Schoology Question Banks and Feedback

By Mark Heintz

I have fallen in love!  My love is the Schoology quiz bank feature.  I teach sophomores world history, so I categorized my question banks by time period, then by topic (such as political), and finally by civilization.  The extreme organization allows me to easily repeat questions on later quizzes.

Here is what my classical political civilization question banks look like. 

As for each questions, I utilize Schoology's feedback feature.  Each question has an explanation to why the answer the student chose is right or wrong.  By using instant feedback, I hope to save time in class. I should not have to explain as many questions to the students. Also, the students can instantly see their misunderstandings of a topic and progress to the next attempt or quiz.  

Below each question, Schoology allows the user to input general feedback for an incorrect or correct answer.  Here I am pasting larger more general understandings of the topic.

 My intent with these questions and quizzes is to have students earn as close to 100% as possible.  I set up my first seven quizzes in a student completion checklist.  Students will have to pass each quiz with a 95% or higher to move to the next quiz.  I want my students to know the content, and I want them to know it so much they have to pass the checklist with a understanding of at least 95%.

 Each quiz has questions from the core set and then random questions from previous sets.  For instance, the Han Dynasty quiz has seven Han Dynasty questions and random questions from Greece, Rome and Persia.  My hope is to continue this process throughout the year. Eventually the students will see each of these so many times the content will be ingrained in their brain.

It is so easy to add questions from previous banks.  Schoology allows the user to choose random questions, so each quiz will be different for each student.  Also, each time the student takes the quiz it will be different! With the feedback feature, the student should not have to go back to their notes to find the information on why or why not the question is right. The feedback will tell them instantly so they can progress through the quiz.  

Student Feedback and Notability

By Mark Heintz

A few weeks ago, Linda Ashida posted on Katie Owen's innovative idea of sharing Notability notes to students.  You can read her post here.  Lately, I have been using this practice to increase student engagement and feedback.   Also, as the school rapidly comes to a end, time is precious.  Using shared notes increases classroom time because students are not spending time copying information from one place to another.  Therefore, more time is spend in the analysis of student work and providing feedback.

I recently used this strategy through a list of topics/terms on the USSR and CCP.  I shared the note with the students, and I asked them to move the information to either category.  They could copy the terms to place under both groupings.  When they finished, students shared their work via AppleTV. This practice enabled the class to go through the answers and provide feedback on their selections.  The entire task took only a few minutes to create and a few minutes for the students to attempt.  The discussion that followed the assignment was rich. Since the activity only took a few minutes, there was time that allowed for students to ask questions on why a term was in a specific category.  At the end, some students had a list of terms they needed to look up for further review.  Next time I do this activity, I will ask the students to use the words to draw comparisons.

Another example of this practice comes from a first year teacher, Kristen Gierman.  To help students writing, Kristen created a note that contained elements of a paragraph.  She wrote one main idea statement that the students located and move to the top of the page.  Then, the students went through all of the other statements to determine which were the best support of the main idea.  The students simply erased the ones that were off topic and moved the ones in support to the order they belonged in the paragraph.

The students shared theirs versions of the paragraph and defended the placement of the statements to the class. It was great to see the students evaluating work and seeing their rationale. Many of the students understood the necessity for clarity in their writing and often cited that as a reason to exclude some pieces of evidence. At the conclusion of the activity, the students wrote their own paragraph.  The writings were some of the strongest I have seen students create in my nine years as a teacher.  It was great to see the students use the structure, clarity, and use of strong evidence from the example in their own writing.   

Student Interviews as Assessment

By Kim Miklusak

This week I performed interviews as part of an ELL grad project in assessment to discover how students brainstorm for an AP English Language prompt.  I selected two students who are second language learners and who have struggled in different ways during the year.  I cannot overstate how useful I found these interviews!  Many teachers instruct and model brainstorming.  Some require that students to demonstrate planning for X minutes before they can write.  What I think these interviews made clear to me, however, was where specifically in the planning process students struggle.  This information will provide teachers and students with clear steps to possible solutions.

For example, my first student is a native Urdu speaker and speaks Urdu as her home language.  She exited ELL during 3rd grade.  Listening to her speak through her planning, we could pinpoint two main concerns: defining terms in the quotation and how to move from brainstorming evidence to outlining a main idea based on the prompt.  I am going to provide her with some graphic organizers to help scaffold the process better for her.

My second student is a native Spanish speaker and speaks Spanish as her home language.  She was in bilingual education through 3rd grade.  When planning, this student skipped the unknown vocabulary in the quotation and jumped right into prompt.  Once we talked through how to use context clues to define terms, the prompt became much easier.  Because she has not internalized steps to understand unknown words, she relies on "what it sounds like" and then moves on to working through the prompt.  I was able to provide her with other ways to figure out unknown words such as using her Spanish cognates.

I realize that interviews are incredibly time consuming: each of these took 10-15 minutes and could easily have run longer.  It would be impossible to do with every struggling student.  However, I highly recommend using this form of assessment for a few of your students in any subject area and grade or possibly using the iPad to require students to verbally explain their whole planning or problem solving before they write an essay or complete a math or science task in order to go back and review with them after they if need be.  The information gained was invaluable!

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!