Welcome to week two of Schoology November here on the blog. Be sure to check out last week's post about Discussions.
Google Drive Assignment App
At the elementary level the way we use digital tools is not the same as middle and high schools, for obvious reasons. Often a teacher will tell me, "I don’t need an LMS because I’m not grading papers online or requiring students to turn things in electronically." While we may not be giving students “grades” or closely monitoring due dates, the Google Drive Assignment app within Schoology is worth exploring. If you ever have your students work on a doc, slides, drawing, or sheet, and you want to be able to see and/or comment on their progress, then I highly recommend using this tool!
Teachers can push out a template of any Google Drive product (doc, slides, drawing, or sheet) and this app will make a copy for each student. Gone are the days of sharing with students, having them make a copy, and share it back to you. You can also avoid the flood of emails you get when you ask students to create and share a document with you. Even if you just push out a blank document, I think this process is worth it. Using the Google Drive Assignment App creates a folder of all the student assignments in the teacher’s Google Drive. This alone can save you hours of searching for student documents. You can also differentiate by individually assigning your templates to select students or groups.
Check out the video below where I demonstrate how to set up a google drive assignment, and the second video to see the student's view.
Humans are social beings. We naturally want to talk, share, and connect with others. I believe this is part of the reason that social media has become such a huge part of our society. It appears that social media isn’t going to be going away anytime soon, so love it or hate it, using social media is a skill that our students will likely need in their futures. If you teach high school or middle school, your students probably have accounts on Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, etc. so teaching them responsible ways to use these platforms doesn’t seem outlandish.
But what if you teach in an elementary school? These students cannot lawfully have a social media account since they are under the age of 13. Eventually these students will need to have the skills to successfully navigate social media, so how can we start preparing them at a young age? Fortunately in the last few years platforms have emerged to help teachers tackle this task. Tools like Seesaw, Flipgrid, and Padlet have designed safe, kid friendly platforms where students can safely share their ideas and their work while practicing their online communication skills that will be essential in their futures. (Note: just because the legal terms of a product say they cannot use it, some adolescents with or without the consent of their parents choose to create and use an account anyway.)
This begs the question, is it the responsibility of our schools to teach children this skill? In my opinion, YES! Just like we teach character education, I believe that teaching these skills will not only positively impact our students long after they have left our buildings, but it fits with what we know about best practices. It is a well known fact that students learning by doing. If they can explain a concept in their own words and in their own way, then we know they have truly learned it. I love this quote from Janelle Bence:
Authentic learning is not demonstrated by a worksheet that’s turned into a teacher. That may be more appropriate to indicate progress in a particular more isolated skill. Real learning, however, is manifested in learner creations that are published for consumption by a wider audience.
Bence, J. (2016, May 17). The benefits of sharing student work in online spaces. In KQED Education. Retrieved February 7, 2018, from https://ww2.kqed.org/education/2016/05/17/the-benefits-of-sharing-student-work-in-online-spaces/
So with the idea that using social media is a life skill, and true learning requires more than just worksheet completion, where do we begin? Lucky for us, some very talented and creative educators have come up with ideas on how to combine the content and skills they are already teaching with the posting, sharing and connecting that students want and need to practice.
Book Talk
A book talk proves you read the book and encourages others to read it. Think about it like a commercial for the book, you want to entice others to read it without giving away the ending or any surprises.
A book review is very similar to a book talk, but your ideas are communicated in writing rather than speaking. Short and simple is the key! You want to summarize the book and get others excited to read it without spoiling the ending.
What tools can student use?
Padlet-example
Seesaw-Activity
Google Classroom-Question
A book trailer is a commercial for a book, just like a movie trailer it creates excitement around the story using images, music, and purposefully selected words and phrases. Book trailers are intended to be short and exciting for the viewer.
What tools can students use?
iMovie-share on Seesaw or Flipgrid
WeVideo-share on Seesaw or Flipgrid Planning Sheet
A book snap is a picture of a page in a book that a student found interesting, insightful, or stuck out to them for any reason. Students use a digital tool to annotate and share their thinking about what they read and share it with others.
If your students have Google accounts you should be using Google Classroom to help simplify how you create assignments, provide feedback and communicate with your students. Google Classroom is simple, user friendly, and can make your digital organization a breeze.
Five Reasons To Love Google Classroom
1. Organization
When you create an assignment in Classroom it creates a folder in your Google Drive with the same title as your assignment. Within that folder you will find all of your students' work for that assignment, and the best part is their name is in title! No more "no name" papers! As the teacher you can access their work either by going through Google Classroom or in your Drive. Students will also see a folder for your class, and all of their assignments will automatically be saved to this folder.
2. Templates
It is often challenging to get students to format a Doc or Slides Presentation exactly how you want them to. When students are not proficient in their keyboarding skills, and they are just learning how to navigate Google Apps, it is nice to be able to give them a template to work on. You can create Doc, Slide, Drawing or Sheet with the formatting set how you want it, and Google Classroom can make a copy for each student. No more "share, make a copy, share back"! This way students can focus on the content of their work rather than spending time adjusting margins.
3. Differentiation
Earlier this fall, Google Classroom added the option to send assignments to specific students. This is a huge step forward in the ability to differentiate! Since students do not see each other's assignments or work, you can now easily give assignments with different directions, expectations, or content while preserving student privacy.
4. Reusing Posts
The creators of Google Classroom understand that teachers spend lots of time creating assignments for their students, so they built in the Reuse Post option. This allows you to reuse an assignment from a previous year or from a different class. You can make necessary tweaks to the assignment and change the due date.
5. Planning Ahead
Another fairly new feature is the ability to save drafts of posts, and to schedule when things are posted for students to see. This is nice for projects or assessments that you know you will use throughout the year. You can set them up ahead of time and push them out to students when you are ready.
If you are looking to get started with Google Classroom, check out the tutorials below or contact me to help you get started!
I've noticed something interesting over the last few years. We often say that our students are digital natives, and they just "get" technology. While I believe this is true to some extent, I think there is more to the story. I would argue that the students I see in our K-5 buildings are very good at navigating devices, they can play games, message their friends, and oh boy can they mess with the settings on a device! 😉 However, I do see many kids struggle when it come to using technology to learn a concept or to show their learning. I think there is a big difference between being able to use technology for fun and being able to use technology to be productive.
It seems like Google also noticed this trend. Over the last few years, they have been developing a curriculum to "teach digital literacy through practical projects." Google's Applied Digital Skills Curriculum is free, engaging, and easy for educators and students to use.
The curriculum is intended for middle and high school students, and they recently added college and continuing education lessons. Even though the target audience is older students, I believe with the proper amount of scaffolding 3rd-5th graders can successfully complete some of the projects.
Last spring, a few of our 3rd grade classes tried out the first lesson and it went well! The first lesson is titled If-Then Adventure Stories, and below you can see the outline of the lesson.
There are 4 different activities in this lesson. However, since this one is the first lesson in the curriculum, the first activity is simply an introduction to Google. The last activity is always a reflection on the project.
Each activity includes tutorial videos that walk students through the steps of using Google Apps to collaborate with each other and create their story. Given the age of our students it might be better to modify some of the directions. For example, the videos instruct students to open a new document and share it with their group members. You may want to set this up ahead of time through Google Classroom so that you can also access their work if needed.
The narrators in the videos do a nice job of explaining the objectives for each section, providing examples, and giving clear directions of what to do next.
Ideally this would be completely self-guided and the teacher would only need to check in with students periodically throughout the process. This would be great way for students to use their WIN time purposefully if they are not in an intervention group. Or it would be a project that students could work on over a long period of time when they complete their other work in class.
Where to Start
There are several lessons in the curriculum, but I believe that a few would be good for 3rd-5th grade students.
If-Then Adventure Stories
Students write a choose your own adventure story, and create links to lead the reader through the story.
Plan an Event
Students plan and advertise and event. They create a logo, a flyer, and a website to promote their event.
Plan and Budget
Students research and make decisions about long term spending, contract, and loans. *High level math skills required.
These lessons give students a chance to create projects that they can be proud of, and it gives them the confidence to apply those skills in other situations. The hope is that by providing students with the opportunity to learn these skills at an early age, they will be more prepared to navigate our digital world. We need our future leaders to do more than chat with their friends and play games, we need them to use the power of technology to make an impact on the world!
As always, feel free to comment below or reach out to me if you want to get your students started on these lesson!
Every spring teachers and students fill out the BrightBytes survey. In the fall our Technology Department looks at the results. We use this data for planning purposes and goal setting. For the last few years, the items about digital citizenship have been a low point in our data, so one of my personal goals has been to provide teachers with resources to explicitly teach their students what it means to be a responsible digital citizen. While there are many great resources out there the one that sticks out to me is Common Sense Media's Digital Citizenship Curriculum. I like that it is well organized and has a scope and sequence across grade levels.
I decided to take this curriculum and tweak it for our teachers. Knowing that teaching a 45-60 minute lesson on something that is not a standard would be a difficult task, I tried to scale the lessons back to about 20 minutes making it easier to fit into the already busy day. I also tried to align the lessons in each grade level to our Character Counts pillar of the month. In some cases this worked, but not every lesson fits every month's pillar well. The goal is to teach one lesson per month, so that by the end of the year students will have gone through at least 5 specific lessons on digitalcitizenship. More importantly my hope is that the conversations about what it means to be a digitalcitizen will become a natural part of our school community. The document below outlines each grade level's lesson for each month, and includes links to the lessons. I'd love to know how you teach your classes about digital citizenship. And if you aren't teaching this topic what barriers are the way?
Have you heard of this?!?! Flip Grid is a highly versatile tool that all teachers will want in their arsenal of tech tools.
We all have all kinds of students in our classrooms; the quiet kids who have wonderful ideas, but never want to speak in front of their peers, the kids with great insights who struggle to write their ideas on paper, or the kids who have no problem sharing, but can get off topic. With Flip Grid you can give the quiet students a voice, give the struggling writer a way to express himself/herself, and give kids a limited amount of time to get their ideas out (with unlimited chances to re-record).
Flip Grid allows you to set up a "grid" (think class) where you can post "topics" for your students. Students respond to your post, which can be written, video you record, video you upload, images, or anything in your Google Drive. You get to control the privacy settings (password protection) and choose if students can post automatically or if you need to approve their responses first.
Check out this video tutorial from Stacey Roshan (@buddyxo) on how to set up your teacher account and start your first topic.
There have been some updates to Google Forms to make it easier than ever to use for formative assessment. Teachers can create questions with images in the question or answer, which makes this tool idea for young learners. Using their iPad or Chromebook, students can use forms to answer questions to provide evidence of progress toward learning targets. The teacher can see student responses in real time, and use this data to drive instruction. Demo Quiz
