Today I'm sharing a rundown on some of the updates from Google for this fall. Many of these updates you may already know about. Google does a great job in giving you a little automatic tutorial whenever they tweak something, but if you are in a hurry (because, again, teachers are the busiest people on earth), you may X out of those tutorials so you can get going with what you need to do. So without further ado...the updates. Grade Book The sad one first. If you follow Google's updates at all, you may have seen that Google Classroom has launched a beta program partnering with Infinite Campus. This partnership allows Google Classroom to sync grades with Infinite Campus. When I saw this, I did a happy dance, as this is a HUGE feature that teachers need to make Google Classroom more functional. My happy dance was halted abruptly when I found out we couldn't do it because we are not a hosted customer. Now, my background is not IT and I'm not sure of the logistics of what that means; however, I was given a glimmer of hope that eventually we will get it. Google is rolling it out with hosted customers to have better control to test it out. So in essence, stay tuned, don't lose hope. Forms Import Questions Quick and simple, you can now import questions from other Google Forms into a new Form. This is a handy option to have. I can see this being used for aligning assessment questions with learning objectives. You could create a form as a template, and just create blank questions with the learning objective written as a description for each question. Then, when you are creating an assessment, you can pull from the template and not have to rewrite the learning objectives each time! Rubrics Beta and Originality Reports Beta
These two really deserve posts of their own, so I will probably post on them again. Both Rubrics and Originality Reports are in beta testing right now. Google is great in that they really listen to educator feedback, and so they open up their beta programs for us to try things out. Our district currently has access to the Originality Reports Beta, and I just asked to see if we can get it for Rubrics, although you can request access individually here. Both of these tools work within Google Classroom. The aptly named Rubrics allows you to attach a rubric to any assignment. There are several Add-ons that teachers have been using to do this for several years, so it's nice that Google is finally making it an integrated feature. Originality Reports lets students cross reference their work against billions of webpages and millions of books. It will then point out if they are missing citations or plagiarizing. In the beta program, teachers have unlimited access. Once the beta window closes, teachers can attach the Originality Reports function to three assignments per class. Let me know if you need more details on any of these features!
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AuthorChristin Barkemeyer Archives
April 2020
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