You may notice that Digital Tool Tuesday is now Digital Tool Tidbits. As the year has progressed I've gotten busier and busier (which is AWESOME!), and I grew a bit tired of having to rush posts in order to get them posted on a Tuesday. Also, I am hoping to blog more about a variety of things in general; hence the name change! Today's digital tool is a Google Docs Add-on called Kaizena. Kaizena has been around for a while, and I had heard about at some point and obviously signed up for it because I get their emails, but I had never actually used it. Anyhoo, Kaizena just recently fully integrated with Google as a Docs Add-on, and it is an excellent way to provide effective feedback to students (hello again, Classroom Instruction that Works). One method of feedback that Kaizena allows you to provide is comments, much like Google Docs already does, but you can color-code your comments for easier identification. But the best feedback you can provide with Kaizena are the things that Docs doesn't already have. You can do voice comments, add a lesson, and track a skill. To begin with, the Voice Message option is pretty awesome. Personally, if I can talk out my feedback to a student rather than have to type it or write it, I know I am going to leave much better feedback. Kaizena makes it easy to do that.
The Skills option allows you to put rubric items within your comments. Each skill is like an item on a rubric. You can set the different levels and then grade student work based on the levels. For example, if you put grammar as a skill (as seen above) you can give a student a rating for how well they did on grammar. Want to get started using Kaizena? Click here to install the Google Docs Add-on (students will need the Add-on as well, but it can be pushed out from your tech. administrator). Then, this help page from Kaizena's website provides you with a ton of useful information to help you as the teacher get started, and this one is great for students when they are ready to review their feedback!
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*Note to my WRMS staff, I subscribed you guys already, so you don't need to put in your email.
Either way, figuring this out really pushed my limits as a techie. I am more of an educational techie, and figuring this out made me enter the realm of website development techie, something I know very little about {I used MailChimp, BTW, to make the subscription happen}. However, I was bound and determined to make it work because I was driven and passionate about finding a solution. There was a sense of urgency behind it {*cough*...maybe a little bit of obsessing...*cough*} and I was SO EXCITED when I figured it out. Think of a time when you felt this way about learning. Now think of a time when your students felt this way. As educators, seeing students excited about learning and reaching goals is one of the most rewarding things we can experience. Sometimes, though, we get so lost in the day to day grind that it is easy to either ignore the excitement of learning or to even unintentionally squash it. Matt Miller over at Ditch that Textbook wrote this great post on thriving at the end of the semester. Miller talks about objectives, feedback, and effort {hello again, Classroom Instruction that Works}, like having students reflect and see how far they've come. He also talks about breathing new life into your activities. Bored with your end of unit plan? Find ways to spice it up! This time of year, it's easy to keep saying "only two more weeks...only two more weeks...only two more weeks." But I encourage you to light a spark in yourself and your students these last couple of weeks and try to end on a high note. It would make your break that much better!!
Today's Digital Tool Tuesday comes to you as a result of a morning in which my patience was tested and I had to repeat the mantra, "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again" (and again, and again). I was creating a Google Slides presentation on how to connect a Chromebook to the projector, and I wanted to use GIFs to give a good nonlinguistic representation of how to do the steps (What is a GIF? See image below!).
I read several blog posts and did several Google searches on GIF creators, but everything that I tried would not work the way I needed it to. I needed to put the GIFs in Google Slides, which you do by going to Insert --> Image --> By URL, and then you paste the URL of the GIF in the box. The GIF creators I found downloaded the GIF, rather than give me a URL, or they just plain glitched out on me. Around and around I went, until VICTORY! I found one that did what I needed it to do.
Gifs.com. Yes, really, it's that simple! GIFs.com let's you turn videos into GIFs. You can upload your own video (I was able to do use the shareable link of a video from Screencastify to make the above GIF), or just copy and paste a YouTube video into the site and go from there.
It lets you adjust the length of time of your GIF and add features like a title.
Once you are done editing, you get a Direct Link, which you then can copy and paste into Google Slides (or Docs, or Drawings) under Insert --> Image --> By URL.
So how can you use GIFs in your classroom?
Tech is shiny. Tech is cool. Tech is 21st century. It's easy to get swept away and think, "Look at me, I'm using technology!" But is the tech we're using tied to learning objectives? Are we leading students down the path to learning, or are we just putting shiny things in front of them and calling them "engaged"? We can do this with other learning activities as well. Anything fun and engaging may seem beneficial to student learning, but as teachers we have to make sure that the objectives come first. Classroom Instruction that Works (2012) gives us four recommendations for setting objectives:
The proof is in the research pudding. If we can get in the habit of posting objectives, it will be easier for us to pick activities and digital tools that pair well with our learning objectives. I hope this Classroom Instruction that Works refresher helps you in posting your objectives! In today's Digital Tool Tuesday, I thought it would be beneficial not to bombard you with another new tool after you just had a day of learning about a lot of tools, so let's talk for a minute about our awesome staff and the great PD we had Monday. A spark. That's all it takes for someone's curiosity to burst into a roaring fire, a determination to learn something, try something new. Hopefully, you experienced a spark in one of your PD sessions on Monday. Monday provided us with some amazing sessions. I love two things about days like Monday: 1. I love that our district/administration acknowledges how talented our staff is and allows us to share what we know; and 2. I love the willingness that our WRMS staff has to learn new things! The sessions that I was in were full of teachers fully engaged and truly wanting to learn new things to implement in their classrooms. In fact, I know teachers were already using Dasan's Beekast in their rooms today! It's that willingness to learn that we must make sure we transfer over to our students.
If you need any resources from your sessions, or you are curious about a session you were unable to attend, go to our Sept. 25th PD website and go to the specific session you are looking for. I am still adding resources to the site as they come in, so if you don't see something added yet, check back in a couple of days and it may be there. You can access resources from Monday afternoon on the Classroom Instruction that Works website as well. Jeff will be adding resources there as we go through the training. I am hoping that the Aurasma app will be added to the iPads soon so that teachers can start using it with students. Additionally, if you are interested in using virtual reality in your classroom, I have six headsets that you can check out to use. I would be happy to help with either in your classrooms! You guys truly are the best staff around, and you make this job of mine so amazing. I am so fortunate to get to work with all of you! |
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April 2020
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