Multiple Teachers and Draft Assignments in Google Classroom

I believe it was today that Google updated Classroom.  Here are the changes and some thoughts on them.

1. Multiple teachers for a classroom.  On the About page of an assignment, you can now add another teachers to a classroom.  This is a great feature for those who coteach a class, have a special education aid or a TA.  Coteachers have all the rights of a teacher, except they cannot delete the class.

Likes - I think it is great, nice to have the ability to coteach a classroom.

Dislikes - It would be nice to alter permissions of the coteacher, but I personally do not have a need for that.

2. Draft assignments ahead of time.  I like this feature, but I think it is one step away from being awesome.  This feature allows you create assignments, rethink and modify them prior to actually pushing them out to a class or multiple classes.  When you are ready, you can assign the assignment to your classes for students to see.  To do this, when done creating an assignment, instead of clicking assign, click the arrow next to assign and "Save as Draft."

Likes - I like that you can edit the assignment after created as a draft, change the classes who will get the assignment.  Push the assignment to the stream when ready.

Dislikes - The draft only shows up in the class where the assignment was initially created.  I wish that, when you choose to assign the assignment, you could push it to one course at a time.

The comment feature on Google Classroom

Most Teachers, when creating a class in Google Classroom, change the class setting to "Only teacher can post or comment."  I would say, off all the teachers I have trained and visited, this has been the setting so there is not a projector surprise awaiting as some student who posted something inappropriate waits for their wonderful words to display.  However, today I visited a class where the teacher continues to use this feature and claims it has helped her students, especially English Language Learners.

Vocabulary:
Ms. S, as I will call her, gives students lists of vocabulary words.  There are assignments associated with them, but students are required to comment on the assignment.  Students write a sentence with the vocabulary word in them.  She claims that this practice is easy to grade and that as students practice this more and more, they get better at the sentences.

Deep Thinking Questions:
Ms. S will put her notes on Classroom or will create assignments associated with a book chapter or other reading.  Students will comment on the assignment with a deep thinking question.  She can quickly view them, discuss the need for a deeper question and work with students on better word choices to express what they mean.  Students then are required to address two of those questions for homework.

Discussion Participation:
Students are often asked to participate in class discussions.  The comment section of Google classroom is a place where students can add to the conversation even when they do not have the confidence to speak up during a conversation.

Management of the Comments:  All comment sections are associated with points, students who act up or type inappropriate comments are given zeros on the assignment and parents are emailed.  As of yet, I have only heard that Ms. S had to perform this once, and that may have been a setup.

Obviously not a complete list, but a great place to start.  How are you using the comment section?

Amazing Classroom Ideas from 2 days of walk-throughs

Although I work with schools and train teachers for 2 whole days of PD (1 prior to getting chromebooks and the other after 1 month of working with them), I find that I learn more from the teachers when I see them in action with their students.  I learned through my years of teaching and writing that what we say and what we write is interpreted in many different ways due to the prior knowledge and experience of the audience as well as the current situation of those listening/reading.  For this reason, after I train teachers in the use of a tool it is nice to see how they manipulate the functionality of that tool to come up with amazing lessons and engaging content that I would or could ever have created or thought of myself.  I see these ideas on walk-throughs, like the one I did today.

1. Kahoot and whiteboards in combination - A teacher used the Kahoot game to gather evidence of her whole class and how they were understanding problems in her AP Chemistry class.  After answering a question on the Kahoot, the teacher would then give them time to write out their explanation or an answer to a subquestion developed by the teacher when she saw the confusions students had with the question.  Kahoot was truly a formative assessment tool that allowed the teacher to assess students, then restructure teaching immediately.

2. Participation during presentation - Many teachers have students do presentations, but what do the students do as they listen to the presentations.  A teacher gave an assignment where the students needed to record information about the presentation in a table nested in a google doc.  Students then were required to use the research tool to gather an additional piece of information.  As this was delivered through google classroom, not only could the teacher coach students on presentation skills, but he also checked in on students during the presentations.

3. Socratic Seminars - A teacher in an high school Sophomore English class had students arranged in an inner and outer circle in her room.  Students in the inner circle were arguing as part of a Socratic seminar while the students in the outer ring added to the notes on the book the inner circle students were discussing.  The teacher mentioned that she was interested in having students share a google doc and have outer circle students feed answers and evidence to the inner circle students through the google doc.

4. Annotated bibliographies for research papers - a Junior English class was annotating bibliographies on American figures from the past.  The teacher collaborated with the US history teacher to make sure the project supported what students were learning in both classes.  The teacher had the students annotating and evaluating sources in google docs to later use in their research project.

Chromebooks Supporting a Culture of Learning

For those who have read this blog before, you know that I am a science teacher who now trains other teachers in technology and the effective implementation of technology in the classroom.  As I work with teachers, I notice that there is more than just resistance or acceptance of technology in the classroom.  To me, more than the idea of teacher resistance or acceptance is the idea of the culture of the class.  I know that all teachers want their students to learn, but what type of culture are they reinforcing?  Teachers can reinforce a culture of knowing by standing in front of a class and talking at students all day or they can reinforce a culture of learning by working with students at times to find and learn.

I know that not all would agree with me, I have had arguments with teachers who felt I was wrong in working with students rather than being the professional knower in the front of the room.  One argument was over the periodic table.  She told me that students at the school should be responsible for memorizing the periodic table, that students had done this for years in the school district.  I had to do that when I went to a neighboring school.  To this day, I cannot see the point in memorizing the periodic table, it is in every science book and there are millions of them on the internet.  Why do I need to memorize it when I can look it up in two seconds?  She claimed it was part of learning science.  I claim that by making students look it up and find it, I am teaching them that there are things that are out there and they should know how to find it.  They should learn to search for themselves.  This whole technology thing allows people to not memorize things, they just need to be proficient in finding things.  If nothing else, changing from a knowing culture to a learning culture is a transformative (the Modification and Redefinition in SAMR) use of technology in the classroom.

When the teacher with whom I fought asked me how I teach the periodic table, I told her this...

I tell the students to open a chromebook and look it up.  If they are really snazzy, they can look up interactive Periodic Table.

• I tell them to find two periodic tables based on looks and functionality.  
• Compare and contrast them.  Which one is more accurate?  Which one is more precise?  I even have students collect data on the average number of place values to the right of the decimal for average atomic mass and use this as evidence of which periodic table is better.  
• I lay out glassware that we will be using during the year around the room, how precise is the glassware?  Does the precision of the periodic table matter in a calculation of values if using measurements from the glassware?  
• I have students find enough evidence to support the use of one of their periodic tables.  Students then take this argument and work in groups to come up with the best periodic table in the group, then argue with other groups.  
• Its like March Madness for periodic tables, only one wins.  This takes about a week.

Though I could talk about the periodic table, this lesson asks students to look at the periodic table, delve into accuracy, precision, measurement, significant digits, lab equipment, supporting with evidence, argumentation.  In short, they are learning and there is no clear cut right answer, or there would only be one periodic table on the internet or published in books.

Videos of Analysis

Common Core requires students to read and analyze nonfictional text.  As they get older, students will need to analyze multiple documents and write a DBQ (document based question) response.  Here is a way to scaffold the informational text analysis.  Teach students to annotate pictures of text.

Tools

1. Some Text, picture, etc.
2. Awesome Screenshot Extension
3. Screencastify Extension

Use Awesome Screenshot to take a picture of the text.  

For those who have not used it, awesome screenshot allows anybody to take a picture of a webpage or a part of a webpage and then annotate it with arrows, shapes, text, etc.  Play with it.  It is how I made this picture.

But once you or your students find a document and take a picture... STOP.  We are going to use the annotation tools to create a video.  Get the picture and plan out the annotations.

Use Screencastify to create a video of the annotation.

Screencastify allows a user to record the action in a tab and the audio captured by a microphone.  Start the screencastify extension and begin recording.  During the recording, annotate the image and talk through the annotation.  This does not need to be long.  Just a quick analysis of the document.

Once the video is created, view screencasts.  Students can Share the screencasts and get a link to the video they created.  Turn that link into google classroom or however you accept assignments.

Uses

I have had teachers do this where they break the students up into groups and provide each group with a different primary source document.  The groups analyze the document then follow the procedure above. Groups turned in their video link via email.

The teacher then showed all videos and students had to choose 2 documents and analysis as evidence in their response to a DBQ as homework.  In a class of 8 groups, groups analyzed 8 informational text documents in 20 minutes and all students watched them, (8 x 1 minute videos).

Yes, there are other ways to do this and other applications.  Enjoy.

Screencast your Solutions

With a history as a chemistry teacher I found that I solved many of the same problems over and over again throughout the years.  I would give a homework assignment and offer to go over all the questions students were unable or not confident in solving.  I found that, although this was a helpful task, it quickly ate up time in class.  How could I streamline this process?  I began screencasting problems.

The Tools:
Screencastify (or screencast-o-matic if not on a chromebook)- Allow the recording of up to 10 minutes of either a tab in a browser or using a webcam.  I just made sure I downloaded the video to google drive and shared it to free up my 10 minutes.

Daum Equation Editor - This is a web based equation editor where I could type in the problem end explicitly work through how I solved the problem.

Webcam - Like a webcam, many document cameras can hook up to a computer with a USB cable.  This will turn the document camera into a high resolution camera.  I often used this to record my hand writing out the solution to a problem on a piece of paper, just like you would do it on the board.  While doing this, you can also project the image that you are recording.

WeVideo - If I wanted to get fancy.  I could edit the video.  As I tried to keep these to quick videos, I rarely used this tool.

Tell the Class to be Quiet and hold their Questions.
As I would go over the problems, I would always save one problem to screencast.  When I got to this problem, I would tell the students to be quiet and that I would be turning this into a video.  I would record the video and audio of me solving the problem, then post it online for students to see.  Upon completion I would turn off the recording and ask if there were more questions.

Get it Done Before Class.
Prior to class I would do the same thing and I would post them to my class webpage.  As students entered the room, I would check their homework and then tell them where to find the videos in case they had questions.

Google Slides

This last weekend I attended a conference and purposefully went to sessions that had nothing to do with chromebooks.  That has been my area of expertise and what I have supported the most.  But I still get asked a lot of questions about the things that iPads can do and what is the comparable app or extension on chromebooks.  After listening to how teachers are using iBooks author and screencasting with explain everything, a truly brilliant use of app smashing, I wanted to see if the same thing could be done on chromebooks.  There are many screencasting apps, I recommend screencastify.  The creation of the content was the challenge for me.  I came up with Google Slides.

Most people use google slides as a replacement for powerpoint presentations.  Yes, it is nice that you can create a presentation online with the ability to collaborate and quickly insert pictures and text.  It is the other facets of the program that I think are better.

Change it from a Slide to a Poster
Open up a Google Slide and select a theme (I like the blank theme).  Once open, select the file menu and choose page setup.  Here you can change the size of the slide to a custom size, for a poster, brochure, book, etc.

Format the Poster
The best part about slides is the lack of format rules.  In a Doc, there are limits to where text can be (left, right, center, and in a table).  In Google Slides, you add a text box where you want the text box, put a picture where you want that.  Move it around, design the space, super easy.

Displaying the Slides
Publish the Presentation - on the File menu, there is an option to publish the presentation to the internet.  Choose this and the presentation can be embedded or linked.

Make it a PDF - on the File menu, select Donwload as, and choose PDF.  Put that PDF in your google Drive and share the link with others.  Much like the publishing to the internet, but it is possible to zoom in on PDF files.

One Page is a Poster, More Pages are a Book
Just because it is thought of as a presentation tool does not mean that there are additional functionalities built into it.  I have seen teachers use them for students to creatively display book reports and character studies, political cartoon identification and analysis, propaganda poster creation, product presentation of engineered solutions, and calculation problem solving posters.  One thing that I know could be done, but have not yet seen, is the creation of a multipage poster that essentially turns the posters and presentations into a book.