It’s been a few days since I’ve done a blog post. The start of the school year is always so busy. I am a full-time classroom teacher, so all the realities of the first weeks of school apply directly to me too!!
I don’t do a formalized typing unit in my Computer Technology classes, but keyboarding is an important skill to learn. There are many resources available online. I posed the question to one of my PLNs on social media and received the following online utilities as good programs to use in the classroom.
www.typing.com offers free accounts, and has few restrictions on the accounts.
Other resources that have been recommended to me by my PLN include:
Typing Club – https://www.typingclub.com – has a free edition and a paid edition. There are significant limitations to the free edition.
BBC Typing – http://www.bbc.co.uk/guides/z3c6tfr – This one appears to be designed for younger students, is formatted as a game and looks to be very good.
Typing Pal – http://ecole.taptouche.com/info/en/ – Does not offer pricing online, but contact with the company offered this information – We have two different subscription models for Typing Pal Online:
A school subscription, which is based on the total number of students enrolled at the school
A per-user subscription, which is based on a specific quantity of user accounts.
A per-user subscription for 260 users would receive the 100–499 user price bracket of $6 per user, which totals $1560. If you can provide the total number of students enrolled at your school, as well as the number of user accounts you would like to subscribe, I can compare both options and provide a quote for the best price applicable.
EDU Typing – https://www.edutyping.com – Again, there is a per-student fee to use this application, and if you teach large numbers of students, it can become fairly costly.
Learn2Type – www.learn2type.com – I use the typing test on this site to do intermittent typing transcription tests. Ultimately, I am looking to see an improvement in the keyboarding skills of my students. They all arrive in my class with a wide variety of skills, and the goal is personal improvement.
Whether you’re new to Remind, or you’ve used it before, it’s super handy to have the image that shows your “phone number” (it’s not your real phone number, it’s a number issued to you by your Remind account) that you can post in your Distributed Learning shell, you can print and hang in your classroom, you can distribute on the school website and so on…
Somewhere in Remind you can find an image like this. I know it’s there! I found it yesterday. Then I forgot where I found it, and so I wasted about another fifteen minutes trying to find it. Fifteen minutes that I didn’t really have to waste on the first day of school.
So, if you’re looking for the image, or the .pdf instructions to send home with students – here’s a quick video tutorial showing you where to find that information!!
So, today we experienced a new error in our Remind apps. A number of students received the message “You are not allowed to join this class because it is not associated with a school”. This was not something we had seen before. I did some searching and came up with nothing (my time was limited because I am a full-time teacher, so this we between classes and during the last few minutes of my prep that I was attempting to find the answers to this sudden issue.
I was very impressed with their customer service. I initiated the ticket mid-morning, and they had responded by noon. Their response to my inquire was succinct, to the point and indicated that Canada is in their near future plans.
I applaud Remind for ensuring that they are a kid-safe website, and that they have done what is necessary to receive ikeepsafe certification. Digital safety and digital citizenship are not always convenient, but they are extremely important concepts in 2016.
Help!! I have a YouTube Channel and now that I have traffic incoming on a regular basis, the HOME screen says the channel has no content. When a newcomer arrives at my YouTube Channel the words on the screen read This Channel Has No Content.
I had this problem. I searched many times and tried a number of different things to solve it. Many of the fixes were a couple years old and did not, indeed, fix the problem. It turned out to be a really easy solution, and one that puts the control of the channel in the hands of the person running the channel. Here’s a quick video showing how to control the content that appears on your channel’s home page.
Late assignments. It happens. So, what do you do when a student has a late assignment to hand in? Or, if you’re a student, what do you do if the deadline has come and gone and you’ve not turned in your work?
This tutorial addresses how this works, and identifies what is presently a gap in Google Classroom’s inner workings. When a student logs into their dashboard, they do not receive any alerts that there is work missing! Teachers – please let Google know that this needs to be adjusted!! (They are software engineers. They need our feedback on this stuff!)
In any case, handing in late assignments is easy. This tutorial will show you how!
Remind (formerly Remind 101) is one of the great tech tools for teachers out there. When parents and students register using your class code (this can be done via text, or through Remind’s own app for smartphones – the user can choose their preferences), teachers can send reminders out via text regarding classroom happenings.
The thing is, your remind codes start to become part of your day-to-day teaching experience. They’re on your course outline, newsletters, booklets – pretty soon they’re everywhere and you don’t want to be changing the code each year.
Clearing our last year’s students so that you can reuse your codes is incredibly easy. Here is a 1:22 video showing you how to “clean house” so you’re ready for this school year!!
I’m serious!! With this feature of Google Classroom, you, the teacher will never find yourself empty-handed again. It works for word-processed documents, google sheets and google slide presentations. (This can also include work that students collaborate on, they just have to choose “whose” document they are going to work on.
Even if a student doesn’t finish an assignment.
Even if they don’t hand it in to you.
Even if it is totally finished and they forget to hand it in to you.
It’s not possible for them to have lost it – it’s in Google Drive!
Even if they just grunt when you ask them what their plans are for finishing it…
SOMETHING IS BETTER THAN NOTHING. And as a teacher, you will never have “nothing” again (unless, of course, the student for-real does nothing, and that’s rare!)
Today we will take a quick peek at how a teacher can grade assignments in Google Classroom, and how formative assessment can be carried out. While the examples shown are very surface so as to keep the video moving along quickly, the private conversations between student and teacher can be very robust within this Distributed Learning environment.
We will also take a peek at the Google Drive Folder and its contents to illustrate how the teacher has a coy that remains in their Google Drive (even if a student unsubmits and resubmits an assignment).
The past two blog posts and videos have taken care of the basic setup of a class within the Google Classroom environment. Today we are going to tackle the very simple task of creating an assignment for one of our classes.
As you will see in the video, it’s incredibly easy, and one assignment can be deployed to multiple classes simultaneously (which is superb for teachers like me who may have 7 instances of the same class – I teach CTF 7 to seven different classes each year).
The video also shows you what your students will see when they log in to view and submit their first assignment. It’s not easy to assist students with their challenges if you haven’t seen the actual process yourself, so I’ve taken about four minutes within the video to demonstrate what students will experience when they access Google Classroom to view and submit an assignment.
Today we need to add out students into our newly created class in Google Classroom. It’s easily done – either by the teacher inviting students (if you have a superstar technician, this may be integrated with your SIS Database [Powerschool in my division]) or by giving students a random access code that they enter to gain access to your classroom.
The tutorial starts out in the teacher dashboard, then at about 2:10 takes on the student perspective of registering in a course, then returns to the teacher dashboard to illustrate how the students have populated a class list by registering.
Here is a the first of a series of video tutorials that I will be creating as the new school year approaches to assist you with setting up and making the best use of the Google Classroom Environment.
Google classroom can assist you with easily creating a distributed learning environment, completing formative assessments and staying on top of which of your students are missing assignments. We will work through those aspects of Classroom over the next couple weeks. Tonight we’ll start with how to set up your first class in Google Classroom.
Note: All accounts used for these tutorials are fake. As is addressed at the start of this video, a random name generator was used to create the accounts, and any assignments or work that appears to be turned in to illustrate the inner workings of Google Classroom in the future will be created by me for the purposes of these demonstrations. No real student work will be used for these video tutorials.
Dr. Jane McGonigal inspires me. What she sees in games, and in gamers inspires me to consider how that can inform pedagogical adjustments. I’m not proposing we throw out everything in favour of games; but I find it hard to ignore her statement that “Gamers are super-empowered hopeful individuals”. I see gamers come through my computer lab by the hundreds each year, and I am inclined to agree with that statement.
Her observations further include that gamers encompass:
Urgent Optimism
Social Fabric (they network and collaborate naturally)
Blissful Productivity
Epic Meaning
I encourage everyone to spend twenty minutes watching her most excellent TED talk – and understand that it is from 2010. Consider what has changed in your own world since this talk was given.
This afternoon, 9E will conduct the first test of their games. To say I am nervous about this is an understatement. There are eight groups, all of them with widely varied games and at immensely different stages of development. Today they will do a test play so that they can learn what the strengths of their games are, as well as the weaknesses of their games.
We watched “Caine’s Arcade” last week, and some of the students were teary as they viewed the unfolding story.
As a teacher, it feels like such a stretch to give up this much control of my class. I feel like I have students everywhere, and I am in a position to “trust” that learning is taking place. The differentiation is inherent as we progress through this project, but the feeling of being in control of the learning, the pace and the assessment is all gone. At least in this moment, it is absent.
What a mind-blowing day!! My Collaborative PD Day involved tours of three makerspaces in Calgary. Two with the Calgary Board of Education and one with the Calgary Catholic School District. A day spent with three incredible educators is nothing short of amazing.
The morning started at Midsun Junior High School in the southwest of Calgary. They are reworking their library to operate as a Learning Commons and Makerspace. I met with the amazing Amber Mazur and we discussed coding and the Raspberry Pi – and using the book Adventures in Raspberry Pi as a guided reading endeavour. (What a brilliant idea by Amber!). We discussed furniture choices and space reallocation within the library. We looked at the inquiry-based learning taking place throughout the school. And we debated the question “what is the difference between design-based learning and makerspaces?”
Midday took me to Calgary Catholic Board’s St. Augustine School school. I spent time chatting with brilliant Marylee about the maker movement in CCSD and the #MakerMarch design challenge she has issued for any schools in their board to participate in. We talked about the logistics of makerspaces, the re-envisioning of the library space, and teacher reactions to the changes.
The day finished up at Nose Creek School learning from the remarkable Steve Clark. We looked specifically at robotics and 3D printing. We discussed the positives (there are many) of 3D printing in schools as well as the challenges (they do exist).
Many thanks to Amber, Marylee and Steve for making my PD day so rich with information and learning!
First and foremost, I’d like to point out that when we are talking about students in our public schools, we are talking about CHILDREN. Their brains are still developing (studies show this continues until age 25), they are still acquiring life skills concurrently with the academic skills we teach in schools, and they are still subject to (victim to in some cases) whatever quality of home life their parent(s) provide for them. They have neither the means, nor the skills (nor the legal right in most cases) to make changes to the overarching environment of their lives. This ALWAYS significantly impacts their ability to function in a classroom – either positively or negatively.
The second point I will note is that as a teacher, it is NOT MY JOB to prepare them for the real world. It is my job to teach them the curriculum as Alberta Education lays it out in each subject area. While some curricula do touch on certain life skills (Health, CALM, Phys Ed), none of the other curricula do. It is the job of the parents and other persons chosen by the family (generally unofficially) to teach kids how to function “in the real world”.
In my school division, I have been a part of a committee (though my AISI time) reviewing “Admin Procedure 360”.
Principle 5 in Admin Procedure 360 [draft] lists the following:
· The summative grade should not be skewed by extreme scores
· Students are expected to complete required work rather than receive a “zero”. Schools will develop a protocol of strategies to facilitate student demonstration of achievement, rather than assigning a zero. Schools will develop a plan for dealing with students who are not completing assignments. This will provide a supportive culture for students who are struggling.
Bottom line is that it is my job to assess students’ mastery of my curriculum. If they are not completing work, and I issue a zero, the message I am sending to the student, to the family and to Alberta Education is that the student IN NO WAY, SHAPE, OR FORM can demonstrate any comprehension of the outcomes being measured. This is almost NEVER an accurate assessment. Surely any student who has been attending classes knows something, and if given an appropriate means of demonstrating what they have learned will be able to do better than a zero.
The next part to address then is professional judgment. At what point have I exhausted all avenues to get a child to provide me with material to assess? It can come to the old adage “You can lead a horse to water…” If I have spoken to the student in question, contacted the parents, kept them in at noontime to complete – there does come a point where I have done everything in my power and in my authority. At that point, I use my professional judgment (with documentation recorded over time) to issue the zero for the missing work. In my experience, it rarely comes to this. When I offer the explanation to a parent about what a zero signifies, they are almost always on board to ensure that their child completes the work. I am not threatening a zero – I am explaining what it means in terms of academic assessment.
Another important point is that zeroes are almost IMPOSSIBLE to mathematically overcome. Once a zero is entered into a teacher’s gradebook in ink, the student who was “awarded” the zero might as well pack in the idea of achieving a good final grade in that course. It’s going to take a whole lot of 100% grades to overcome that 0.
Progressive assessment encourages the use of median scores as opposed to averages. Using this as the method of assessment shows where a student consistently scores, and factors out extreme scores – on either end of the spectrum.
Punitive assessment procedures simply do not work. Those who advocate for them have not stopped to consider how that’s working out. The teacher who gives zeroes – do students start handing work in suddenly to avoid the “dreaded zero”? No. Those kids generally need a little more hands-on teaching and TLC.
I did note that the teacher in the article teaches senior high Physics. Generally speaking (and please, forgive the generalization), those kids are the highest academic students, and as such, a punitive grading practice such as the issuing of zero scores may compel some students to ensure that their work is handed in. However, in other courses, this absolutely will not impact students to up-the-ante in terms of completing their work.
In the earlier days of my teaching career I did award zeros. I had not considered what the grade of zero was actually saying about the students’ achievement or curriculum mastery. I have used it as a “threat” (as my academically-minded brain would see things), and it was ineffective. A phone call home was always far more efficient in influencing students’ behaviors and habits.
And in the end, these students are still kids. The real world is going to teach them plenty – – as it has for all of us. Did school teach me about the “real world”? Nope. The real world did. I have no delusions of grandeur. I’m a teacher. I’m not the real world. Only the real world can serve up a good healthy dose of “real”…. Everything else is just contrived.
If kids have grades that allow them college entrance, those kids are ready for college. Or they are close enough to being ready that they will be able to pull on their workboots once they get there and do what is asked of them.
That said, I’ve read lots that indicates that colleges and universities are also changing their assessment practises. One final point with respect to post-secondary readiness is the idea of having the kids learn the curriculum. By making them complete their work, they learn. If they have learned the high school curricula, they are deemed ready for college.
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