshot to go, and paste it.

Step 4 (optional) – Edit the snapshot

As with any other image, you can use the graphics tools in your word processor to resize, position, crop, etc. the Gizmo snapshot.

fig. 5

Resizing tip: To resize the image, first click on the image once to select it. You will see some "handles" along the edges of the snapshot. Clicking and dragging those handles resizes the image. If you drag a handle on a corner of the image (the cursor will become a double-headed arror, e.g., fig 5), it will retain its correct proportions. If you drag a handle on the middle of one of the sides of the image, it will become distorted.

 

The best thing about the screen capture feature is how easy it makes it to merge the virtual manipulative world of Gizmos with the traditional, paper-based world of handouts, worksheets, and quizzes that are part of every teacher's repertoire. Students, too, can make use of the screen-capture feature as part of homework or reports that they turn in.