This is the instructional technology blog for Deerfield High School. "Free Tech Tools" will be posted on Tuesday. Musings about teaching and learning will be posted on Thursday.
Can you believe it's been about 6 years since District 113 adopted Schoology as our primary learning management system?! 6 years of grade setups, cross-linking, and course tabs. 6 years of "add materials," folders, and updates. Besides the new gradebook syncing system, not much has changed in the Schoology ecosystem and last week I couldn't decide if I had a problem with that. On one hand, it represented stability, and continuity, and control. On the other, I thought about stagnation and plateaus. Don't fix it if it ain't broke?
Either way, today we get to introduce you to a "new" feature regarding Schoology's updates: You now get to create and schedule your updates in advance! WOW. Ground-breaking news for you, I am sure. For those of you who have tirelessly created countless updates for your students for the last half decade, I hope this simple change provides some measure of efficiency to your planning.
Scroll down the page and type in our district's custom domain, lms.dist113.org in the box and click continue.
You should see your account name and district. Prove your humanity, and click "Approve."
Step 2: Implementation
Now you can bookmark this page. If you haven't caught on yet, this is a 3rd party page that allows you to organize and schedule your updates to all of your various Schoology course pages.
Choose a course from the left-hand column, and write and schedule your update. It's as easy as that. If you'd like, you can test this out by writing a test update that triggers in a minute. Go to your Schoology course page to confirm.
Again, nothing too groundbreaking here, but a welcome addition to our tried and true platform: Schoology. Good luck and let us know how we can help!
What Our Students Need To Know About Artificial Intelligence
@LisaBerghoff/@MrKimDHS
If you have seen the movie War Games with a young Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy, you will recall that the computer comes to the conclusion that "the only winning move is not to play." If you have not seen it, sorry for the spoiler but that movie is 40 years old so I felt safe dropping the ending here. It's still definitely worth watching, and I'm pretty sure you can stream it from Amazon video. Anyway, we are now at at inflection point with AI in education. We can work to ban, discourage, and attach negativity to AI use or we can learn and teach about it, and explain to students how to be responsible with it because it is most definitely not going anywhere. To simply not play is not an option here.
What is AI? As you have seen in previous posts, artificial intelligence is a catchall term for technology that mimics human intelligence to perform tasks and iteratively improve. Subfields include machine learning and deep learning. AI is only as good as its data set and there are plenty of examples of why we should be critical of results and especially aware of bias that exists in all data.
I found this video to be extremely interesting.
But while we are learning and growing our capacity to understand AI and its impact on the world, we need to simultaneously teach and model responsible AI use for our students. Furthermore, just as you need to know how to effectively enter search terms into a search engine, or recognize when a spellcheck or grammar check should be ignored, in order for our students to use AI effectively, there are certain skills they need to learn. We want our students to be able to use AI to solve real problems and build useful solutions.
Here are the top skills needed to help our students be purposeful and responsible with effective AI use:
1. Good Output Starts With Good Input- Know How To Effectively Ask
In order to get the output you want, you need to know how to make a precise input request. Just like with our Google Drive, Gmail, or spreadsheets, if you are not good at searching you will be frustrated that you can't find what you are looking for or get the results you want.
2. Critically Assess Outputs
Outputs cannot be blindly trusted and our students need to be able to evaluate the responses they receive. I can imagine the educational shift and outrage when students were allowed to bring calculators to school. The math teachers must have thought they would soon be out of a job. Of course, we now understand that when you use a calculator you need to evaluate the answer that you see and ask yourself, "Does this make sense?" Is this the type of response I am expecting? How does this response fit in with my knowledge of the question? Thinking critically is key to utilizing AI as a problem-solving tool.
3. Know What's Underneath The Hood: Basic Data Literacy
The AI tool is only as good as the data set that it is using. Students must have a working knowledge of data analysis, data collection, and visualization. AI relies on very large data sets and in order to make proper use of AI our students need to know about the data being used.
4. Know What An Algorithm Is
Basically understood as a set of rules or patterns for problem-solving, our brains use algorithms constantly and AI tools rely on them. Our students need to have a familiarity with the fundamentals of how algorithms work and their potential applications.
5. Understand Problem-Solving
AI is all about solving complex problems. Developing problem-solving skills, critical thinking, and the ability to decompose problems into manageable parts is crucial. Our students need to know how to zoom in as well as zoom out of a big problem, when they understand the pieces that make up the whole, they will be better equipped to use AI well.
6. Ethics
Understanding the ethical implications of AI and data use is essential. Students should be aware of privacy concerns and responsible AI development. We can teach ethics while not having all the answers. Let's work together with our students to discuss and figure out how to manage the ethical implications of AI use both in and out of the classroom.
Want more information about AI in education? Feel free to reach out!
Last April I wrote a blog post about an AI conference that completely blew my mind. There was a decent mix of excitement and fear about how AI would impact education now and in the near future. Dr. Sugata Banerji, the 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." So which pair of shoes do we give our time and attention to? Not surprisingly, since April, there has been an explosion of new AI-related educational apps and services and it's easy to get overwhelmed with the choices. It's important to take advantage of what AI offers us as professionals, while still being wary of the unintended consequences of such a fast-paced tech boom. Today, let's take a look at two pieces of the puzzle, one AI app to welcome and utilize, and one AI app to be understood and be wary of.
The Good
Diffit.me is an incredible productivity AI tool that our very own Kelly Walenga shared with me. Diffit is a resource adaptation/creation tool that can adapt the reading level of any reading, excerpt, or article you provide. Even if you don't provide anything, Diffit can CREATE a reading-level-appropriate text on the chosen topic. According to their website, it can:
Make adaptations to support English Language Learners
Make modifications for students with IEPs
Assist in differentiating your curriculum*
Instead of merely being able to adapt a text to a reading level, it can create worksheets, homework assignments, multiple-choice questions, summaries, short/long comprehension questions, and feature key vocabulary, all based on the chosen text or topic. Once you've created your document, you can export it as a PDF, or convert it to a Google Doc or Google Form. You can also house your resources to Diffit's main UI, which currently maintains that they will never share your data, and remains FERPA and COPPA compliant. It does all of this by using ChatGTP as an LTI integration but modified for their app.
Diffit currently plans to offer a freemium version for educators, while also offering a premium version with more robust services. While a lofty claim, their goal is to "save teachers time, help all students to access grade-level content, and create new possibilities for differentiation and lesson prep."
The Bad and the Ugly?
There's currently a TikTok that is going viral of a student sitting in a university lecture hall, using a new AI tool called Answer.ai, which seemingly is able to instantly answer all of their multiple choice questions on an assessment. The video shows a POV of when a "freshman finds out that college students cheat on everything crying smiley face." To my immediate horror, I noticed that the app was answering Microeconomics questions and if the video was to be believed, rather quickly and accurately.
Their website's tagline is, "School on Easy Mode" and boasts integration to Blackboard and Canvas (phew), and can photo solve individual multiple choice questions, auto solve MC questions on Blackboard/Canvas, or even accept PDFs or Textbook chapters. All this for a low low price of $9.99 a month!
So I decided to test this out and purchased a month of this pandora's nightmare and my results have been...mixed. I tested out multiple choice questions from a variety of AP and non-AP courses and I'm happy to report that while powerful, it's not quite as accurate as they suggest. Here's what I found:
It would report that the question is unanswerable. (clearly not true)
It would give an obviously wrong answer.
It would give a correct answer but with an incorrect rationale.
It would give a correct rationale, but choose the wrong option.
It would give an incorrect answer once, and a correct answer the next time for the same question.
On some higher-level AP Computer Science and AP Economics questions, it had about a 50-75% pass rating. Other times, it got every single question correct. I don't believe it's accurate enough (yet) for students to completely buy in, but it's worth keeping on our radar. It might also be a good idea to think about how we're releasing our multiple-choice assessments to students since there is a Chrome extension, as well as an Android/Apple app.
Don't tell my students, but this is correct...
While we shouldn't necessarily fear the incoming changes to education via AI, it's certainly worth noting that there are going to be some negative consequences and that we need to be realistic in how we assess knowledge and understanding without students. It feels like "The Essay" has been attacked by ChatGTP, and now our multiple-choice questions may no longer be unaffected. I don't necessarily believe much, if anything, needs to change due to apps like this. You really shouldn't allow students to have their cell phones or Chromebooks out during closed assessments anyway. But it helps to know what's currently out there and to weigh the true value of the types of assessments we are assigning students outside of the class. Good luck navigating this new and exciting phase of technological change. We'll be researching and piloting different AI tools and strategies this year, and are excited to share our findings with you. Please feel free to reach out!
*image above was created with Canva's text-to-image AI tool
Brand new year, brand new you. I hope you were able to recover some of your drive and enthusiasm during a long summer of relaxation and respite (unless you have small children of course).
Here is a list of some of the items available to you in your digital toolbox. Many of these can be utilized in lots of different ways. I would love to explore these with you so if you want to work together please reach out.
Here are a few options (in no particular order) that our district pays for:
Pear Deck gives you the ability to create interactive slides. You can create a prompt on the fly or in advance and your students can work along with you as you lead them or you can set the activity to student-paced. Within the Pear Deck suite lives Flashcard Factory, which is a partner activity that can be tailored to any lesson, which is a game-like activity where you can create questions, and your students can play with you in person or on their own. There are lots of Pear Deck posts in this blog, feel free to search the archives or reach out to me for help.
Read&Write for Google Chrome is a Chrome extension and the premium version is available to ALL students and staff. This is your one-stop shop for everything reading and writing online. It has text-to-speech, a highlighting tool, a screen mask, a vocabulary builder, voice notes, and so much more. This is an extension that many adults in the business world are using and it would only make sense for us to teach our students about this tool now. There are also many blog posts about Read&Write in the archives so feel free to check them out. I'm happy to work with you and your students to get you up and running.
Screencastify is your go-to tool for screen recording and basic video editing. Yes, the students have access to it too! This is a fantastic tool for students to give presentations and voice over their slides. You can also now give assignments right on the Screencastify dashboard. Just look for the orange arrow in your Chrome extension bar and try out the various tools you and your students can use to create videos.
Want to assign videos for your students to watch? EdPuzzle is a great way to make those videos interactive. You can add questions and notes and it integrates with Schoology. EdPuzzle now also has a great content library with its own videos in addition to all of those found on YouTube and elsewhere. If you set it up with multiple-choice questions it will also auto-grade!
The following options are free and amazing:
Canva- Do I need to tell you what Canva is? Probably not.
Flip- Students can interact with you and each other via short videos. Great mobile app! Easy to use. So easy my niece's 2nd-grade class used it. Try it. You won't be disappointed.
I am so excited to see what you and your students create with these tools! Don't forget to reach out for help or just to bounce ideas.
It is the last week of classes and all we want to do is make it to the last day of school. I have always described the end of the school year as running full speed into a brick wall. Last week a teacher gave an even better analogy. She said the end of the school year is like we are running in a race, we can see the finish line, but new hurdles keep showing up and we don't have the energy to jump over them so we just plow through them. Unfortunately our students indicate that they feel the same.
My hope is that this post will encourage you to pause for a moment along with your students and reflect and also get some valuable feedback that can be used to make next year even better.
One of my favorite parts of my job is when I get to work 1:1 with students. Sometimes students who are struggling will come to me looking for digital solutions that can help them manage school better. There are times when those students look at me and say something like- Can you talk to Mr./Mrs. _____ and please tell them to set up their Schoology page like____. Or, can you please talk to my teachers and ask them to ____ with the Schoology calendar. You get the idea. The reality is that our students get 8 (or more if they are in activities and sports) different ways of doing things. They see a lot and they know what works and what doesn't. However, they like/respect/are afraid of you to tell you.
The solution? Ask them. The end of the school year is a wonderful time to get some honest feedback from your students. You just have to ask them the right questions to get the answers that will be helpful to you.
Here are a few digital ways to get feedback from your students:
3. Give them a prompt and ask them to respond via video using Screencastify or Flip- also not anonymous but might get more detail with a video response
4. Use Answergarden to ask a single question and their responses will be turned into a word cloud- anonymous
5. Padlet is an amazing tool for crowdsourcing of information. You can choose if it's anonymous. Everyone will be able to view what is posted. You can use the shelf layout to organize by specific topics. This also allows students to post in multiple ways and not just typing text.
You can use this feedback as much or as little as you like, but you can't use it at all if you don't have any. Think about what you want to know from them.
2. Ask about how you organized your digital classroom resources. Did you use the materials page with folders? Did you primarily use the Schoology calendar? Ask them what worked and what didn't and why.
3. Ask them how they would describe your class to a student one year younger than them. Does this match with how you want your class to be described?
Along with feedback comes reflection. We want our students to realize how much they have learned and how far they have come. It's good practice for you to also reflect on the year.
Here are some digital tools that make reflection simple:
1. Google slides: These are linear so it makes sense to use slides to show progression over the year.
2. Canva: This is a fantastic tool for slide decks that you can also turn into short videos. You can also use Canva to make an infographic, social media post, or a meme explaining the journey of the school year. There are tons of templates to get you started.
3. Flip or Screencastify: Don't let writing be a barrier to meaningful reflection. You can set Flip videos so the only you can see them. Have your students (and you) just click record and talk for a limited period of time talking about how the year went. Give specific points you want them to discuss.
4. Google docs Voice Type: Have students open a Google doc and ask them to use the voice typing tool (probably not in the same room all at once). The speech recognition is really very good and you are more likely to get an authentic response if the students are speaking to you.
Don't let this time slip by without getting valuable feedback from students and reflecting on all that has been accomplished this year. What tools will you use for feedback and reflection? Want some help setting up some of these tools? Reach out. I'm always happy to help.
OK, year one of the Manual IC-Schoology sync is drawing to a close. Hopefully, by this point, we've taken our licks and figured out most of the sync issues, and are ready to finalize our gradebooks. There's nothing quite like being able to click "POST" and close out all of your tabs at the end of a semester. So to get there, where do we start?
STEP ONE: Sync Verification
Make sure that your scores in Infinite Campus match the scores you see in your Schoology Gradebook. If there are discrepancies between these two scores, here's what you should do:
Check Infinite Campus Grade Calculations. Category percentages, Weighted Grades, and Final Exam information need to be identical between IC and Schoology. Here are the updated instructions.
Make sure you are SYNCED in Schoology. It's the easiest mistake to make. Click on the Infinite Campus button in Schoology.
STEP TWO: Entering Final Exams/Projects
Do you have a final exam that lives outside the in-progress semester grade?
For example, here is a breakdown of how my semester grade is calculated.
Two Options- Enter In Schoology And Sync Or Enter Directly Into IC
For either option, do this first:
Go to your IC gradebook and click on Settings -> Grade Calc Options and make sure it is set to calculate correctly. As an example, here is what mine looks like.
Option 1: Enter in Schoology and then sync to IC
Enter your assessment/assignment in Schoology. DO NOT click the box that says "Set As Midterm/Final". Just make sure your grading task is set to Final Assessment. You can enter multiple parts to your final. As you enter each part, just make sure the Final Assessment grading task is chosen.
Enter the grades and click on the sync button to move over to IC. You should be able to see those grades appear in the Final Assessment task in Infinite Campus.
Option 2: Enter directly into the Infinite Campus grade book
In Infinite Campus go to your grade book, choose a section, and then choose Final Assessment as the grading task.
Click Add (top left, above settings) and then enter the details for your final. If you have a final with multiple parts, you can click Add and enter as many parts as you need.
Click Save or click Add Sections to add it to other course sections.
Enter the grades in the IC grade book and click Save.
STEP THREE: Finalize, Post, and Save Your Grades.
Take a look and make sure the grades look accurate. Go to your Infinite Campus grade book and select a section. Choose the Semester grading task.
Go to Grade Book. Under the Semester task, click the orange "Post" in the "In-Progress" column. After you click "Post", a window will open to the right to confirm details. Make sure you are posting to the Semester Task and click OK. This will put all grades in the "Posted" column. Lastly, make sure to click "Save", which will turn orange from grey after you post. Repeat for every section.
IF YOU NEED TO MAKE ADJUSTMENTS TO THE GRADE: You will do that in the Posted Column and then click SAVE.
And that's that? Hopefully, there are fewer issues this time around. As always, let us know if you have any questions or need additional help!
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!
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