FTT - Mix It Up With Different Question Types In Schoology Assessments

Mix It Up With Different Question Types In Schoology Assessments

@LisaBerghoff/@MrKimDHS

 It is getting to be that time of year when we focus on end of the year assessments. The whole notion of "show us what you know" often is in direct opposition to teachers' needing a quick way to grade because we want to get that grade book signed sealed and delivered in time for us to go on summer break. Would I ideally like to sit with every single student and have them go through their growth and progress on all of our learning targets? Absolutely. Unfortunately our schedule does not allow for that and so we are forced into other means of assessing student learning. According to Rick Stiggins, high quality assessment must satisfy five specific quality standards: 1. Clear Targets, 2. Focused Purpose, 3. Proper Method, 4. Sound Sampling, and 5. Accurate Assessment Free Of Bias and Distortion. 

As you are crafting your summative assessments, I thought it would be helpful to bring back into focus some of the assessment features that can be found baked into Schoology, our learning management system.  These features help customize your assessments to go beyond the typical multiple choice and true/false test. There are also lots of options within the setup that can help personalize the experience so you can get the best out of your students. As we know from the TPACK framework, many parts need to come together in order to best integrate technology in our classrooms. With your knowledge of the content and pedagogy combined with how well you know your students, you can utilize technology to effectively assess your students in a way that hits all five of Rick Stiggins' benchmarks for high quality assessments. 

Let's Get Into It:

The Setup-

When you click to add an assessment to your class, you will see the instructions box on the setup page. This box is often overlooked and I would encourage you to use it. Here, you have a rich text editor menu that allows you to add images or other media, links, and tables. You can also bold, highlight, and change the color of your fonts in order to draw attention to specific text. You can choose how you want to set the tone for your assessment. This is a spot where you can remind students of often missed details, and offer words of encouragement.

In the assessment toolbar you can allow students to flag questions so they can go back and review them before they submit. You can also allow them to eliminate answer choices if you do have multiple choice questions on your test.

Question Types-

There are 18 different types of assessment questions you can choose from. I am going to highlight the 5 that I think are most interactive and get kids to demonstrate their learning in different ways. 

1. Label Image

Upload an image and have your students label it by dragging and dropping from a list of potential answers. This can be a wonderful option for timelines, labeling models, cycles, or systems, describing parts of a work of art, or parts of an equation. Here are detailed instructions for using Label Image questions in Schoology, including how to align learning objectives. 

2. Highlight Hotspot

Upload an image and have your students identify an area or region that is determined by you. Use this option with maps, geometric shapes, data charts, scientific diagrams,vocabulary questions, and more. Here is an example using basic Spanish vocabulary. Here are instructions for using Highlight Hotspot. 

3. Chart

This question type enables students to review, create, or manipulate different kinds of charts in response to a question.  I actually recently saw a teacher use this as a self reflection tool which really appealed to me. I created one for an instrumental performance. I uploaded an image of the rubric so the students can refer to it. Then, I set the parameters so students can interact with the chart. They can assess themselves using the chart and then write or record a reflection explaining why they chose what they did. You can see lots of ways this would apply to your class. Here are detailed instructions for using the Chart question type. 

4. Highlight Image

This question type offers so much more than the name implies. Upload an image and your students are given multiple color options to highlight the image. But they don't need to only highlight. You can use this as a drawing tool as well. Since many of our students have touch screen chromebooks, this can be a fantastic option for marking text, circling or drawing arrows for vocabulary. My example below shows how to use the Highlight Image question for graphing in math or science. The image that I uploaded is just a basic graph. Once you create one question of this type, you can easily duplicate it and just change the equations.

5. Audio/Video 

I often have students who don't do well on a test or a quiz just come in and tell me what they know. It's remarkable to see the difference when they can just talk to me. While I can't do that with every student in person, I can have them respond to an audio or video question. You can upload an image or other media to add to your question prompt. The students then click to record their audio or video, depending on the question type. It's very easy to listen or watch once they submit.

Are you ready to start exploring the various options within Schoology assessments? Want some help getting started? Send an email and I'm happy to partner with you!

FTT - Google Tasks: It Integrates into Everything!

 

Using Google Tasks!

 @LisaBerghoff/@MrKimDHS

There's something awfully cathartic about checking something off of your to-do list or crossing out items on your shopping list as you navigate through the bumpy, crowded supermarket. It's kind of nice to finally throw away that sticky note reminder or click the little box that removes that nagging obligation. There's a palpable feeling of release when you're done with a task, as if a real weight is being lifted off of your frayed mind.  You're off the hook from yourself, or your students, or your colleagues which gives you much more time for...other fun things to do? I'm sure we're all feeling the crunch at this time of the year with AP exams coming up, seniors are about ready to leave the comforts of your classroom, and our courses are wrapping up. Now is a good time to think about being more efficient with your tasks by using and exploring...Google Tasks!

Now what's the difference between Google Tasks and any other digital organizer? Well first off it's as simple as it gets. It's a light-weight Google Workspace addition that allows you to create lists, tasks, and subtasks that are all perfectly integrated with Google. It integrates with Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides, and more. So wherever you are in Google Workspace, you can check your tasks. It also integrates well with Google Calendar events and due dates, as well as individual Gmails.

Getting Started

1. Create a task list: The first step to using Google Tasks is to create a task list. To do this, click on the "Tasks" button on the right-hand side of your Gmail inbox. This will open up a new pane on the right side of your screen where you can create a new task list.
2. Add tasks to your list: Once you have created your task list, you can start adding tasks to it. To add a new task, simply click on the "+" button at the bottom of the task list. You can also add subtasks to a task by clicking on the arrow next to the task.
3. Prioritize your tasks: Google Tasks allows you to prioritize your tasks by adding a due date and setting a priority level. To do this, click on the task and then click on the "Add date" button. You can then set a due date and select a priority level (high, medium, or low) for the task.

Gmail Tasks 

If you're reading an email and was reminded for the 3rd time to help that one student with that thing, you can click on the newly added task button on top of the email to add it as a task:

The bottom line is this: we all could use a little help keeping our priorities in check. Everyday we are bombarded with dozens and dozens of little requests by students or staff in the hallways in between classes, or serious, multi-step requests tackled over weeks or even months. Stay organized and use technology the way it should be used - help educators to be more efficient, productive versions of ourselves so that we can spend more of our time and attention on teaching! Let me know if you have any questions.

FTT - Learning and Teaching in the Age of AI

 

Learning and Teaching in the Age of AI

 @LisaBerghoff/@MrKimDHS

*The following blog was written by a human being

Last night a few colleagues and I went to the Learning and Teaching in the Age of AI conference held by Lake Forest Country Day School and we listened in on a variety of breakout sessions and guest panels run by some pretty serious and interesting folk. A few professors of computer science and technology and literature spoke on a variety of topics all relating to what they were seeing as the impacts of AI in their respective fields and classrooms. Besides being the only PD I've been to that had booze at the end, it was one of the first times as an educator that I truly felt my mind was being blown by what was being discussed. It was intriguing and thought-provoking but also just gave me the heeby jeebies. 

For the most part, I've got a decent understanding of current forms of AI and how they integrate into our professional and personal lives. My Roomba, Frank, has been terrorizing my kids and dog for months now and my daughter is so afraid of Frank that she is all but frozen with fright at the sight of it which leaves me no choice but to have it constantly covered with a towel. When she's at daycare, Frank expertly navigates a fairly perilous floor of toys, towels, and other traps using a combination of LIDAR, cameras, and an AI system that FAR outpaces its predecessor, Bob. But what does it mean that my robo vacuum Frank uses AI to clean my floor? Alan Turing OBO, the famed British mathematician, philosopher, and computer scientist still holds the best description of what AI truly is: an intelligent computer system that can imitate a human being. Can your self-driving car or robot vacuum or autofill email successfully predict the nuanced actions of what a human would have done in its place? A human, ideally, would see a pedestrian and slow down and stop the vehicle. A human would see dog poop on the floor and vacuum around the mess instead of dragging it around the entire first floor. Frank in turn navigates my filthy and battered floor the same way a rational human would: avoiding messes and traps but also creating an efficient route that is responsive to my floor plan and its optimized battery life.

So why do ChatGTP and Midjourney and other AI tools feel so much more impactful and impressive and rather more terrifying than Frank? It may be because they have the capacity to not just imitate us, but to surpass us and substitute us with a superior version of anything we could do ourselves. What I cannot wrap my head around is the absolutely break-neck pace at which AI is improving...and what AI is going to look like in the next few years. A popular Reddit post on ChatGTP summarized the newest and best ChatGTP API tools that were created in JUST THAT WEEK and it was dizzying how many advancements and resources the user was able to compile. 

The current released iteration of ChatGTP is actually 3.5. They recently released 4.0 under a paywall last month, but the productive difference between 3.5 and 4 is staggering. Take a look at what ChatGTP 4 can do that its predecessors cannot. And the rumors are that ChatGTP 5, which has not yet been officially announced by OpenAI, will be the closest thing to General AI that mankind has ever created. If true, the impacts would be exponential and staggering. A general AI can reason and plan and make unilateral judgments and learn instead of merely guessing the next logical word, which is what ChatGTP 3.4/4 is doing (it's essentially the world's most complicated autofill program). What the heck does this all mean for us as teachers and parents and citizens?

Paradigm Shift

In one of last night's breakout sessions, I had the unexpected pleasure of sitting next to former HP principal Tom Koulentes, who asked a poignant question asking how we adjust the ways we challenge our students in the face of something like ChatGTP. When Google and Wikipedia become more readily available, educators were pushed to avoid simple fact/recall questions and offer more analytically heavy formatives that students couldn't just "look up." But what do we do now? 

Dr. Janel White-Taylor, an associate professor of educational technology at Arizona State University, offered some assurances that once you are familiar with the academic "voice" of your students, you can easily discern the difference between legitimate work and artificially produced work. While that may be the case now, I wasn't so sure of my own ability to identify the surreptitious use of ChatGTP, especially when newer, more powerful versions are made available. 

Dr. White-Taylor also offered the idea of assigning fewer essays and substituting different ways for students to demonstrate authentic learning. The social studies teacher in me cringed a little bit, but for the most part, I was just confused. What do we replace The Essay with? Isn't it still mission-critical for students to work and think long and hard on an analytical piece of writing? Don't we have an almost fiduciary duty to our kids to give them the skills to convert important and complex arguments and theories in their minds and manifest them into something concrete? Do we just do more in-class writing assignments? I thought we abdicated penmanship and cursive for QWERTY? Video responses and speech assignments and project-based creations? Dr. White-Taylor didn't really have a good answer, and I'm beginning to think that there really isn't a good answer yet. And our careful answers to AI's like ChatGTP may become obsolete and redundant in a matter of MONTHS, not years as the pace of innovation sprints ahead of what we can properly respond to. Luckily, Turnitin has released its AI writing detector function in Australia and New Zealand and reportedly boasts a 98% confidence rating. Can firms keep up with the exponential growth of AI with their own AI?

Something Safe

I could go on and on and on about everything I saw and heard and thought about during last night's conference. Firms are offering Six Figure salaries to "prompt writers" or professionals who can trigger the most efficient series of commands to AI tools to get the desired outcome." Apparently, administrators at Vanderbilt University sent a ChatGTP-generated email to the student body in response to the horrific Michigan State University shooting in February and are now on administrative leave. One of the breakout sessions was titled, "Ethics and AI - Can a Computer Pray?" One panelist mentioned how simple coding scripts can instantaneously be written for you in ChatGTP and he doesn't know how much longer he'll be teaching those scripts in his beginner coding class. I then realized that ChatGTP can give you detailed instructions on Queary functions in Google Sheets (if you know what to ask it)!  

Again, that all seemed somewhat overwhelming so now I've decided to compile some simple, concrete ways to incorporate AI into the production side of teaching. I'm not offering much insight on how to bring AI into direct instruction. I'm not quite there yet. But on the teacher productivity side, there's much to see. Here are a few examples of how I've used ChatGTP and AI in the classroom, as well as examples given last night:

Review Materials:

Last week I had a number of students miss an all-important Monetary Policy lecture on how the Federal Reserve used to impact interest rates. In addition to reminding my student via email that the presentation and lecture notes and assignments were on Schoology, I decided to ask ChatGTP for assistance. The prompt went something like this: "You are now an AP Macroeconomics teacher and you had a number of students miss your lecture on monetary policy. Write a brief explanation of the three fed monetary tools used to change the money supply."  Then I asked it to rewrite the explanation as if it were talking to a 10-year-old. Then to a 5-year-old. I read and reread each excerpt for accuracy and created three separate docs and sent them to my students. Students were immediately intrigued, especially considering ChatGTP is certainly much more interesting and cleverer than I am. It took us (ChatGTP and I that is) a mere 45 seconds of prompts and re-prompts to generate the three review excerpts, and it took me 5 minutes to slap them into a Google Doc and digitally ship them off to my students. 

Warning: ALWAYS review what ChatGTP generates for accuracy

Generating Templates and Documents

Need to write an email and.....don't want to? Enter a specific prompt into ChatGTP and use and edit the template. Now prompt writing may become the next new skill we may want to pay attention to. The ChatGTP-generated product is only as effective as the prompt. If you give it a prompt but do not like the output, refine your prompt conversationally. Here are a few email prompts to get you started:

Could you create an email template for…

• Reminding students about missing homework.
• Parent communication regarding absences.
• Information going out to a club, sport, or activity.

Could you write a direct email to colleagues about...

• Anything

I even asked it to write a song to the tune of Everlong by The Foo Fighters explaining Monetary Policy. I mean....it produced it, but it's certainly not winning any Grammys anytime soon.

Conclusions?

Here's where we need to go next: as an educational community we have to gain some insights into AI and envision its role in our pedagogy. Will we outright ban its use and strike it from our network or do we embrace it and utilize its efficiencies? To what extent do we add AI to our digital literacy curriculum? Do we teach our elementary and middle school students about ChatGTP and why it's useful or harmful to their learning? What about the ethics of AI-produced work? Who "owns" the value of what it generates? Should staff automatically disclose when they use it? What are the costs of using ChatGTP to write a letter of recommendation for students or colleagues if they are then accepted/admitted to their program of choice?

This blog could go on and on and on and it still wouldn't cover interesting things in AI that happened in just this week. So I'll just leave you with something one of the panelists said that stayed with me on the drive home: Dr. Sugata Banerji, an associate professor of Computer Science at Lake Forest College said that "no professional runner competes without shoes, and within 1 year I don't imagine a world where any educator doesn't use AI in their classrooms."

FTT - Annotate PDFs and So Much More. It's the Magic of Kami!

Annotate PDFs And So Much More

It's The Magic Of Kami

 @LisaBerghoff/@MrKimDHS

Back in the 2014-2015 school year I visited a middle school classroom for students with disabilities. The 8th grade students were coming to high school the next year and the staff were very excited to show off how they were using technology in the classroom. They had ipads for each student and were thrilled to showcase their use. When I got to the classroom there was a lot of fanfare about the ipad use. There were posters on the wall about how to care for the devices. There was a giant cart for charging them. There was a schedule on the wall indicating the plans for the day including "break time". The lesson involved the students reading pdfs on the ipads and then answering verbal questions from the teacher. When break time came, the students all excitedly played games on the ipads. The teacher proceeded to tell me how much the students enjoy having the devices in class. 

Even back in 2014 I remember being unimpressed. Giving students ipads to read on was not exactly going to make the reading more engaging and it certainly was not going to impact their reading comprehension. What the students really enjoyed was the games on the ipads, because there was some interaction there. The break time could have been used to play a game in the classroom that involved some human interaction. There has got to be a way for students to interact with the text, right?

How to interact with pdfs continues to be a common question that I get.  There are lots of reasons to digitize our print materials, primarily for accessibility purposes, but it's 2023 and we want more than just having students reading pdfs.

Kami is a chrome extension that provides tools and features that allow you and your students to easily interact with pdfs. It was developed in Aotearoa, New Zealand by four university students who wanted to streamline their note-taking. Kami has received many accolades over the past 2 years and are really being noticed on the edtech scene. This is for good reason, Kami is easy to use, and the tools really can level the playing field for many of our students who struggle in school. 

Kami lets you and your students annotate, highlight, draw on, and comment on pdfs. There is also a library of templates within Kami that you can customize and use. Students can work together to collaborate on the templates, or any file you share within Kami. The list of tools that you have available to you in Kami is long, giving many options for students to interact with digital text. 

We currently have a trial of the pro version of Kami. But even before we had premium access I had been using the free version as it is robust on its own. Here is a list of the features and tools that are included at each level. Since we have the premium access, let's take advantage of it and give it a try. 

Getting Started With Kami: 

You and your students can access Kami by downloading the chrome extension which you can access here, or by going to Kamiapp.com. Kami saves and works seamlessly with Google drive. I know that it can look and feel overwhelming to try a new tool in your classes. When you use Kami you don't need to worry because there are built in supports including a tour of the dashboard and short tutorials. Kami files are available even when you and your students are offline so if the internet goes out you are still able to access and work on those files. 

The Dashboard:

Take a look at the screenshot of my Kami dashboard. It is uncomplicated and straightforward. 

•  If you have files saved on your Google drive or your computer, you can just click where it says- open file. 
• You also have the ability to create your own by starting with a blank page in Kami.
• If you have a file that you are unable to edit, the text recognition tool will scan your file and make it possible for you to edit. There is also a split and merge tool that allows you to separate files or combine multiple files into one. 

Here is a two minute video tour of the Kami dashboard.

With premium access, Kami integrates nicely with Schoology. You can assign through the Kami app in Schoology and your students can turn in their work to you after they have used Kami on their files. Here is a short video showing how it works.

Start With A Template: 

I am a huge fan of starting with a template whenever it's available to me. I can easily customize something that is already created and for me it's much faster than starting with a blank page. Take a look at the Kami template library and you will see that you can easily filter the templates by grade level, subject, or file type: brain breaks, diagrams, activities, etc. They even have templates made for your students to learn how to use and explore the tools in Kami. 

I especially like this hexagonal thinking template. It prompts students to use the voice comment tool to explain the connections they create. This is a wonderful formative tool. It can also be used collaboratively if you have your students work in groups.

There are lots of templates for note-taking, graphic organizers for pre-writing, diagrams, timelines, charts, and comic strips. From the Kami dashboard, just click on template library to see what is there. You could even allow your students to choose the template that they think most appropriate for their work. Hearing their reasoning could be a wonderful insight into their understanding.

How will you use Kami? Want some help getting started? Feel free to reach out. I'm always happy to help.

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