Category Archives: Google Apps

End-of-Year Google Classroom Cleanup

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The end is nigh and in sight! As usual, over the summer the Central Office tech staff will be archiving your Finalsite classes and creating new ones according to your 2019-20 schedule. But when it comes to Google Classroom, it’s up to you to manage all of that. However, it can be done in a way that does not add to your end-of-year stress. Rather than reinvent the wheel, I found some great posts by other bloggers about some steps you can take to clean up your Google Classrooms and get ready for next year. You’ll find some great advice here and here.

In short, you’re going to want to consider doing the following:

  • Return all student work that was submitted via Classroom.
  • Archive your current classes so you don’t have to deal with any clutter when you start the 2019-20 year fresh.
  • Make copies of your current classes for next year. This will copy all Classwork posts and put them in draft mode in the new copy, and you can decide next year what you want to use. These new classes will not have any students in them until you add them next year.
  • Make copies of any student exemplars you want to keep, and store them in a Google folder called something like Student Exemplars (students are the owners of their files, so if they delete it, you lose it).

That’s pretty much it, though I do recommend checking out one of the linked articles above. In the meantime, you if have any questions, or would like me to come visit you in person as you clean things up, you know how to reach me.

A Closer Look at New Feedback Features in Google Classroom

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At the start of the year, I shared some new updates to Google Classroom, and they were all nice improvements. However, I wanted to take a closer look at one feature in particular that I believe can have the most impact on the way teachers assess student work. Now, in Classroom’s new Classwork page, when teachers view student submissions, it appears in a new grading and feedback shell that allows teachers to do a couple things more efficiently. 1) Teachers can now quickly cycle through student submissions without having to open and close new tabs. 2) Teachers can create a comment bank of frequently used feedback phrases and provide this feedback to students with just a few keystrokes. Check it out in the brief video below.

And in related, but different news, I recently received a great tip from Music teacher Scott Ferguson. He sent me a link, announcing that Google had just created some new shortcuts that allow users to quickly start new projects right from your web browser.  You can type doc.new, docs.new, or document.new in your web browser to make a new Google Doc, just like you would type a website address. Use sheet.new, sheets.new, or spreadsheet.new for new Google Sheets. Forms.new or form.new will open a new Google Form. You can also make new Slides with slide.new, slides.new, or presentation.new.  Want a new Google site? Try site.new, sites.new, or website.new.

New Features in Google Sites

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The new school year always brings new updates to different G Suite apps, so today I wanted to let you know about some changes to Google Sites. Sites are a great way to have students share new learning and important findings. If you’ve never considered having students create their own websites, you may want to check out this post first.

The main enhancement to Sites involves new section layout options, which make it quicker and easier to design professional-looking web pages. There are six pre-built section layout options, which you can find in Sites’ right-hand Insert menu. To use them, just drag the layout onto the page. A new section will be added to your site and auto-populated with placeholder content matching the layout. You can then customize the layout by adding your own content.

 

Google is also making it easy for users to add buttons to their websites. Buttons are a great way to direct people to important content on a site, as users tend to click on buttons more frequently than textual hyperlinks. Buttons will automatically match the site’s color scheme and are easy to resize.

While these changes aren’t ground-breaking, it’s nice to see Google continue to respond to users’ requests and make improvements. As always, let me know if you need any support using any of Google’s tools with your classes.

Meet the New Google Classroom

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While many of you have always loved Google Classroom for its ability to streamline digital work from students, some have complained that it falls short when it comes to organizing class resources and materials. Google has just announced some improvements that have the potential to satisfy everyone’s needs and concerns. With these improvements come:

  • a dedicated Classwork page, making it easier for students and teachers to find posts containing assignments
  • a new grading tool designed to allow teachers to give better, faster feedback
  • an improved tool to copy and reuse classwork from previous classes
  • customizable notification settings

Plus, there are more improvements on the horizon, such as:

  • organized materials (resources) on the new Classwork page
  • Classwork pages for pre-existing classes
  • creating online quizzes in locked mode

Read all about these enhancements in more detail here. If you haven’t yet explored Classroom to manage part of your web presence, now’s the time.

8th Grade English Students Show Off Their Creative Chops on Google Sites with The Polson Press

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After I touted the potential of the new Google Sites in a recent post, the 8th grade Language Arts teachers at Polson have done some pretty awesome things with its implementation. Martha Curran, Mary Rothfuss, Kristen Cinque, and Crystal Procaccini came to me at the start of their creative writing unit with the idea of publishing students’ finished works in a digital format. Blogger and Sites both came to mind, but they settled on Sites. The results are fantastic. Every student across the grade chose the piece they were most proud of for publication in what they dubbed The Polson Press, be it short story, vignette, poetry collection, or chapter 1 of a potential novel. While browsing the site, it doesn’t take long to realize how personally invested students were in their work. As a former English teacher, I was impressed by the quality of the work, but I can’t say I was surprised. On workshop days, I witnessed students’ focus as they went about their business on Chromebooks in the 8th grade commons area, situated just outside the 8th grade LA classrooms. It made me wonder if raising the stakes with the imminent publication of their work was the incentive needed to encourage students to produce their best work.

Due to privacy concerns, Google Sites created by Madison teachers and students are only accessible to other madisonps.org account users. But parents can enjoy seeing their kids’ work by simply asking them to sign in to Google when they visit the site. Go check out the results at the link above, but be sure to have your Google sign-in credentials on-hand. And if you’re interested in doing anything with Google Sites in your classrooms, don’t hesitate to reach out! It’s a great platform for students that can feature not just their more creative endeavors, but any intellectual pursuit you guide them through.

Replacing Those Research Papers and PowerPoint Presentations with Websites

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In working with teachers and students at Polson Middle School and Hand High School, I’ve seen students demonstrate their understanding in a variety of ways, especially as more and more teachers give students choice as to how they present their findings. One platform students have been increasingly using to great effect is a website. Last spring I worked with some 8th grade social studies teachers who forwent traditional thesis papers or PowerPoint presentations about the state of American democracy throughout the 20th century in favor of student-created websites. As with a traditional research paper, their final products had to have a clear well-supported thesis with ample evidence. In this case students needed to answer the course-long question of “Have we made progress?” in terms of how we, as a society, have (or have not) been living up to the Constitutional promises at the heart of our Nation’s founding.

I believe that what makes a website a powerful platform for students is the way it lends itself to organizing information in a way that reflects how we often chunk related pieces of information in our minds. For many students, the linear nature of a traditional paper (introduction, body, conclusion…in that order), or PowerPoint presentation, doesn’t reflect the way they process information or mentally organize related concepts. Often our thinking is grouped into concepts and sub-concepts that are best represented visually as a sort of mind-map. While websites and visual mind-maps are not the same thing, the organizational options and features of websites do allow for a similar kind of chunking of interdependent ideas. Look at the following examples. The first was created by an 8th grader whose thematic focus was an assessment of the progress made by African Americans during the 20th century up until today, and whether or not the America they experienced lived up to the promise of the US Constitution.

The previous site was created with Google Sites, the preferred platform if you’re going to have students create websites. The next example was not created with Google Sites, but with Weebly. Note: Weebly is not in compliance with CT student privacy laws, but because this student had already established her account before those laws went into effect, she was able to use this platform. This student was part of the Independent Study course at DHHS, and she chose to explore food safety while taking a close look at government promoted diets vs. science-based diets.

In both examples, the students leveraged the organizational and multimedia features of websites to clearly convey their ideas and support their thesis statements.

If the same depth of knowledge is presented, why not give students the option of presenting their findings on a website? For many it’s a platform that better reflects the way they process information. Moreover, when students document their learning in a way that is easily shared digitally, there is no need to have students walk their classmates through presentation after presentation, which, depending on the length of the presentations, often amounts to a waste of class time. Instead, teachers can create their own Google Site to serve as a repository for all student websites. The teacher can post links to all student work, then assign 1 or 2 websites to each student to view and analyze before providing personalized feedback to their peers.

If you are new to creating or assessing student websites, but are interested in giving students this option, don’t hesitate to contact me. I’d be happy to help you design your next assessment. If you’d like to jump right in, this step-by-step guide is very helpful.

Fostering Student Reflection with Google Forms

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Because it’s one of my teacher evaluation goals this year, Reflection is the capacity I’ve been thinking about a lot and helping other teachers with. So far this year, I’ve seen teachers make some great headway in fostering student reflection through the use of Google Forms. For those of you who have never used Forms, it is essentially a survey creator that has become more than just a survey tool, thanks to the way Google keeps updating it to provide functionality that goes beyond asking simple questions. For instance, you can embed images, ask a variety of different types of questions–from paragraph responses, to multiple choice and likert scale responses–and Forms now has a quiz mode.

So how does Google Forms become a student reflection tool? It’s pretty simple: Teachers tailor their questions on Forms around the self-assessment of student learning goals and specific criteria to meet them. One of the most powerful uses I’ve seen is when DHHS Special Education teacher Danielle Fragoso showed me how she uses it, not only to collect feedback from regular ed teachers on how well her students are meeting IEP goals and objectives, but to get her Special Education students involved by reflecting on their goals and objectives and the specific strategies they might use to better meet them. Another great use comes from other DHHS teachers who use Forms to prepare for student-teacher conferences around writing. See the template below that I helped develop for English and Social Studies teachers to foster the kind of reflection required of students to make writing conferences more purposeful. And keep in mind that this kind of reflection tool would work with any kind of project, not just writing intensive ones. Just today World Language teacher Sasha Gauley showed me how she was using Forms to get students to reflect on their growth as Spanish speakers.

 

When it comes to collecting responses, that’s where Google Forms really shines. You can collect them in two ways: You can view responses by question or by person within the Forms interface, which includes neat looking graphs. Or, you could view responses in a Google Sheet that gets automatically added to your Google Drive. The nice thing about viewing responses in Sheets is that you can then sort responses however you’d like and run formulas to collect aggregate data on the different questions.

If you’d like to explore Google Forms, one place to start might be the G Suite Learning Center. Here’s a cheat sheet I downloaded from there. And, of course, never ever hesitate to ask me for any support you need in using this or any digital tool.

Already using Forms to promote reflection? Please leave a comment below, describing how.

Google Keep: A powerful note-taking app that keeps getting better

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As we challenge our students with more performance-based assessments that require a process of taking the necessary steps to reach learning goals, have you noticed that a lot of our students struggle with determining what those steps are and staying on course? The kind of self-direction required to stay with a challenging problem, or build new knowledge and skills, doesn’t come naturally to us. As humans, we’re prone to distraction and instant gratification…especially in our adolescent years. This is where we need strategies and tools to keep us on track, and often a good note-taking application is just the tool we need. Google Keep is one of many digital note-taking apps out there (along with iOS Notes, Evernote, Microsoft OneNote, Simplenote, etc.) that started off pretty small, but has gotten more powerful with each update. Notes in Keep look like virtual sticky notes with all the usual features you see in most note-taking apps, such as bullets, to-do lists, color options, etc., but because it’s part of G Suite’s core suite of apps for education, we can rest assured that students’ privacy is protected. And like all G Suite apps, collaboration on Keep notes is a snap. In other words, it’s a great tool for pairs or groups of students (or teachers) to collect notes collaboratively for any project. Additionally, the app now features tight integration with Google Docs, so you can import items right from your notes directly into a Google Doc by dragging and dropping.

To access Google Keep on a laptop or desktop computer, you can launch it from the Google app launcher , or go to keep.google.com.

And like all G Suite products, it has an easy-to-use mobile app and is could-based, meaning your notes are synced across all of your devices on Google’s servers.

If you’re looking for a third-party endorsement, here’s what DHHS Library Media Specialist J’aime Ottaviano and DHHS Tech Para Jake Siciliano both had to say about Keep when I asked them if they used it: “Oh, yeah…Google Keep is amazing.”

Here’s a quick rundown of how Google Keep works. Check it out…

 

Google Classroom Will Change the Way You Collect Digital Work From Students

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As most of you know, last year we conducted a pilot, involving close to 50 teachers, for the use of Google Classroom to see if it had the potential to replace Finalsite as a teacher’s web presence. Once the pilot was in full swing, the MITT committee surveyed teachers, students, and parents to see how they viewed Classroom. The big takeaways from these surveys: Teachers loved the way Classroom streamlined the workflow of collecting digital work, and many came to rely heavily on Classroom for everything and no longer had a need for Finalsite; students found turning in digital work to be much easier with Classroom but did not like having some teachers on one platform and some on the other. They asked that the district please choose one — Finalsite or Google Classroom. Some parents were frustrated that they were not able to log into Google Classroom without their child’s credentials and found the weekly email updates to be insufficient and/or difficult to set up. Many were not able to receive Classroom updates because they did not have Google accounts. However, since the survey was conducted, parents can now subscribe to email updates with any email address, thereby greatly increasing parent-teacher communication.

With these takeaways in mind, the MITT committee decided that Google Classroom was not ready to become a replacement for Finalsite. Instead, MITT recommended a plan, which the BOE eventually approved, that would allow all teachers to use Classroom as another G Suite app but still list homework assignment descriptions where all parents have easy access—Finalsite.

While continuing to post homework to Finalsite may seem redundant and enough of a deterrent to keep you from exploring Google Classroom, consider all the time you spend sorting through your Google Drive’s Shared with me folder to find and organize student work. It’s never fun. Here is where Classroom really shines. Instead of submitting work by sharing it with you through the Google Drive interface, students submit their work through Google Classroom assignments. This is much better for teachers as Classroom organizes student work for you, allowing you to view, comment on, and return student work without ever having to look at your Google Drive.

If you’ve never used Google Classroom and you’d like to learn more, I’d be happy to help you set your classes up and show you how to navigate it. I’m also doing a 4-part series on Classroom as part of Polson’s 20 Minute Monday after-school workshops, which all can attend (2:50-3:10). In the meantime, if you’d like to explore more on your own, here’s a YouTube playlist that covers the in’s and out’s of Classroom, or to get started, you may want to view the following presentation I’ve been using during PD activities.