April 2018 – EdTech Awesomeness

Giving feedback to students is an essential part of teaching. Back in the dark ages, before tools like Google Classroom had been invented, I taught language arts. I would collect assignments and then spend my entire weekend giving students meaningful and useful feedback on their writing. Oh, the suggestions I made! The wit with which I dispensed my wisdom in the margins of their papers! I was certain that this valuable feedback would change the course of their work and lead them to be the Pulitzer Prize winners of the future! Of course, when I handed it back to them, all of my meaningful and useful feedback would wind up in the recycling bin with no one ever looking at it, fueling my eternal rage. But, you know, bygones…

In the past, it seemed that most of my feedback was after-the-fact feedback. Students were already done with their work and the feedback I was giving was no longer meaningful. Since the students had already received a grade on their work they felt that they were done with the assignment and were not willing to dig back into it. The feedback would have been worthwhile if I could have offered it while the students were working, but short of cramming more writing conferences into my already packed class period, I struggled to give the feedback in a timely fashion. Fast forward to 2018 and a little tool (Google Classroom) and her useful friends (private comments, Screencastify and Google Keep). Feedback no longer has to be scribbled in the margins of student work with the hopes that students will read it and do something with it, I can now reach the students while they are working and guide them in their work even if I don’t have the opportunity to speak with them face to face. Providing students with digital feedback as they work creates more personalized learning for students.

Private Comments: Google Classroom has a neat little feature where you can send private comments to individual students. To do this, simply open up the view of student work and click on the individual student. A private comment box will be below their work attachments.

The student will get an email notifying them of the comment and when they click the blue reply button, they will be taken directly to the assignment. You can have an entire conversation with the student about their assignment via private comments.

The important thing to remember with this is to create comments while the student is still working and not after they have already turned in the assignment. Once that assignment is turned in, the student counts it as done and any feedback you give will be wasted. With this in mind, it is a good idea to not give students a grade on their work until after they have attended to any feedback.

Private Comments and Video Feedback: Sometimes you really want to dig into the work of a student and just leaving a few sentences is not enough. To do this, I like to use a program like Screencastify in conjunction with the private comment feature. When I want to give more detailed feedback, I open the student’s work, open Screencastify, record my screen and voice while I give feedback and then share the link to the video in the private comments. The student can then access the video and see/hear the feedback while they revisit their work.

Here is an example of how to create this type of feedback:

Once I have created the video, I simply grab the link to the video (which is now housed in my Drive in a folder called “Screencastify”) and place the link in the private comment section for the student.

Student View Screencastify Link in Comments

Google Keep, Screencastify and Private Comments: I am a huge fan of Google Keep and feel like it is the best-kept secret in the Googleverse. I have written a few blog posts about the awesomeness of Keep. Check them out here. If you find that you are giving the same feedback over and over, creating that feedback in Keep notes will help streamline your workflow. You can easily open up the Keep notepad in Docs, Slides and Drawings and copy and paste the feedback from the Keep note into a comment dialog to quickly give feedback. You can even include links to mini-lessons or videos to help the student understand the concept they are struggling with. An even fancier idea is to combine the Google Keep feedback with video feedback. By doing this, you are not only giving them solid and concrete visual feedback via Keep, you are also giving them verbal feedback. I don’t know about you, but it seems like students pay a lot more attention to what I say than to what I write.

No matter how you slice it, Classroom makes it easier for you to give meaningful feedback to your students before they finish an assignment. I’m not going to lie and say that it will save you a ton of time. In fact, once you start using private comments, your email is going to blow up. One of my favorite edtech gurus, Alice Keeler, has written an excellent post on how to manage the private comment workflow and email explosion. Rather than try to recreate her awesomeness, here is the link to her original post: My Respond to Private Comments in Google Classroom Workflow. Her suggestions will help save a lot of headaches and keep you from just deleting your email app and heading for the hills.

Inspire your students to revisit their work. Inspire your students to dig back in and make their work better. Do this by giving them meaningful feedback.

When creating a PLN, the sheer amount of content that you interact with can be mind-boggling. You read a great tweet that has content you want to remember for always! You stumbled on a blog that has realistic suggestions that you want to incorporate into your classroom. You find an article that was meaningful and full of insights that you relate to.You found a rock star blogger and you want to read every single thing that they write! Oh, what to do with all of these knowledgeable people and their amazing resources? How do you organize or curate the content that you want to keep?

There are three tools that could be very useful in the curation of content from your PLN; Feedly, Diigo, and Google Keep. Each tool has definite strengths and depending on your needs, can be used in isolation or together for maximum, professional librarian style curation! Feedly and Diigo offer a free basic account for users, but as always, there are upgraded accounts available. Google Keep is a free component of G Suite.

Feedly: www.feedly.com – At its core, Feedly is an old-fashioned news aggregator. Select websites, blogs and Youtube channels that interest you and add them to your news feed. Instead of having to remember to visit your favorite websites and blogs each week, you can instead just visit Feedly and review everything you missed since the last time you checked in. What makes Feedly so useful though are the ways you can customize your feeds by category. Your feeds can be categorized into topics such as edtech, innovation in education, classroom management, or frosty beverages to make after a really long day at school. Feedly also has a cool feature called “Boards.” Boards are digital spaces where you can pin material from your current feed or directly from the web using the “Save to Feedly Board” chrome extension. These boards are great for when you are working on an initiative and you want to put all of your research material in one place. With the free account, you can create up to three boards. No more desperate searching for that article or blog that touched your soul but disappeared when you accidentally closed your browser! Feedly will keep it all in one place for you.

Diigo: www.diigo.com – Diigo, which stands for “Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other Stuff,” is a tool that allows the user to store, organize and annotate content found on the web. By using the bookmarking and tagging system in Diigo, you can create an online library or collection of material that is useful and meaningful to your projects and personal learning. Whether the content is from a blog or webpage, you can simply use the Diigo chrome extension and save it to your Diigo library. When saving material, you have the option to add tags for easy organization and retrieval. You can even mark the item as “Read Later” which will then show it as new content when you login to your Diigo library. One of the best features of Diigo is the ability to annotate any content that you find online. Once material has been saved via the extension, Diigo provides tools for the user to highlight specific phrases or content and add personal sticky notes. If you want to do more than just collect URLs, then Diigo is an excellent option for your curation needs.

Google Keep: keep.google.com – Google Keep is a multi-use app that has recently seen some upgrades which could make it a valuable curation tool! Every G Suite user already has a Google Keep account, and you might have even used it in the past to make a to-do list or jot down some important information you didn’t want to forget. Keep’s sticky note feature is excellent because within each sticky note you can copy and paste links, add images and type in your own material. Individual notes can also be shared with collaborators in the same way that Docs, Sheets, and Slides can be shared. There is even a new feature where you can load your Google Keep notes as a side panel in Google Docs. This will allow you to drag and drop items from Google Keep right into the flow of your writing. (See this article by Eric Curts at Control Alt Achieve for more on this). But what makes Keep an excellent curation tool is your ability to save web content to Keep by using the “Save to Keep” extension. After you have found an article or blog that interests you, click on this extension and then “add a label” so that you can easily find it in on your Keep board later. As your PLN grows, you can add new labels to Google Keep at any time! And since Google Keep is always free, you will never need to worry about your curated content disappearing. For more on Google Keep, visit my earlier posts, Google Keep – The Gift That Keeps on Giving

Whether you choose to use one of the three suggested tools or decide to travel down your own path, curating your PLN content is valuable and worthwhile! You just never know when you are going to want to revisit something you read, and falling down the black hole of Google trying to re-locate it can be a very frustrating experience! Happy curating!

Month: April 2018

Feedback of Awesomeness in Google Classroom

Curating Content From Your PLN