FTT - Schoology Tricks and Tips 2.0

Another Round of Schoology Tips and Tricks

@Themrkim/@LisaBerghoff

It's week 10 and with some real, concrete Schoology experience under our belts, this seems like a good time to learn some new tips and tricks! The following items are solutions to some commonly asked questions and useful features that we've found so far. As always, we really appreciate everyone's patience and enthusiasm as we learn Schoology!

1. How to find grades for students who drop/transfer out of my class?

Course changes happen all the time, and if it happens days, weeks, or even months into the semester, the recipient teacher will need that student's grades. Here's how:

Instructions for the original teacher

• On your Schoology page, click on "Members" on the left-hand side
• Then to the right of, "Add Members" click on "Inactive"
• This will give you a list of all of your students who have been removed from your course
• To the right of the student's name, there are three colored bars. Click that and it will show their grades

• You can print the grades the usual way by pressing “Ctrl + P” or you can save it as a PDF. To save it as a PDF, click “Ctrl + P” and change the destination from your actual printer to the “Save as PDF” option.

2. Adding other staff or senior teachers to your Schoology Page

Luckily I still get to teach 1 section of political science, and Lisa Allen and Amy Skonberg round out the rest of the poli sci team. I wanted Lisa and Amy to be able to see my course, calendar, and assignments that I posted. If I had a senior teacher, I would’ve added them as well. Here’s how:

• On your Schoology page, click on “Members” on the left hand side
• Once you click, "Add members" a box full of names will appear. Switch from "Township High School District 113" to your building
• Then type in the name of the teacher or student you would like to add. You can add multiple people at the same time

• Once added, click on the gear wheel to the right of their name. Then click, "Make Admin"
• Once you give them admin privileges, go back to the same gear wheel to the right of their name and click on, "Set Section-level role"
• This gives you the option to give your added teacher/senior access to your class, but controlled access. You obviously wouldn't want senior teachers seeing student grades

Below are the section-level role options. "No grades/ View Materials" would probably be the best option for most cases. That means the added person cannot see or edit any student grades, but they can view your Schoology assignments/discussions/posts.

3. Control what notifications you receive from Schoology.

This can be a daily double for students and staff. The number of e-mails we receive can get overwhelming. Some fun facts: as of March 2018, over 125 billion daily e-mails are sent around the world, and the average worker is responsible for 120 of them. Schoology mercifully gives us complete, granular control over this.

• At the top right hand corner of your page, click on your name and avatar
• Clicking on "Settings" will bring you to your main account page.
• Now click on, "notification." Go down the list and decide for yourself what you think warrants an e-mail notification.

4. Organize your gradebook by categories

It's important to take a holistic look at a student's performance and one way to do that is to organize grading by categories. The all category summary shows you how a student is doing in each grading category . It might be helpful to see how students are doing in formative assessments only relative to their summative ones.

• In your gradebook, change over from "All materials" to "All category summaries" which will differentiate the grade.
• The same tab will list your categories and will only show gradebook entries from those specific groups.

Have any other Schoology tips and tricks? Or have any other questions? Leave comments below!

FTT - PearDeck

Presenting? 

Try Interacting Instead With Peardeck

I am so fortunate that in my job I get to see many different teachers teach many different students. I love it! You can feel the vibe of a class just by hanging out for a few minutes. Teachers still seem to primarily rely on lecture/presentation style teaching when doing whole class instruction. The overhead projectors are gone and in their place are powerpoint and Google slides presentations. As a student, I often struggled with this type of teaching because I just couldn't sustain attention for long unless I was very interested in the topic. If there was a way for the teacher to have us do something, besides taking notes, that would often help redirect my focus and increase my learning.

There is a fantastic tool, called PearDeck, that works with Google slides, that allows you to input interactive activities within your presentation. I used PearDeck with my class today. They loved it! They said that it would work especially well for social studies, in their opinion. I tried about 4 different question types and was very pleased with the students' level of interaction. I also really liked how simple it was to use for both me and my students. 

Here's how it works:

When you create a Google slides presentation, go ahead and add the PearDeck add on. Once you do that, a sidebar will open up with options for interaction. For example, there is a whole deck dedicated to critical thinking. There are also options for beginning class, during class, or ending class such as bell ringers and exit tickets. Once you create your presentation, including the PearDeck slides, you can click to present in PearDeck. The students will see the access code that you project on the screen and then they can see what you are presenting. You control the presentation, both being projected on the room and on your students' individual screens. When you get to one of the interactive slides, the students can go ahead and type, draw, or whatever you set up for them to do. You can see all of their responses on the teacher dashboard. You can choose to present the responses or just keep them on your laptop screen. 

The simple, 3-step process is:

*Images from PearDeck.com

1. Open PearDeck through the Add Ons menu in Google slides. If you don't already have it, you can click Get Add Ons and search for Pear Deck. You will be prompted to allow PearDeck to run. 

2. Add interactive slides from the PearDeck library and customize the questions to make them your own. 

3. Click Present With PearDeck to open the interactive lesson. 

You also have the option of adding a question that you can create yourself:

Do you want to give PearDeck and try but aren't sure how to get started? You can check out the PearDeck website. Or, give me a call. I'm happy to work with you on this. Do you have other tools or tricks that you love for getting kids engaged during direct instruction? Post in the comments below.

FTT - Keyboard Shortcuts!

A Few Keyboard Shortcuts that'll save you time and your sanity!

  @MrKimDHS/ @LisaBerghoff



I'm currently typing this blog on an immense, mechanical keyboard with RGB lights pulsing with, you guessed it, Halloween colors. If you've ever asked yourself before if you need LED lights under each key that responds to your touch, first of all the answer is yes, and second - please do yourself a favor and go out and buy an RGB keyboard. With Microsoft reporting that the average American worker spends 6.5 to 7 hours a day on a computer, your fingers will thank you for the added luxury. 

Until then, try some of these keyboard shortcuts that will save you precious time, as you work on your computer day after week after month after year. 

Recovering accidentally closed windows/tabs on your internet browser.

Ctrl + Shift + T (Windows)

Shift + Cmd + T (Mac)

If you're like me, at the end of the day you will have anywhere between 10 and 20 tabs open on your internet browser. Ever accidentally close the wrong tab? Or close a window and realize too late that you still need it? To recover press the "control" and "shift" button at the same time. Then press "T" as many times as you need to recover your closed tabs. It will recover them in the order that you closed them. On Chrome, this will also work after a full restart of your computer. Ctrl + Shift + T will open all of your tabs before you restarted your computer!

Extending your desktop through a projector

Windows + P (Windows)

...No shortcut for Mac

Showing a movie in class using your laptop, but still want to be able do something on your own screen? Pressing the Windows button and "P" gives you the option of having two screens: one on your laptop, and another on the projector. After extending your screen, click and drag over the window you wish to be shown to the class.

Copy/Pasting without formatting

Control + Shift + V (Windows)

Cmd + Shift + V (Mac)

Ever copy and paste text, only to find that the text you've copied over is a different font, color, size than what you're working on? Copy your text the normal way by pressing "Control + C" or right click to copy. But when you go to past, hold down the "Shift" button and it'll paste the information with the same formatting as your destination text. 

Quickly minimizing your windows

Windows + D (Windows)

Cmd + H (Mac)

As educators, we are privy to sometimes sensitive information on our computers. We have to be careful with e-mails and student grades. If you have something up on the projector, or a student comes up near your laptop, Windows + D will quickly minimize all windows on your screen and will take you to your wallpaper. If you press Windows + D again soon enough, all of your windows will come back up. 

You do not have to memorize all of these shortcuts at once! Write your favorite shortcuts on a sticky note and post it on your desk, and after a few weeks, it'll be like second nature. Have any other awesome keyboard shortcuts to share? Or need any RBG mechanical keyboard suggestions? Post below!

FTT - Sli.do

Maximize Engagement With Slido

@LisaBerghoff/@MrKimDHS

How do you know when your students are engaged?  This is a question that I often ask teachers and I get a wide variety of answers. Engagement is a little bit of a unicorn. You know when it's there but it's hard to pin down. Often, compliance gets confused with engagement. If the students are quiet, looking at you, and following directions, you might assume they are engaged. Look up engagement in the dictionary (or the digital equivalent: Mirriam-Webster.com) and you will find many definitions. When it comes to learning, the following seems most appropriate.

Establish a meaningful contact or connection with. 

How do we know if our students are establishing meaningful contact or connections with what they are learning? One way is by having them do something. Ask them a question that goes beyond recall, have them analyze, discuss, debate, create, and explore. This becomes more complex depending on the course content, the number of sections you are teaching, and the level of involvement you want the students to have. This is where tools come in. There are lots of ways to incorporate various tools to establish or assess levels of engagement. One of my new favorites is called sli.do

Sli.do is an "audience interaction" tool that involves both polling and Q&A features. It's easy to set up, the basic version is free, and it allows for all of your students to interact in a much less risky way than raising a hand.

Here's how it works:

1. Go to sli.do and set up your account. You can use your school Google account. 

2. Click on Create Event, name your event, choose the start and end dates and times,  and then click Create Event in the box.

3. You then have 3 options. You can crowdsource questions from the class, you can create a poll, or you can browse how others are using sli.do to get some inspiration. The polling feature is my favorite. I love that I can ask a question, have my students respond, and then sli.do puts their responses into a word cloud which I can use later.

4. Once you have set up what you want to do, you have your students go to sli.do.com and give them the code that is associated with your event. When you are presenting, the code is displayed in large font to make it easier for your students to join. They can use any device, and their responses will show up on your end. You can choose to display your poll or questions in present mode so everyone can see.

I asked my peer mentoring students to think of someone who inspires them and then write down the qualities of that person. Here's what they came up with.

5. After you are done, you can click on the analytics tab to see how many students were engaged and in what ways.

It's great to try using new tools to keep things novel. Sli.do is a simple way to encourage engagement and move beyond compliance in the classroom.
What tools do you love to maximize engagement?
Post in the comments section below.
Want some help setting up Sli.do for the first time? Just ask! I'm happy to walk you through it.

FTT - GIFs and Snips

GIF or Jif?

@LisaBerghoff/@MrKimDHS

Steve Wilhite, an American Computer Scientist at CompuServe, was probably not aware that on June 15th, 1987, his invention would ignite the “Great Schism of the 21st Century” as it were, by creating an image format called the Graphics Interchange Format, otherwise known as a GIF. Of the many random things that I am passionate about, I am a fervent supporter of pronouncing GIF with a soft 'G,' and no amount of references to the hard 'G' in graphics will change my mind. Regardless of how you pronounce GIFs, we can all agree that the simple, 8-bit image format has greatly improved the way we communicate and instruct online. While I have enjoyed many GIFs of cats doing funny things over the years, I have found GIFs to be an invaluable teaching tool to show a process instead of just describing one. GIFs have carved out a niche in between text and video and can be found on most how-to guides.

There are dozens of free GIF makers out there, but I found that the simplest one for educational use is called GifCam. It’s lightweight at a shocking 700 kb, making it smaller than most JPEG image files. So let’s get down to the brass tacks, how do you use it to create GIFs? Let’s start by creating a simple GIF of adding a link to Schoology.

You can download GifCam free here

Step 1: Demarcation

To create the boundaries of what you want to capture, simply manipulate the GifCam window itself around the area.(I am fully aware of the Inception-esque feel of creating a GIF, of myself creating a GIF)

Step 2: Setup Recording

Click on the little arrow to the right of the “Rec” button. 10 FPS is typically enough for our intents and purposes. Here you can also enable “Capture Cursor” to show your mouse arrow.

Step 3: Record

Click the “Rec” button to begin. Do what you need to do to complete your GIF and hit the “Stop” button to end the GIF.

Step 4: Save and Export

Now that your GIF is recorded, press the “Save” button on the side. Rename your precious GIF into your folder and you’re all set! (depending on the length of the GIF it may take a few minutes)

Step 5: New GIFs
When you want to create a new GIF, you need to go back to the arrow next to the "Rec" button and click, "New."

One more for the road - Steve Wilhite famously said in 2013:
"The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations. They are wrong. It is a soft 'G,' pronounced 'jif.' End of Story." Boo-yah

You can use GifCam on your browser, desktop, Microsoft product, and other programs. Have another GIF program or another recording tool? Share below!

FTT - Albert.io

Online Test Prep

@LisaBerghoff/@MrKimDHS

One of the best years I’ve had as a teacher came unsurprisingly when I was single, had no dogs, and was asked to teach AP economics for the first time. With no relatively real responsibilities yet, I took the challenge of an AP spot by completely immersing myself into my curriculum, and was free to spend most of my extra time focused on my classes.

When I finally met my students, I had this overwhelming desire to do right by them and get them the scores, and more importantly the college credit, that they sorely needed. Now while I’ve come to understand that the almighty 5 is not the most important value of a good education, the rapid inflation of college tuition, and the subsequent rise in student loan debt, puts educators in a position to balance teaching to the test and keeping the integrity of their vocation.

To this point, Albert.io is a resource I sorely wished I had access to all those years ago. The educators and professionals that make up Albert’s team have put together an extensive online test prep resource for AP exams, SAT/ACT, and graduate exams like the GMAT, GRE, and MCATs. Some early piloting done by Deerfield’s AP Psych team last year yielded some great results, and we are excited to expand it to some of the other AP courses. Here’s a snapshot at some of the features Albert.io offers:

While there is a heavy focus on AP subjects, Albert.io has a strong selection of assignments and analysis on subjects like the humanities, accounting, finance, and others.

Their online study guides are comprehensive and include basic multiple choice practice, FRQs, and full practice exams.

The multiple choice section categorizes questions by unit and difficulty. Once submitted, revealed solutions give a detailed explanation of why a particular answer was correct, and just as importantly, why the other options were incorrect. Data is collected site wide and students can see how other users have answered.

Sample FRQs are plentiful and provide sample solutions, explanations, and the FRQ scoring guidelines.

Full practice exams are timed, organized, and have detailed instructions to replicate the real thing.

AP exams are rigorous, and the stress on our students near overwhelming. This resource can a tremendous help to our AP teachers and students in their quest of learning advanced materials and mitigating the pressures that come with it. Do you have experience with Albert.io or other online resources? Comment below!

FTT - SAMR Model

Image from: Wikimedia Commons

Let's Think About What We're Doing: The SAMR Model

@LisaBerghoff/@MrKimDHS

When I first embarked on the new position of Director of Instructional Technology, 3 years ago, several friends and family members who are not educators asked me to explain my job to them. Was I going to fix computers? No. Was I going to hook up projectors? No. Was I going to show teachers where to click to access their files? Sometimes. Eventually my younger son, who was 8 at the time, explained it best. He said "She's going to teach teachers how to use chromebooks in ways that aren't stupid". That explanation still comes to mind when I think about my goals in how I work with teachers. We all agree that we don't want our kids staring at screens all day. We know that interpersonal, face to face communication skills are extremely important to be successful in today's world. However, technology also plays an important role in learning as we can now re-imagine tasks and kids can do things that were inconceivable before.

As we take a deep dive into the school year with our 1:1 chromebooks, our new LMS- Schoology, and our use of the TI Inspire CS CAX calculators, I believe this is the perfect time to take a deep breath, take a step back, and look at the WHY. When we plan lessons, activities, and assessments, what is our purpose? When it comes to ed.tech, one of the most widely used models to examine purpose is the SAMR model. This framework was created by Dr. Ruben Puentedura and it categorizes 4 different degrees of classroom technology integration.  One thing to keep in mind is that although there are 4 levels of technology integration and it appears to be a hierarchy, not all lessons should be striving for the redefinition level. At times, substitution is the most appropriate use of technology for a particular lesson. Therefore, there is no need for judgement here, let's just be aware of what we're doing, understand why we're doing it, and be mindful that every lesson is not at the same level. The SAMR model is a simple way to take a look at our use of technology in the classroom and can help give us some direction as we move forward. 

Here is the SAMR model explained in 120 seconds by Candice Marcotte:

Still not sure how the SAMR model works?
Here are some examples that I came up with that are NOT classroom related.
Maybe some of these will resonate with you.

Substitution:

I used to have a paper calendar/planner book that I took with me everywhere. I loved that book! I loved looking at my whole week at a glance. Now, I use the calendar app on my phone to mark down appointments and events. This is pretty much just a substitute for the paper calendar that I used to use. 

Augmentation:

I can share my digital calendar with my husband. This way, if he is making plans, he can look and see what we already have planned without needing to call and ask or look at a paper calendar that would be located at home. Sharing calendars digitally makes it easier for us to coordinate plans in a timely manner. 

Modification:

My digital calendar can now alert me when I need to leave to go to an appointment. Using traffic information and gps technology, the calendar app on my phone sends me an alert in enough time for me to get there on time. This has changed the way I manage my time because I no longer need to look up travel times or distances and try to plan my day around that information. 

Redefinition:

If I can't make it to an appointment in person, my Google calendar app will generate a link to a Google Meet/Hangout so I can join the meeting over my computer or phone. I can use the webcam and microphone so the meeting participants can still see and hear me and I can participate remotely. 

This feature has enabled me to participate in meetings with people who are in different states, timezones, even different countries! I have participated in online professional conferences in real time but without needing to travel. This could not happen without technology and we couldn't even imagine it several years ago. 

Have you been using SAMR to think about your own classroom lessons and activities? Post in the comments section below.