How to: Import McGraw Hill eAssessment Assessments into your Canvas LMS

*This post was originally published in 2020 and updated in Aug 2023 to reflect a change in the click-flow on the McGraw-Hill platform*

This one is for my math homies in my school and out there in the #mtbos!

I've been teaching in Canvas for only a week, and I've already learned out two very important lessons: 

1. Canvas has a LOT to offer as far as tools to deliver content to my students
2. The more I keep my kids ON Canvas, the less confusing the flow of my class will be (which is super important for keeping you, kids, and parents all on the same page!)

So, as a part of my into-the-fire professional learning, I wanted to figure out very quickly if I could import assessments from our McGraw-Hill tools into Canvas to make building my curriculum muuuuuch easier. 

Here's how I did it:

1. Create your assessment in eAssessment on the McGraw-Hill website
2. Go to File --> Export --> QTI Standard --> QTI 2.1 and save the .zip file it creates.
3. Go to File --> Export -->  QTI for Canvas --> New Quizzes and Item Banks (Updated since 2020 when I made this screencast!)
4. Go to Canvas and click on the quizzes page or a module to create a new quiz. 
5. Set the title and due date for your Canvas quiz
6. Click on the 3 dots menu in the top right and choose "import content"
7. Drag or navigate to the folder with your saved .zip file and upload.
8. You're done! Go on over to the quiz settings and tweak how it best fits into your class.

Check Out These Tips for Searching In Google Drive

How's the organization on your Google Drive looking? Kind of like your desk?

I suspect that most folks' Google Drive models their organization in real life - if you've got everything physical filed away perfectly, you probably have a similar organization digitally. If you have NOTHING physical filed away, your Drive is probably nearly folder-less. My Drive is a mixture of the two, which basically means, I know better than to NOT organize, but often fail at it and just keep all the files in the huge main "My Drive" folder, which is the same as piles on your desk, I think.

That doesn't mean I'm not without my conventions and methods.

I try to name similar purposed files using a similar structure. For instance, my notes each week for the graduate class I'm taking currently are all named, "Gifted Class - mm/dd/yyy"

When planning projects, the FIRST thing I do is make a folder. Okay, not always, but when I do, its really helpful. You'll save a ton of time when kids ask you to reshare those directions or rubric for the nth if you don't have to search your computer for that for the nth time.

Use the specific Slides, Docs, or Sheets URLs. If I know that the file I need is a certain filetype, I'll often go to the URL specific to those to hide the clutter of those other files from my view. For example, the Slides URL is slides.google.com. This is probably a more cumbersome method of just searching in Drive by filetype, but this helps me to declutter my thinking and focus on the task at hand.

I think these methods are helpful for my digital workflow, but their utility is all predicated on the fact that I plan on SEARCH being my "organization" method in the first place.

Check out these search tips from Kasey Bell at Shake Up Learning to make your search more powerful!
Shake Up Learning - 8 Fantastic Ways to Find Anything In Google Drive

Creating Memes as Modern-Day Political Cartoons

Finding or drawing political cartoons to express the absurdity or irony of a historical perspective has long been a staple of history class. I remember creating a political cartoon in my study of Romeo and Juliet 18 years ago and one of the first lessons I wrote in undergrad social studies ed classes revolved around this cartoon, published after China's first manned spaceflight:

During my planning for my summer school government class last week, I wanted to think through the idea of filibuster, but I was looking for something that my students (and myself) would relate to contextually. As the print newspaper has declined in readership and influence informing the public, we've of course seen a concurrent rise in digital media and freedom/ease of expression through social media. (I did a precursory Google search before I wrote this post to see if anyone else had already written it and found this piece from journalism professor John Schacht - "Why Internet Memes May Replace Editorial Cartoons" - it didn't suggest any role in the classroom, but it exactly expressed the increasing prominence of memes beyond picture of grumpy cat.

Recently, Senator Ted Cruz gained some notoriety for reading Seuss's Green Eggs & Ham while holding the floor with a filibuster to delay vote of a funding bill for the Affordable Healthcare Act. I played this video from CSPAN of the reading, and then asked my students to create memes showing their understanding of the concept of a filibuster as part of our study of the legislative branch.

Most of my students used createameme.org - it worked well enough on the iPads - but you could use any app/website that allowed you to layer text over an image. Here's what they came up with:

The best/worst part of this activity was the giggles that ensued the rest of class because students didn't want to get off of the meme websites. :)

Enrich Class Discussions by Podcasting Them

This post describes the rationale and some nuts and bolts of the Government class podcast I'm working on this summer. You can read more about that class and listen to the episodes at governmentclass.mrcbaker.com.

This summer school I am delighted to be teaching a 2 week "credit recovery" course for Government, something I taught in my student teaching in 2005, but have not worked with since.

One of the things I'm looking most forward to is the class discussion. There are opportunities for these in math class the deeper you go with relevance, 3 Act Math Stories, and or project-based learning, but because much of studying the social sciences is how everything that has (or may) happen relates to you or others, class discussions are something that I like to do several times a week.

I used today's first podcast as a way to get the kids to reflect on what they see as the role of the federal government, if they think the government is doing well in that role, and to think of or research specific cases that exemplify their stance. Here's a link to the prewriting doc I put in Google Classroom for them.

I gave them 15 minutes to think through the doc and get some of their answers down, stressing that the idea does not have to be at its fullest fruition since we were prewriting. I moved around the room, talking through some ideas with students, clarifying questions, and encouraging that putting good effort in the prewriting was going to make them sound really smart when we started recording.

After their prewriting time was up, ordinarily, that's where you would have a class discussion, right? You, the teacher would throw out a question, the students would share their responses, you would counter with follow-up questions to help clarify their statements and summarize for everyone else, and students would respond to each other. And then with the exception perhaps of some stellar note-taking from some student, the discussion would die as soon as the bell rang, living only as a memory, and only for the benefit of the people in the room.

But if you record it, the discussion lives on! Why record (and why podcast specifically)?

1. Recording the discussion archives it for students who were absent or want to review it later when studying
2. Recording and pushing it out as a podcast invites parents into the classroom without having to be IN the classroom.
3. An audio recording is less intimidating to students who may not want to be on video and less intrusive to the normal flow of the discussion. I set my Chromebook in the middle of the circle, pressed record, and then left it alone.
4. Podcasting the discussion creates an audience for your students beyond their classmates and you, their teacher. A class discussion may have gotten blown off, but everyone was on their best behavior and best engagement while we were recording. 
5. Letting kids know you trust and value what they say to put it on the internet is a message of trust and value in them as people. Who doesn't love to hear that?

But HOW do I do this, Chuck?

1. Get a voice recorder app for your iOS or Android device, or open up an online audio recorder. Today I used online-voice-recorder.com. When you save/export these, it will save as an .mp3 file.

2. What if you can't hear my students on the playback? I used twistedwave.com to edit individual files with fade in/fade in or cutting out any period of more than like, 5 seconds of silence, but MUCH more useful was the "normalize' tool, that allowed me to highlight the quiet sound signature from a quiet student, "normalize" it to the rest of the audio, and turn up the volume just in that one segment.

3. Ideally, things will go great and everything your students say will get recorded. :) If that doesn't happen, or you need to separate the recording between different hours (or any other reason you may have two separate .mp3 files that you want together) I used http://audio-joiner.com/ to put my files together after I had them edited how I liked.

4. Do you have the .mp3 file how you want it now? What should you do with it? You could do something like attach the file to your website, Google Classroom, Edmodo, or other LMS, or even share the link from Google Drive via email or Remind. That's by far the simplest solution. If you want to try posting your audio as a real life, honest-to-goodness podcast, you'll need a blog post the files to, generate an RSS feed, and get yourself submitted to iTunes. Here are tutorials for that.

• Setting up Drive and Blogger
• Making and submitting a podcast to Apple iTunes 

When deciding if you need the extra layer of complication submitting to iTunes, consider your audience. Are you podcasting your class discussions for the stakeholders of your school and/or district, or are you hoping to share with a larger audience? If your answer is the former, you don't really have a need for iTunes - people you want to share with can just get the file as an .mp3 shared via email or Google Drive.

However, as I said in the Why Podcast section, I sensed that my students stepped up their game knowing that other people were going to be turning in as well, so it is worth the steps to host the podcast on iTunes and this blog.

MY next step is to start to train the students to be able to record, facilitate, save the .mp3 files themselves. My government class is less than 10 students this summer - I don't think it would have been as successful an experience if we were trying to get a "regular" class size all engaged in the same discussion at the same time. In that case, I would hope to split it into at least 2 concurrent recording sessions. The obvious advantage here is that then the teacher steps even further into the background and can just sit in a guide/contribute rather than driving the discussion. 

Is YOUR School #FutureReady? Here's What Some Students Said -

I had to pleasure of "crashing" the St. Louis Regional Future Ready School Summit last week as a part of the volunteer team, so I've been reflecting a lot on my own practices, some of the decisions we make as a school that we do have control over, the decisions our district makes that I have no control over, and how all of that meshes together to affect the "future readiness" of my students (and figuring out what that really means.)

According to the Future Ready website from the +U.S. Department of Education, a #FutureReady school commits to...

• Fostering and Leading a Culture of Digital Learning Within Our Schools.
• Future Ready district leadership teams work collaboratively to transform teaching and learning using the power of technology to help drive continuous improvement. We work together to protect student privacy and to teach students to become responsible, engaged, and contributing digital citizens.
• Helping Schools and Families Transition to High-speed Connectivity.
• Future Ready districts conduct comprehensive diagnostic assessments of the district’s technology infrastructure and develop a sustainable plan to ensure broadband classroom connectivity and wireless access. Future Ready districts work with community partners to leverage local, state, and federal resources to support home Internet access outside of traditional school hours.
• Empowering Educators through Professional Learning Opportunities.
• Future Ready districts strive to provide everyone with access to personalized learning opportunities and instructional experts that give teachers and leaders the individual support they need, when they need it. Future Ready districts provide tools to help teachers effectively leverage learning data to make better instructional decisions.
• Accelerating Progress Toward Universal Access for All Students to Quality Devices.
• Future Ready districts work with necessary stakeholders to ensure that all students and educators across the district have regular access to devices for learning. Future Ready districts develop tools to support a robust infrastructure for managing and optimizing safe and effective use of technology, so students have opportunities to be active learners, creating and sharing content, not just consuming it.
• Providing Access to Quality Digital Content.
• Future Ready districts align, curate, create, and consistently improve digital materials and apps used in the support of learning. Future Ready districts use carefully selected high quality digital content that is aligned to college and career ready standards as an essential part of daily teaching and learning. Teachers are able to share, discover, and adapt openly-licensed materials and teaching plans.
• Offering Digital Tools to Help Students And Families #ReachHigher.
• Future Ready districts make digital resources available that help access expanded college, career, and citizenship opportunities. Future Ready districts promote ways to leverage technology to expand equity through digital activities such as completion of the FAFSA online, virtual counseling services, college scholarship search tools, and online advising access, all of which help to return America to the nation in the world with the highest college completion rate by 2020.
• Mentoring Other Districts and Helping Them Transition to Digital Learning.
• Future Ready districts work to design, implement, and share their technology plans. Future Ready districts join regional summits, participate in an online Connected Superintendents community of practice, and publish their Future Ready technology plan at a site such aswww.MyDistrict.org/FutureReady.

How is YOUR school doing on these measures? The Dept of Ed partnered with +AT&T and +McGraw Hill to offer a dashboard to district leadership teams for self-assessment, planning and data tracking. Its a great tool for focusing your team on the vague idea of "21st century learning."

After the first day of the summit, I was curious what my own students thought about that, so for my second day out, I left the following writing prompt for them:

Tomorrow my students will be argument writing on how #futureready their school is. #stuvoice #kidsgradehard pic.twitter.com/67t67JKViX

— Chuck Baker (@chuckcbaker) April 28, 2015

The way I wrote the prompt, the kids understandably took it down to their experience as students, but I was surprised to the extent that many of them said it was because their teachers didn't care about them. I don't know how different the results may have been with higher performing students (these were my juniors/seniors who have failed at least 1 semester of math and many of which will not move on to Algebra 2), or with kids from a different district, but rather than focusing on student use of technology and the lack thereof in most of our classrooms, the narrative I saw developing as I transcribed in the handwritten responses were that my school is failing students (in the sense of not fulfilling our mandate to prepare them for what's next) not because of irrelevant work, but mostly because teachers either did not care, were not good teachers, or both.

You can read the full text of student responses here.

The ones who DID respond positively usually referred to career and technical ed classes we offer (business, food, Project Lead the Way), or in offering the ACT or scholarship information, which almost hits on the second to last Future Ready principal listed above, but still discounts the technology that can be leveraged to enhance those opportunities.

I've also included a few word clouds trying to best visualize the narrative I saw developing. If you read the full responses, I think you'll agree none of these quite "get" it, but the ones where "don't" is most prominent come close.

So what do you DO with this information?
I'm pretty sure part of the discrepancy between their responses and the Future Ready principals was a combination of the way I worded the prompt and the students' own experiences. Obviously they wouldn't have anything to say about teachers' professional learning opportunities or mentoring other districts in digital learning.

What I DO take away from this is that a school's first priority should be in setting up procedures and systems that let students know implicitly and explicitly that they are cared for and who they are and will become matters. The Summit welcomed Dr. Tiffany Anderson of +Jennings School District, a district close to mine that has taken the pledge and seen a significant turn around from unaccreditation to accreditation in the last several years to tell the Jennings story.  Dr. Anderson laid out three principles they use to guide decisions in the district: relationship, pedagogy, and curriculum. I think its easy to tighten up pedagogy and curriculum - those are processes and fixed by training. Relationship is harder because relationships get hard and ugly sometimes. Relationships are made of people and people mess up.

The day can best be summed up for me and my students in what I tweeted just as Dr. Anderson was wrapping up with her experience guiding the students through understanding and expressing their feelings surrounding the Michael Brown and #Ferguson protests in our community last fall.

I just want to give Dr. Jackson a hug. WOW. @JenningsK12 is evidence of power of trusting your kids #moedchat #FutureReady

— Chuck Baker (@chuckcbaker) April 29, 2015

Tip Tuesday - Copy Your Padlets for Other Sections

I love using Padlet as a landing strip for students to share ideas, work, or problems they're creating.

Here's some ways I've used Padlet on my class set of iPads:

• backchannel
• students' summary statements after reading a text
• generating questions before or after reading
• gathering guesses or estimations of an answer during Act 1 of 3 Act Story
• students creating/solving exercises to share with each other
• reflecting on a video or text

Some of those uses listed above might actually be enriched by students being able to go back to earlier periods in the day and see what they did, particularly the backchannel or creating exercises for each other to solve. For the reflections or checks for understanding, I think having other kids' thoughts on there pollutes the experience and prevents new ideas.

For yesterday's work, I wanted my students to make up the graph of a line, write the equation for that line, share their work on the padlet, write the equations of some of their classmates lines, and then have the classmate check them off as correct or needing more work. It wouldn't have been the end of the world if some of the lines got repeated, but it was important that the line creators were in the room so that they could check their peers' work.

In THAT case, where you need a fresh board for each period, you can COPY your padlet with identical settings so that you don't have to duplicate your own work.

I chose "copy with posts" on this occasion because I wanted my own example up there. 

 Another pro tip: edit the addresses of your padlets for easy sharing with the date and hour.

After the day was over, I had 3 padlets that all looked SIMILAR, but were unique to each hour.

For more info, check out the Padlet blog - I checked after the fact, but they wrote a recent post about copying, too.   :)

Do Your Students DESERVE Technology?

"Well, its they fault for having iPads..."

This was a students' response a couple weeks ago when I told everyone we were putting their project on hiatus because someone in their class walked out with an iPad yesterday. (The day after someone walked out with the class fish to be "funny.")

"The school should have known they'd be stolen - this is the hood."

I'm not oblivious to my own white privilege, and my school is definitely not Pleasantville High, but to describe our setting as "the hood" is laughable at best and disrespectful to the students in cities who have to go to schools across the country where their safety IS obviously in question.

But... maybe my school is more authentically ghetto than I thought. In a real, Webster's Dictionary kind of way, many of  my students are at least CULTURALLY isolated and trapped. When I announced their class would be going back to worksheets, there were some kids who started making contingency plans to finish their project work after school or on their cellphones, but no one really expressed the same outrage at the injustice I was about to enact on this class as I was feeling myself. I wonder how aware they are of the creative, cool, relevant projects kids with more access to technology are doing every day in other schools?

Some of my students may have even been relieved - completing a worksheet requires much less of them than a student-paced, open-ended statistics project like we've been doing. Worksheets eventually go away because the teacher moves on to the next teacher-centered, teacher-directed activity. The sheeple can follow along.

When relevance is a CLASSROOM-SPECIFIC focus, it sends the message organizationally that its only something that happens in so-and-so's class. Something THAT TEACHER is doing extra. (I had a kid tell me today after he told me he couldn't enter his answers into a Google Form that he was going to just go to credit recovery so he could get a math class that doesn't use technology. His teacher last semester that he failed with was heavy on flipping the class and using Study Island for some assessment.) When student-centered, relevance-seeking technology use is only in pockets, students can escape (and slip through the cracks). Students can blame THAT TEACHER on bad experiences. When relevance is a school-level or district-level emphasis, it starts to shift the CULTURE, which can then change the students' mindsets.

So what did do the next day? I kept the iPads locked up for that class for several more days after the fact, but they're back out now. I don't want to manage two different lesson plans for the same course, nor do can I bear intentionally making the decision to leave the iPads in the cart. I believe the only thing to fight my students' ignorance is with knowledge and exposure, and the only way to ever know and expect better is to see and experience better. 

Defining Students' Capabilities (What Happened on the Scientific Notation Project?)

What do you think defines more of your students' capabilities to create, the tools you give them, or the content you teach?

Which builds more capacity in our students to solve (their own) real problems, teaching them to ask better questions, or teaching the content necessary to attack those problems?

I had a great conversation with +Jeff Horwitz from Chesterfield Day School in December about continuing to push myself to think out of a box about what problems kids can solve and what products they can create in 2015 with the technology and information available to them. There are skills we teach at the high school level in our career and technical ed and arts courses that 15 years ago a kid may have needed to make a professional-ish product.

When I was a kid...

• I "published" stories and books by using a printer, our best markers, and those little metal brads and giving them to my parents. One day, I even got invited to an city-wide event where I got to read my story in a classroom of TWENTY-FIVE other kids and parents who were attending the same event.
  
• I "produced" songs by recording myself singing along to the radio on a casette recorder.
  
• I "interviewed" people from other cultures by making up fake languages and talking into my casette recorder.
  
• I "published" a newspaper by drawing a picture in the box and writing on the lines of a pre-printed template on newsprint that my parents bought one time. (And just once. So, the fun was over in an evening.)
  
• I saw my grandparents on my mother's side fewer times than I can count on my hands, because they lived more than a day's drive away.
  

My 5 year old...

• Has published an interactive ebook and shared it on my facebook with her friends (okay, my friends, their parents, but you know what I mean.)
  
• Without even being given the idea, recorded music videos on a Leapfrog Leappad with songs she makes up herself.
  
• Has a "fashion" blog with images of her designs that she'll request we post to so she can show her friends her pictures of "horse braids", "tags for charming babies," necklaces, and more
  
• Can Facetime her Mimi and Poppa almost whenever she wants, sharing all the latest news from STL to ATL. 
  

Its hard for me to even imagine what she'll be capable of once she starts reading, but I have a feeling it will only be limited by our ability to get the tools into her hands, and her own imagination. 

I think in a lot of ways, I expect greater creativity and imagination from my preschool-aged children than I might from the high-schoolers in my classroom. Is there a chance our expectations of what they may be capable of is what defines the end product? If something is an "11th-grade" project, what makes it so? Is it the math content from a course they haven't yet taken, or is it a complexity limitation? 

Once you raise your expectations of the quality that students are capable of producing, how do you sell that to your students that have a fixed mindset of what they can accomplish? 

Two weeks ago I gave my Applied Math students a mini-project about multiplying or dividing numbers in scientific notation. I gave them the choice of 4 different questions to research and solve, and a choice of poster, collage, video, or whatever else cool they could come up with as their product. Several students steered toward poster, which was fine, but the disparity between quality was what rattled me for the better part of a weekend. Choosing to work by herself, one student finished her work in 2 class periods (and most of the 2nd was filled with coloring in block letters and graphics on her poster.) I had a group of 4 boys "finish" the same question in 4 class periods with what was probably a level of quality I could have produced in 3rd grade. 

What happened with these boys (the 2nd photo above)? Is it a matter of their teacher accepting this poster as "done," even as I already know that it will barely pass muster on my rubric? Can we mandate creativity in core classes? Do I have to put quality measures in my rubric that really should be assessing a student's learning of the content? 

From my experience, its not enough to give the option of creativity in the classroom and producing cool, quality work. Some students will flourish under that setting, but it cheats that ones who will continue to function at the lowest common denominator. I don't think its enough to show our students what they can do - we have some level of responsiblity to push and encourage them to make it happen. 

Engaging Your Students With 3-Act Math Stories

You want your students engaged and invested in the math work they're doing, right?

Are sweating common core-style performance events that require kids to go make decisions about what information they need, and then successfully gather that info?

Are you looking for something more memorable to do with your students than "page 412, #34"?

Enter 3-Act Math Stories, a collection of open-ended, perplexing math stories (think of it as a word problem with all of the structure stripped away). The movement was begun and is being led by +Dan Meyer

3-Act Stories are what have me most excited curricularly in math this year, so when given a chance to put together something for METC this year, I knew that's what I was going to choose.



Links 3-Act Math Stories:
101qs.com - Dan Meyer created site to manage crowdsourcing creation of stories
threeacts.mrmeyer.com - Google Sheet of Dan Meyer (and others) stories aligned to CCSS standards
Three Acts Livebinder - Popular stories, reading and videos for training teachers

What's a Library For?

Recent posts from MindShift, Slate, and Good on the future of libraries have got me thinking- 

Of the pictures below, which best typifies why does someone goes to the library? What's the main activity?

Historically, you're probably thinking of the picture on the left, but what about the future? What's the mission of a library? Let's take a look back to the gilded age and see what Andrew Carnegie, the tycoon philanthropist responsible for many, many public libraries' founding in the US, had to say about their importance:

"There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the Free Public Library, this republic of letters, where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest consideration."
“A library outranks any other one thing a community can do to benefit its people. It is a never failing spring in the desert.” 

The irony of modern library funding is that organizations or regions with the most resources (and therefore, best libraries) are probably less in need of their power to democratize information and learning. What do our impoverished communities need more in 2015: books, or internet access? Is there still a role for physical books? Of course! There's nothing to replace (at least for now) the warm fuzzies of cracking open a new book and cuddling with my kids to read. 

But back to the role of libraries - it took a billionaire philanthropist to get the public library system a kickstart because books are expensive. Building up personal libraries or archives of books took a wealth of time, space, and money. But their role in expanding the knowledge base of a community are invaluable. Today, relying on books (a traditional, conservative view of libraries) is a model that can only be sustainable to a community that is not reliant on the real point - lifting the learning and resources of a community it serves. If you have reliable, consistent access to the internet to gather information, then you may not need the library in a traditional sense. You can use it more for memories-with-kids-warm-fuzzies. But ask someone who does not have that access, and a student will tell you how much they rely on the library to complete online assignments, an adult will tell you how hey went to the library to apply for new jobs or prepare their taxes online. 

This graphic from the New York public Library says a lot:

Find the Antiquity in This MLK Poster-Essay Contest

There's something about the rubric to this Martin Luther King, Jr. essay-poster contest that just doesn't sit right with me. Can you find it?

 

I had a debate about this with one of my friends in my department, and he said he thought the "no computer generated art" rule was good for leveling the playing field for students who may not have access to a good digital art studio. 

I think the rule prohibiting digital/computer generated art does the exact opposite. I think sometimes my colleagues get the impression that I hate physical art and "traditional" processes. It's not that at all. If a child has the skill to do his or her best work with crayons/paints/markers/colored pencils, then by all means, they should. But if they don't?? Talk about UN-leveling the playing field.

I think the only thing prohibiting digital/computer generated art from this contest does is encourage kids that can write OR do the art to cheat and have someone else do the other requirement for them, or DIScourage kids who can only write to not enter at all.

   

Why do the organizers of this contest want FEWER kids to enter with LESS professional looking entries? I just don't understand.

Socrative Interactive Assessment in 30 Seconds

I've written more about the Socrative app/website before, but have been tasked with presenting in a slim 25 minute window to our school staff, so I wanted to refine my experience to the elevator pitch.

Socrative is...

• an app
• a website

You can use Socrative on...

• PCs
• Macs
• Tablets
• Smartphones

I've used Socrative for...

• exit slips
• quick check-ins
• surveys
• test review
• quizzes
• unit exams
• final exams

Socrative questions can be...

• short answer
• true/false
• multiple choice

Quiz navigation can be...

• student paced
• teacher paced
• randomly ordered

You could spend...

• 5 seconds
• 5 minutes
• 5 hours

...preparing your assessment in Socrative.

It really is a versatile tool! For more info, read can read further about Socrative on this blog, or visit Socrative.com

Algebra on a Chromebook: LucidChart Diagrams

I've heard more than once that laptops or Chromebooks in a 1:1 environment get relegated under the desk during math class because the classroom teacher struggles with finding ways to integrate the technology into what is usually a much more hands-on process with graph paper, pencil, and exercises.

I think the easiest answer is to have kids using the laptops for watching videos, looking up examples on webpages, or drill and practice on websites. The sexy answer is to have kids engaged in problem-based learning, integrating their math work into relevant reports, graphs, images, and presentations, but first you would have to also sell problem-based learning on the teacher.

In between the easy answer and the sexy answer lies LucidChart Diagrams, whose collection of education templates can facilitate note-taking, critical thinking, the problem solving process, organizing and summarizing, sequencing, and concept mapping.

Let me show you briefly how a student could use LucidChart Diagrams to integrate writing and list the steps to solving an equation.

You can find LucidChart Diagrams in the Chrome App Store

After clicking on "Create," this box pop-ups, giving you a selection of templates. There is an extensive "education" collection.

This is the "sequence chart" which you could use for any technical writing task. 

Your next task is inserting an image of a worked out equation for students to write about. Scroll to the bottom of the menu on the left and select the plus icon to add an image. This box pops up in which you can do a Google search or upload your own (student or teacher created)

Here's what mine looks like after resizing the image some and inserting each of my steps. (click to zoom or pop out to new tab)

Other charts you might use - 

• Venn Diagrams
• Cluster/Word Web
• Compare and Contrast
• Concept Map - use to connect similarities and differences in characteristics of functions
• Planning Chart - problem solving or think alouds
• Vocabulary Chart - visualizing unit vocabulary, grouping similar/related words
• T-chart - change the headings and use as guided notes/interactive notebook. students import images of examples and type in on the right side.

Create Digital Manipulatives with PicCollage App

Searching for a fun way to enrich my students who had already watched and accounted for the videos for today's lesson, I decided to have them create and use manipulatives to model the addition and subtraction of integers that I had presented in my flipping videos.

My first decision was to just have them use paper, but with other kids in the room catching up on the videos on the class iPads, that almost seemed like a PUNISHMENT. "Good job doing your homework and getting ahead. Now give me back the technology - you can cut paper squares." Not exactly the engaging environment I was hoping to create. While rethinking it during my prep, I opened my iPad just to look through my apps to see which of them might give me some of the create-a-shape-and-then-move-it-around functionality I was seeking.

I settled on the app PicCollage (iOS | Android), which I previously used last year to have students construct a Frayer Model for our exponent rules.

Here are some student examples. Taco vs. Nachos was my favorite. :)

That was "-6 + 12 =" in the blue text, in case you're thinking this kid was as lost I was first thinking when I looked at it. :)

This was is also -6 + 12

7 + (-12)

The real winner was when the creator of smileys vs slushies above used HIS OWN MODEL to help out the kid next to him who was a little confused on how to use the model. Student win!

Traditional Textbooks Are Holding Back Your Students' Vocabularies

Do you use the dictionary tool embedded in the tools in your favorite eReader or browser? What about your students? Once your students are proficiently reading at a middle school level they probably aren't likely to run across (many) unknown words in popular fiction, but what about content specific words in textbooks or course specific literature like Shakespeare or Hawthorne?

Remembering from my own experience, your students traditionally have three choices (and these are still advocated, I know) - keep a paper dictionary at your desk/in your backpack to look up words whenever necessary, attempt to use context clues to get an idea, or skip over it and miss out on comprehension of the text.

I've got a lot of respect for students willing to keep that dictionary with them (or even willing to reference a standalone app), but why are we making it so hard on our students (or yourself)? When you give your students ebooks and web resources to read, definitions are a highlight-and-tap away. Your definition comes on-screen and in context.

Kindle for iOS 

IBooks

Safari for iOS

Imagine how you could unlock your students' potential to learn through reading if they weren't frequently skipping new words (or skipping the reading altogether because it seems insurmountable).

Ready to take the next step?

Your district may not have a license for the corresponding ebook to your text, but you can use these tools to get your students access to alternative texts they could use in class or on their own devices.

CK-12

You can find a free CK-12 ebook in iBooks and the Kindle store for many go your core subject needs (Algebra, Geometry, American History, Biology, Chemistry, etc.) 

CK-12 Flexbook

On the website from the resource above comes a related, customizable tool. I've had these on my class iPads for a couple years. I like them because you can create/compile your own text, or use one that another teacher has already made public. I usually also post a download link on my class website for students' personal downloading pleasure.perfectly formatted 

iBooks Author 

This Mac app allows you to bring in text, images, and video to create an ebook perfectly formatted for iBooks (although it would still work in other ereaders, as well.) you can share your books created in iBooks Author just as I do with my Flexbooks from CK-12. 

Someone in your social network. 

Fellow AP Stats teacher, Julie Kindred (@jkindred13), has made most (if not all) of a stats book in iBooks Author and was willing to share her treasure with me. Maybe you are as fortunate as I am and have someone in your network who has done the same for your needs. Or you and a few friends could collaborate on one!

Does Paper Get Your Students' Attention?

We've had online grades for several years in our district, and some students and families check and keep track of their progress almost to a point of obsession. However, I have a larger sample of students who either rarely check Edline, or "don't have Edline," which means, "it never bothered me enough to go downstairs to technology and get my information."

All that goes to say, no matter how consistently I update their online grades, or how many digital resources I give my students for help or for projects, many of them seem to respond with much more urgency to a piece of paper. It almost seems that anything digital gets lost in the clutter of Snapchats and iMessages.

I'm reminded of this cartoon that I think anyone over the age of 25 can relate to.

from poofytoo.tumblr.com

Has the novelty of ubiquitous access to information already dulled so much that the paper-based teacher has more opportunity for influence with some of our students?

Technology is no longer novel - what's next?

Although its definition continues to evolve, we've seen the rise of the "techie-teacher" to a place where its not really a unique role anymore. The popularity of Pinterest and "crafty" websites like it lead me to think the "artisan-teacher" is the next realm. The "artisan-teacher" uses paper almost ironically. Purposefully. Not because he or she has to, but because it gives an extra touch of personality to their craft.

Supersize the Floorplan Area Project

Designing a floor plan to have students calculate and study area is pretty standard fare for a high school Geometry course, but the further we get into the CAD-era of drafting, the further it gets from relevance.

The only way I've ever seen this done is on grid poster board or with grid paper. It's good for modeling how someone might draft up an informal plan at the kitchen table or your workbench, but its completely unlike what "real" architects, engineers, and designers do at their desks. Your students might get some exposure in the career and technical ed department with the heavy tools from Autodesk, but there's no reason you can't get everyone a quick exposure from these free tools.

Google SketchUp

My students are in the middle of a project right now designing a water park for a fictitious town in southwest Missouri using SketchUp to lay out the 2D geometry, pulling up into 3D shapes, wrapping it with colors or images, and adding dimensions. You can add some pizzazz to your plan from the extensive 3D warehouse gallery of items contributed by SketchUp users.

I'm not mandating this for our purposes, but you can also add any text you want for identifying parts.

When you're done you can export your SketchUp to 3D printers or as images to be embedded anywhere else on the web.

How to get it:
SketchUp is available for download here for your personal use, but its software, so you'll have to wait for someone with admin privileges to install it for you at school. (I always hate coordinating this, so I stay away from locally installed apps whenever possible).

You can also run it with a browser plug-in from this link. I haven't tested that yet, but I imagine it might get slow at times. On the positive side, your students will be able to use it at home without having to install it on their own.

Autodesk Homestyler

Homestyler is marketed directly toward consumers wishing to design for their personal home or office. Therefore, there's less to offer to the "power" user, but its easier to pick up and use for your students that might be wary toward the technology aspect of your redesigned project.

My favorite parts of Homestyler:

• When adding doors/windows/appliances to your model, beyond the generic options are brand name designs that you could specifically purchase at your favorite home improvement warehouse. 

• Adding a budget or cost layer to your project because as simple as keeping a window open to homedepot.com or lowes.com

• Exporting images AND interactive walkthroughs 

• Users have a choice of several nature backdrops to have peeking behind any windows, and can even choose a setting to have the sun shine through. The point is to get a better feel for how a paint color would look in the afternoon sun of your actual home, but for your students' fake floor plans, it just adds an extra pop.

How to get it:

Not only is Homestyler free, but its also a web app, which means all your students need is the url to finish on their own at home. Launch the web app here. (requires Adobe Flash)

CONFUSION WARNING: There is also a Homestyler app in the iOS app store that has a completely different interface and functionality. The app directs the user to take a picture of the room they want to style and then add elements layered onto the image of that space. From a consumer standpoint, its a lot simpler than having to measure and layout your space like you do on the web app, but for the purposes of your floor plan area project, its useless.

Honorable Mention: Free, online tools that may also work for your project

RoomSketcher - looks a lot like Homestyler

Roomle

Placepad

Daum Equation Editor - Polishing Students' Documents and Presentations

The biggest hurdle I've experienced to moving all of my students' math work online and to our iPads was related - I want them to create polished, professional reports and work, but kids were limited in their abilities to express the equations they had worked with.

For instance, showing the work for solving an inequality they had written for a short story ended up looking something like this:

It's serviceable, and if you know what they work is supposed to look like, you can translate it to know its meaning, but it definitely doesn't resemble what kids are used to seeing in any math text, much less the way they themselves would be writing it.

One solution I started accepting to work around this problem was for kids (and sometimes myself) to type out their narrative and leave space to write in their calculations. Writing in their calculations and formulas after printing is certainly easier to implement, but arguably looks much worse than the awkward result of typing them.

Making Equations

So, I'm excited to have found Daum Equation Editor in the Chrome Store this afternoon. According to the app details, here are all of the features:

• Create formulas with the click of a button. 
• Create formulas with TeX input editor. ( latex )
• Changing the size and layout of the formula.
• Images created with a formula to save to your PC. 
• Text files created with a formula to save to your PC.

The tools are based on LaTex, and are identical to those available in the equation editor in Google Docs (my other favorite), but are nice and large (and obvious).

Why Do I Need Daum Equation Editor?

I wouldn't use it if I were creating everything inside of a Google document, but in any other Google product or interactive tools like Socrative, an editor is not present, so you must import equations as images. Here's why Daum wins:

Instead of using Alt + Shift + 4 for screenshots on a Mac, or the snipping tool in Windows Vista/6/7/8, Daum has 3 saving options right in the editor. 

I got SUPER excited at the thought of accessing my photos via Drive, but for some reason Daum saves the images as .PNG files and the embedded Drive option in Google Presentations will only recognize .JPG files.

The Bottom Line

Common Core standards and the demands of 21st century work demand that our students be able to create and publish digital work, so we need tools that are easy to use and share with our students. Yes, there are other equation editors, and one embedded in the programming of Word and Google Docs, but exporting those equations to multimedia presentations or other apps still requires taking a screenshot, so you may as well give your students a straight-forward tool that saves the image on the same screen they use to create it.