PSA: Don't Reinvent the Wheel, Copy your Google Classroom

If you are using Google Classroom as your LMS, you are saving yourself and your students from disorganization. If you enable the SIS sync with infinite campus, you can import grades and assignments to make keeping your gradebook up-to-date easy. And perhaps more importantly, if you organize your LMS space well, you are supporting students success.

EdSurge reported that "on an average day, a student has to navigate between as many as 10 different platforms—in a single class! Students expressed frustration with not knowing where to find assignments. Most said they didn’t have a preferred organization system; they just asked the kid in class that seemed to be the most organized."

To support student executive skills, you want to think carefully this year about how best to organize your Google Classroom. Often week-by-week is easiest, with teachers archiving older materials below, and creating a new classroom for each term.

If this sounds like a lot, it's not! Once you have a set up in place, you can copy formatting from term to term and year to year. 

This means that if you used Google Classroom well last year, you can save yourself time and headache by copying your entire classroom or copying your assignments! 

Here are the steps:

1) Prepare the old classroom: remove or note# classwork materials that didn't work or needs revision.

*Note that if you don't want copies of materials, don't copy your classroom with files attached to assignments. 

2) Make a copy!

3) Update the files, if needed, as you go. This is where the # system is helpful.

Now, if you didn't love how your classroom was organized last year OR you want to make some updates to your classroom copy, check out the video below for some useful tips:

End of the Year Technology Clean Up

It's hard to believe the school year is drawing to a close, but given that Chromebook collection is fast approaching for students, there are things for teachers and students to have on their collective radars now to ensure a smooth end of the year AND set you up for a smooth start to next year!

1. Prepare to Archive and Otherwise Secure your Google Classrooms 

Your Google drive will be FILLED with student files if you don't return work. If you've been holding on to student work all term (or all year), now is a good time to return those files. This will save your Google drive from clutter and help you find things faster in the future.

• This Teaching Channel blog post walks you through the process and includes a helpful video tutorial!
• One additional tip, for those of you worried about securing assignments for academic integrity reasons, you may also opt to unenroll students from classes. This blog post will explain and walk you through the process.

2. Support Students in Organizing their Google Drive

Once you return work to students, you could give students the opportunity to create a portfolio for their families OR students could organize their work into folders for school applications, Vision of the Graduate reflections, or any number of other reasons.

• A lesson for this for Grades 3-12 can be found at ShareMyLesson.

3. Organize Your Files without Creating Additional Clutter!

• Use versioning to name this year's file without making copies that clutter your drive.

Instead of making copies, go into the Version History and name the current version. This way, you can have multiple versions of a test, assignment, handout, etc. that is customized based on your group of students, semester, etc. And the great part? You can go back and forth between named versions without losing any of the versions!

• Place shared files in a shared drive--your team or department will thank you!

Create a Progress Report from Google Classroom

Google Classroom is amazing for so many reasons, but if you want to give parents (or SST) a progress report of Google Classroom assignments, which may include tasks that aren't reflected in the gradebook because you are looking at completion, you need a workaround.

This blog post shows you how to download a sheet from your Google Classroom gradebook.

Now, to make a simple single student progress report, you can do the following:

1. Create a new filter view.
2. Select only the student/data you want.
3. Print! (Print to PDF to attach to an email)

Our video tutorial shows how, plus how you might use this to share notes about student progress.

Let TLI know if we can help, and happy conferencing!

(PS: If you are curious about other tools that work with Google Classroom, check out this demo from Schoolytics. It isn't currently an approved tool at GPS, but if you want to see more about what it can do, contact TLI.)

Save Time Scoring to Spend Time on What Matters

Midterms at GHS have inspired several questions about ways to save time on scoring assessments. While there are limits to what multiple choice can assess well, questions that are carefully designed and target specific objectives can assess higher order thinking and provide teachers with the ability to provide students with fast feedback. 

Megan Faherty of Angela Watson's Truth for Teachers blog/podcast puts this well: "If you don't have time to grade it, students don't have time to learn from it."

There is so much research about the impact of feedback on student performance. But for fast feedback from these types of assessments to be meaningful, teachers need to plan for students to use it. 

Depending on the tools teachers use, there are many options for helping students review and use their feedback from assessments that involve limited choices.

A few ideas, such as those from "Getting Students to Engage with Feedback," 

• "Make a connection between the expectations of an assignment and feedback. When I set an expectation, I explain how I will give feedback and the way students should apply the feedback to their work."
• "Create opportunities for students to interact with feedback during class sessions."
• Students can work with peers who had similar challenges to determine what skill or concept was involved in the question troubled them, and think about what knowledge or strategies might help them in the future.
• Teachers might also create specific plans for students to review questions or problems, recognize their strengths, and utilize resources to help address areas of struggle. Simply having students review incorrect responses and answering questions like, "Why is the correct answer better than the other options? Why did you think the answer choice selected was right? Can you find evidence for why it is wrong?" helps improve engagement with this work. 

This aligns with research that shows that "Short, low-stakes tests also help teachers gauge how well students understand the material and what they need to reteach. This is effective when tests are formative—that is, designed for immediate feedback so that students and teachers can see students’ areas of strength and weakness and address areas for growth."

Asking students to take the time to review not only saves you time, but then also leads to better results, especially if students know they can retest or they earn back credit for showing that they know the material via these test reflections.

Tools to Speed Up Grading (and Feedback)

In several posts on this blog, we talk about the value of fast feedback for student learning. So how do you do this in a way that is safe (remember CT's student data privacy rules) and speedy?

Enter tools like Google Forms and Zipgrade, which offer fast results and teacher-friendly data reporting.

Zipgrade has the advantage of working with paper. This is great if you have a longer multiple choice assessment (up to 100 questions) or secure test that wouldn't work well as a Google Form quiz OR if you don't have access to student devices. Essentially, you can print a premade scantron-style sheet to use for multiple choice, true/false, and matching questions--or create a custom one for gridded-numeric entry questions--and students will fill in their responses. The teacher then uses a smartphone or tablet with the app to scan the answer key and score the papers. A set of 20 sheets can be scored in under 2 minutes!

To see what this process looks like, watch the first few minutes of this video; this YouTuber also walks through the getting started process, which is regularly updated for iPhone and Android users on the Zipgrade website.

Zipgrade also quickly provides an overview of student scores, item analysis, and allows you to print individualized reports for students:

Class Overview Reporting

Item Analysis

Google Forms quizzes have the advantages of being completely free (Zipgrade has a limit of 100 scans/month in a free account), and offering a wider variety of question-types, embedded media, and seamless integration with Google Classroom.

The above video shows just some of the options for creating Google Forms quizzes and viewing data that will help you plan instruction and focus areas for students. 

What makes this an huge time-saver is the ability to work with Google Classroom and Infinite Campus gradebook sync to quickly pull the scores from the Form to the Classroom, and from the Classroom Gradebook to the IC Gradebook. This two minute process not only gives students quick feedback in Classroom (as you can enable them to view their quiz results), but also saves you time entering data.

Avoid Quarter 2 Blues: Save Time with a new Google Classroom

For those of you ending the quarter, now is the time to create a new Google Classroom for each of your classes. Organizing new classes will save you time in the long run and help you empower students.

If you use the sync function to pull grades from Classroom into Infinite Campus (a HUGE time-saver), creating a new course for each marking period is key to aligning those gradebooks. Here are the steps:

• Step 1 - Create and configure a fresh NEW class
• Step 2 - “Reuse” needed content from OLD class (Only pull ongoing assignments or essential materials)
• Step 3* - Unlink old class; link new class to SIS   (Go to “settings” to link; this syncs to Infinite Campus!)
• Step 4- Add your students
• Step 5 - Archive--don’t delete-- your OLD class.

Additionally, this prevents students from trying to submit old work and removes clutter! Google Certified Trainer John R. Sowash shares the four main reasons to do this, along with a demonstration of Steps 1-2 and 4-5 in the video below:

It is also a good time to make sure you are posting EVERYTHING to Google Classroom. Sam Kary of The New EdTech Classroom makes that point that this saves you time in the long run, as when you go to reuse classrooms and posts in the future, these resources will be available: 

By spending a little time now, you will save BIG in the future!

Stop the Madness! Schedule Posts

Feedback from teachers regarding professional learning needs was that TIME SAVERS are sorely needed. One such time saver, which will also save your sanity, is scheduling posts in Google Classroom. (See tutorial video below).

There are many reasons to schedule posts, but when used in conjunction with the "reuse post" tool, you can schedule out your assignments for the day (or week) as you prepare them. This saves you the time from having to go back, find documents, etc. AND from having to "pull back" assignments that might be released before you are fully ready to share.

A few minutes here or there can buy you time to respond to parent email, update grades, or even just enjoy a cup of coffee. 

Let us know if you have questions in the comments.

Save Time, Increase Engagement with Mote

This week Sarah DA shared out a tutorial for using Mote in Google products. If you didn't get a chance to watch, it is well worth the 2 minutes (or visit the TLI EdTech pages at any time to view this tutorial and more)!

Mote is a tool that can increase engagement. How many times have you written a comment or email only to have someone misinterpret your tone? Sometimes it is easier (and more engaging) to just use your voice. Research shows that 

"audio feedback may be positively perceived and better utilized by the students compared to written comments (Merry and Orsmond, 2008; Lunt and Curran, 2010; Parkes and Fletcher, 2017)."

However, it can also be time consuming to keep saying the same thing over and over again. It's no fun during class, and certainly no fun during prep! Luckily, edtech teacher Avra Robinson has a trick to save you time: add audio comments to the Google Classroom comment bank! (3 min video)

Mote unlocks differentiation potential as well. For students who do better while listening, making a quick recording of directions can make a huge difference. A Google form quiz for a student who needs a reader can now be done with a pair of headphones!

Let us know what other ideas you have for Mote in the comments below!