Tech Tips & Tricks

Over the next couple weeks, we will be sharing with you what the EGHS staff presented and learned at our staff-led Institute Day.  This is the first in a series of posts.

One of those sessions was presented by Mark Heintz, where he discussed numerous time-saving tips and tricks related to both the MacBook and iPad.

Here is an overview of Mark's tech tips:

1.  Extended Desktop

Allows you to work on your laptop while displaying something else.

2.  Spacebar on the Mac

          This feature allows you to preview a document in Finder, instead of having to load it.

3.  Gestures
 

1. Two fingers - right click & Three Fingers - drag an item on the desktop
2. Four fingers up - see all apps that you have open
3. Four fingers over - switch through multiple "desktops"
   
   
   
   
   

4.  Two Different Types of Mirroring

5.  Screen shots

1. ⌘ + ⇧ + 3 Capture entire screen + save
2. ⌘ + ctrl + ⇧ + 3 Capture entire screen + copy to the clipboard
3. ⌘ + ⇧ + 4 Capture dragged area + save (the one I use the most)
4. ⌘ + ctrl + ⇧ + 4 Capture dragged area + copy to the clipboard
5. ⌘ + ⇧ + 4 then Space Capture a window +save
6. ⌘ + ctrl + ⇧ + 4 then Space Capture a window + copy to the clipboard

6.  Spaces

1. Different classes-different uses

7.  Online quizzes & what I have learned

1. Review quizzes are the best-hard-time limit

8.  Google docs & Calendars with Links


9.  Screen Recordings with Quicktime
          Each D214 laptop has Quicktime.  It is a quick way to record your screen, voice, or both!

10.  OneTab
          Save and re-open all tabs from day to day.

11. Apple Tab and Apple Tilda

1. Command + tab - opens all apps that you have open & Command + q - closes all

Recharge with Professional Learning! ICE 2016

Written by Linda Ashida


February is a great time to take a break from our daily routines as educators and recharge by attending a professional conference.  And, as Kirsten Fletcher reminded us in her recent Collab Blog post, taking time out for professional learning benefits our students!

Last week I had the opportunity to recharge by attending the ICE 2016 Conference: Welcome to the Future.

In this post I will share highlights of just a couple of sessions that I attended. They were inspiring, stretched my thinking and re-energized me.

Keynote speech by Jenny Magiera. 

If you ever have the chance to hear Jenny Magiera speak, don't miss it!  In her keynote she inspired all of us to all be courageous, step out of our comfort zones, and "share our crazy pills" to encourage others to join us in our Edventures. She shared powerful examples about the power of student voice.  Check out the video her students submitted to the White House Film Festival campaign:  #YesYouCan.  You will be inspired!

Jenny also led an engaging workshop on Professional Learning.  Participant Katie Muhtaris captured many of the ideas presented in this sketchnote:

Katie's tweet is an example of how we can multiply our learning through social media. By following #ICE16 on Twitter during the conference, I expanded my professional learning network and learned from sessions, like this one of Jenny's, that I didn't even attend.

Social Curation by  Joyce Valenza

Curation is a search strategy, an activity to promote learning, a critical thinking activity and if we teach our students to curate, we teach them to take responsibility for their own learning, be a trusted guide, and form community and learning networks.  Joyce Valenza stressed the importance of teaching curation skills to our students. She shared a wealth of examples and resources. If you are interested in exploring curation resources, check out this this link to her presentation.

 

To "see" more about what ICE 2016 looked like and how it inspired participants, and for a wealth of resources, check out #ICE16 on Twitter.  

Using Audio Recording to Improve Fluency

By Bonnie Kale

In a high school English classroom, we rarely have the opportunity to practice and assess our students' reading fluency.  After all, with the time constraints of a 50-minute classroom, it would be nearly impossible to give 25 students a chance to read aloud from a text.  What's more, we don't want to force kids to read a passage aloud in front of their peers when they have had limited time to practice. Now, thanks to the audio feature on Schoology, it is easy to seamlessly incorporate fluency instruction and assessment into our courses.  Simply create an assignment as you regularly would in Schoology.  When students go to submit the assignment, they will click on "submit audio recording." 
 
Recently, I had the opportunity to use this audio feature with my honors freshman class. Students practiced reading the prologue from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet in small groups, paying particular attention to the punctuation, phrasing, rhyme, and overall purpose of the passage.  Then, students went home and submitted an audio recording of themselves reading the prologue aloud.  I was able to provide students with individual feedback about how to improve their fluency, thus, enhancing their overall understanding of the passage.  For example, I could hear that several students were pausing and ending phrases at the end of the line, rather than continuing the phrase to the end of the punctuation.   It's easy to forget that fluent reading is not a product of good reading but a contributor to reading comprehension.

Increasing Engagement & Feedback with TurnItIn.Com

By Jackie Randall and Kristen Guth

World Literature and Composition utilizes Turnitin.com more than simply an authenticity resource.  The sophomore English teachers take advantage of the site’s ability to prevent plagiarism, engage students, manage assignments and collaboration, and deliver rich feedback.  For the recent Memoir assignment, students submitted their first drafts to Turnitin.com.  With this submission, students received almost instant grammar corrections.  In addition, the sophomore team created comments that directly correlated with the rubric for the assignment.  By sharing both the comments and rubric within the team, all students receive consistent feedback across the grade level.  Each comment can be tied to the customizable rubric allowing for students to check the mastery of skills during the drafting process.

In the student example above, the purple bubbles are grammatical errors. The blue bubbles are the teacher comments, both canned comments (saved in the comment library on the right of the screen) and original comments found in the blue speech bubbles.

When the student hovers over the comment, the explanation or rule appears.  This is also where the evaluator can connect the comment to a criterion on the rubric.

Students have access to the complete rubric and how their comments correlate to the criterion. 

Through this process, students can receive rich feedback specific to their paper and assignment while in the drafting process.  Teachers can take advantage of utilizing canned comments (seriously, how many times do you write the same thing on every student’s draft?!) and grading through the website or iPad instead of hauling home piles of students’ drafts.  PLTs can share comments and rubrics to make team wide grading efficient and consistent. I’d say that’s a win-win-win! #turnitinforwhat

Schoology Checklists as Formative Assessment

By Kim Miklusak

Schoology checklists are not new on this blog: you can read more on how different subjects have used them here!  This year, Matt Snow & I are using them to differentiate instruction and provide immediate feedback for students at the AP level.

The sequence goes like this: Students take a pre-reading quiz on vocabulary from the text, using context clues and roots to determine the meaning of 5 words.  They have 3 opportunities to take the quiz in order to get 100.  This will then unlock the text, which students will annotate and submit, receiving quick feedback on a 4-point scale.  They then take a 10-question comprehension quiz, participate in a discussion in which they write a sample thesis (again using a 4-point scale).  Finally they are able to unlock the AP writing/analysis assignment, which targets individual writing skills.  None of these steps is graded!  They are the foundational skills required to reach higher level understanding, so students receive self-, peer-, and teacher-provided formative feedback before moving on. 

This example is not set up as a checklist because we are modelling it for students first.
The next assignment will be a linear checklist feature.

We have multiple goals for this set-up: 1) we hope to catch each student where s/he needs the most support, 2) we hope to provide immediate feedback on targeted skills, and 3) we hope to allow students who do not need as much support the opportunity to push themselves farther than they may have been able to in a traditional classroom set-up.

In pre-1:1 years, I had students fill out an excel print out, noting what score they received on the 4-point scale for each writing skill [more information on that can be found here].  But now with Schoology, if I can mark assignments as "graded" even if they are formative, I am able to see a running tally of how each student scored on each individual writing skill.  Now not only do students get quicker, targeted feedback on individual skills, but they can see their own development over time, thus making revisions and conferencing more effective and efficient.

This screen shot is set to display our "writing" rubrics/skills.
I can also change the view to "reading" or grammar rubrics/skills

You'll see in the sample above that there are some things I need to work out: for example, how to label each assignment.  Nevertheless, I'm excited to work with these features for this upcoming year!

Using Mini-Rubrics to Provide Feedback in Schoology

By Kim Miklusak

I'm excited to use rubrics in Schoology this year.  As I mentioned on my other blog [shameless plug], I'm looking forward to working with mini-lessons on skill-specific assignments that target what each student needs to be successful in larger reading and writing assignments.

The tricky thing on Schoology is where and how to set up the rubrics.  There are many websites and videos for setting up and using them.  If you're looking to start small, I recommend setting up a few generic ones.  For example, I have one set up for "journals."  I'm not grading all of my discussions in our actual gradebook, but I do want to provide students with targeted feedback on the depth of their responses to encourage them to give enough detail to explain their point of view.

Discussion topic & rubric

Grading view of a discussion on web browser

Grading view of a discussion on Schoology app

There are pluses and minuses to grading on the app vs. website.  The website allows you to clearly see which students' submissions have been graded, but it takes 4 clicks to finally submit the rubric.  The app is much quicker, a really nice interface, but it's hard to see which submissions have been graded--not a problem if you just move down the list and check every student, though.

Grading assignments with the Schoology rubric is so smooth on both the app and website.  This will be so helpful in giving immediate and detailed feedback to students on specific skills.

Grading view of an assignment on Schoology app

Please share ways you have used skill-specific rubrics in the comments below.  And please stop down to the CollabLab if you are interested in setting these up or would like to discuss more ways to use them in class!

VoxVote, Part II

By Bruce Janu

The first annual CinéStudent Film Festival closed its curtain on Saturday night. We highlighted 11 student films, giving out over $200 in awards.  One of the awards was an "Audience Award," voted on by the audience in attendance.

As I mentioned last week, I decided to try VoxVote for the audience voting at the festival.  After setting everything up, I felt pretty confident it was going to work. I didn't even have a back-up plan, which is unusual for me.  I always try to figure out ways in which things can go wrong and, in this case, I either felt confident or simply ran out of time to come up with an alternative.

Luckily, I didn't have to.

When the audience was ready to vote, I decided to start off with a basic polling question just to get the audience ready and logged on.  After displaying the website and pin for VoxVote, I took them to the first question.  The presentation was being fed through Power Point, so I had to "command+tab" to a web browser on the Mac which was already set to go with the my VoxVote account.  I showed them the first question:  "To what upcoming movie are you most looking forward?"

The audience then voted.  I refreshed the screen periodically so the audience could see how it worked and get a near real-time tally.

And, surprisingly, Finding Dory won.

Then it was time to vote on the best film for the audience award.  I hit the next button and told the audience to start voting and that voting would only be open for 5 minutes. But there was one small problem: I had forgotten to hit the "start" button and people started pointing out that they could not vote.  Once that was figured out, the voting started in earnest. For this segment of the voting, I chose not to display the tally^* and just "command+tabbed" back into Power Point.  I then went upstairs and logged onto a computer to watch the results.  After five minutes, I saw who had won and quickly printed out a certificate for the winner.

One thing I didn't do was to hit the next button when I was done collecting votes.  If I had done that, I would have been given the option to close the voting and all of the participants would have received a message on their devices:

Overall, VoxVote worked extremely well and I am thinking about ways to use it now in class. I'm even going to use it to collect votes for Film Club elections for officers, film screening choices and for film ratings.

Here are some thoughts about VoxVote and its use:

1. Practice.  Once you set everything up, go into preview mode. Run it off you computer and then try out several devices as if you are a participant.
2. Since VoxVote is web based, it can be used on any device.
3. Data can be collected, archived and sorted.  You can even email voting summaries to participants.
4. It would be nice to embed the VoxVote website directly in Power Point, but our versions for the Mac do not allow this.

Give VoxVote a try.  Remember, it is free for District 214 teachers.  Just make sure you register with a 214 email.

Any questions, just ask.

------------------------

^* I chose not to display the tally because there were some films that did not receive any votes and I didn't want hurt feelings.

Comprehension Checks without Quizzes

By Kim Miklusak

My American Literature students are currently reading The Great Gatsby.  Since we just started, I wanted to do a comprehension check, but I didn't want to give a pen-and-paper quiz, so I decided to try out something that I have heard other people in my department doing.  The students' assignment was to create a visual representation of the main characters and events in chapter 2.  While I suggested apps like PicCollage or a comic book app, students were also free simply to use NoteTaker or Notability.

I wasn't sure how this was going to go.  There are a handful of students in this class who I could tell would scoff at an assignment like this, but I decided to see what would happen.  The scoring was simply based on completion of the major events and characters, not creativity.  Some students, as the one below, only produced one scene, which would receive a limited score, while others showed a progression throughout the whole chapter.

In the end I was happy with how this assignment went.  In a traditional class, we would have spent time talking about plot and characters  to be sure students understood the key events.  What this assignment did, however, was it required all students to take ownership of highlighting the key events and work through it on their own.  I could hear them asking each other questions like, "Why did Tom hit her?" and "How do I know what Myrtle looks like?" or "Whose apartment was it?"  I won't tell you that every student had so much fun, but there certainly was a higher level of engagement than if we were doing a large or even small group assignment for the same chapter.  We will now use this foundation to instead spend time focusing on analysis of the literature than "did you understand."

At the end of the period students uploaded their collage into a Schoology Media Album, so their peers were able to see it.  I projected the album up on the screen and would refresh it to share progress.  We started class the next day by looking at each collage.  Again, this brought up more conversation.  Some students asked, "Why do people keep putting a picture of a car or garage," which let us talk about George Wilson and his situation, etc.  It also let us correct some misreading such as in the first collage above where the student said "Nick bought Myrtle a dog" instead of Tom.  Overall, I was happy with the engagement and outcome of this assignment, and I look forward to working with it later on again in the novel on a more thematic level.

Skilled Workers

By Mark Heintz

On Monday, April 6, 2015, our district had an in-service day.  In the new contract signed last year, our Education Association and District Administration agreed to add an in-service day to the school calendar.  The day's intent was to allow teachers time to digitally convert their curriculum.   The day was great!  In the early stages of planning, I might have been a nay-sayer, but thanks to @Ashida_Linda and @MrsMiklusak, their wisdom prevailed.   In the morning,  spark sessions were given from a variety of staff members on topics from flipped classroom to the use of stop motion videos. The spark sessions flowed to two hours of EdCamp. You can read more about it here.  

Not to change subjects, but recently my history classes finished learning about the industrial revolution.  I can't help but make the connection between the in-service day and industrialization.  No, I am not talking about horrible working conditions or child labor.  I am writing on the needs for educated workers and the development of skilled laborers to work in factories.  People needed to be educated to work the complicated machines and perform a specialized job.

The in-service day showed how teaching has become increasingly skilled.  With the proliferation of technology and the ease of accessing information, teachers are shifting their role. New brain research drives educators to understand what methods work better to maximize learning.  Brain research coupled with new technology, it is hard to stay current with both the brain research and the technology.   The pedagogical techniques to meld these two together are difficult skills to master. The in-service day was great way to allow teachers to see a variety of new techniques and hear the latest brain research on effective teaching.  It was even better because the day allowed for time to development, collaborate, explore and create materials for their classroom from the new understandings they received at the beginning portion of the day.

A final thought: the day reminded my of a scene from Scrubs where two doctors are talking about how hard it is to stay up on the current research and how times have changed.  I have only been teaching for nine years, and the changes are drastic from when I first began.  I am fortunate to be in a school and district that has so many support systems in place to provide the tools and knowledge to become even more specialized and skilled in the art of teaching.  The teachers I work with constantly push me to new understandings of students and different ways to approach the subject matter.  I work in a school where teachers share ideas constantly.  It makes it easier to grow and stay current in a world that is ever changing.

Professional Learning by Teachers for Teachers

by Linda Ashida

Today was a great day of collaborative professional learning at Elk Grove High School! It was an In-Service day intended to give staff time to enhance their knowledge of technology to transform student learning.

To take advantage of this opportunity, our Collab Lab team facilitated Spark Sessions and EdCamp-style workshops, that teachers could opt to join in on, to build connections and multiply our learning.

This portion of the In-Service day was completely teacher-led. The Spark Sessions were led by 10 staff from various disciplines. They each gave a 3-5 minute presentation on an educational technology strategy they use in their classrooms.  These sessions were designed to quickly share many examples, learn, and spark ideas for more in-depth learning in the EdCamp Workshops.



This was the first time we had EdCamp-style workshops at Elk Grove High School, so we first explained the concept of EdCamps. We then invited staff to propose workshops related to interests, passions, or questions they have. They wrote their ideas on PostIt Notes which a team of teachers used to build the schedule. After just ten minutes working on the schedule, we were ready to go!

Check out the schedule of Spark Sessions and EdCamp Workshops in the Google Doc we created and shared with staff with a tiny URL:  http://tinyurl.com/eg1to1 . We created this doc to not just to share the schedule with staff but resources as well.  You will notice that the EdCamp schedule includes links to separate Google Docs for each Workshop to curate our learning and resources.  Teachers can refer back to the docs to access resources, or learn from the notes on sessions that they did not attend.

We also used #EG1to1 on Twitter to share and curate our learning from the day. Check out this Storify of Tweets to get an even better idea of what our day of learning "looked like": Professional Learning By Teachers for Teachers

Did you participate in the day at EG?
Have you participated in a similar professional learning experience in another school?
Do your have resources or ideas to share?

We'd love your feedback! 

Please leave us comments so that we can extend our learning even more!

Interactive Activities with Notability

Posted by Linda Ashida

We would like to give a big shout out to Katie Owen, Special Education teacher, for facilitating this week's 8th hour Peer Learning Group and inspiring this post.  Katie shared a variety of interactive language arts activities that she has created for her Strategies for Learning class using the apps Notability and Flashcards+. After Katie's demonstration, our group enjoyed brainstorming the many way we could adapt the activities in our own classes; we discussed applications for varied disciplines and varied levels.

In this post we will highlight some creative ways that Katie uses Notability with her students.

Instead of simply writing and annotating documents, Katie also wanted her students to be able to manipulate words and phrases, to do varied vocabulary, categorizing, and writing activities.  Prior to her 1:1 days, Katie recalls the "old-fashioned" manipulative word-sort and sentence-sort activities where either she or her students would spend SO much time cutting out the words to prepare the activities.  Collecting and organizing all of the word and sentence pieces was also time consuming.

After transitioning to a 1:1 classroom, it ocurred to Katie that her students could do the same manipulative activities using Notability. She could do this by posting documents in Schoology in as Notes, instead of PDFs. That way, students could still write on and annotate the documents, just as they could with PDFs, but the .note format would also give them the ability to manipulate words or phrases using the scissors function; they could easily be "cut" and moved around the document into category boxes, or organized in a series, etc. They could also modify or make corrections on documents using the eraser function.  

Before sharing some specific examples from Katie's classes, we'll first share the steps that she uses to upload each activity to Schoology in "Note" format:

1. Create a PDF document on her laptop and open it in Notability on her iPad; OR, create a document right in Notability on her iPad. 
2. Option: Annotate the document with additional instructions, or examples.
3. From her iPad: Email the document to herself as a "note" from Notability.
4. On her laptop: Open email and download the document (now in .note format) to her desktop.
5. Upload the .note document to Schoology Resource folder.
6. Move the .note document to Schoology Course Page for student access.

The sequence of  visuals below show how to choose the Note format and move it to the Schoology Resource folder:

And now, some specific examples from Katie's classes.

1)  Word sort/categorization activity:

Katie created this document in Notability, emailed it to herself, opened it on her laptop, and then uploaded it to Schoology.  Students open the document in Notability and then manipulate the words to categorize them. You can see on the Note that the students choose the "scissors" in the top menu bar, circle the word to "cut" it, and then move it over into the correct category.

2) Cloze Activity:

Katie started with this document in PDF format.  From her laptop she emailed it to herself and then opened it on her iPad in Notability.  In Notability she wrote the words in the word bank in blue.  She emailed it to back to herself as a Note.  She then opened it on her laptop and uploaded it to Schoology.  Students open the activity in Notability.  Once again, they use the scissors to "cut" the words in the word bank and move them to the correct blank.


 

3)  Sentence structure / Sentence corrections:

To prepare this activity, Katie used the same steps to prepare it as she did with the Cloze activity above.  Katie annotated the sentences on a PDF document in Notability, emailed it to herself as a Note, and the uploaded it to Schoology.  The students open the document in Notability and then use the eraser in the top menu bar to erase and correct Katie's annotations.

4)  Modeling annotations with "I do, We do, You do" color-coding:

Katie has embedded in all of her classes a strong routine of modeling for her students.  The "I do" activities, those that the teacher models, are always coded with the color red in the instructions box. The "we do" activities, those that the students do together with the teacher, are coded in yellow.  The "You do", activities, those that the teacher directs the students to do on their own, are coded in green.  In the example on the right, you will see that the first section has instructions coded with red, and has annotations that Katie completed as a model for the students.  The next section's instructions are in yellow, so the students move on to do annotations with the teacher's guidance.  The final step would be for the students to do their own annotations without guidance, and those instructions would be in green.  You can see an example of that above.  Notice that the sentence correction activity instructions are in green, so that is an activity that the students were prepared to do on their own, after modeling, and guided practice from the teacher.



Katie also shared examples of interactive activities that her students enjoy using the Flashcards+ app.  We'll save those examples for a future post. After Katie's demonstrations, we brainstormed applications for our World Language, English Social Science and Math classes.  Have Katie's activities inspired ideas for your own classes?  Please share your ideas in the comments below.

And, if you are a teacher at EGHS and you'd like to try these activities with your classes, stop by and see us in the Collab Lab! We'd love to brainstorm ideas and help you create activities for your own classes!