Using Google Apps for Grading

As you can see from my and George's posts, we are letting our inner geek out, but don't fret more content posts are forthcoming.  I was just sent the video above by fellow blogger Frank Franz.  If you teach with me in FCPS (Va), you have probably started using the "Data Sorter" to better analyze test results, but for the rest of you, you can do aggregate test/quiz/assessments using Google Apps and even let new scores (for re-tests) replace old ones.  The video begins with a short segment showing the power of Google Apps for grading and then shows you how to explain Andy Schwen's (@MrSchwen) work or actually his student's idea for how to use Google Apps. 

Collaborize Classroom

 “CollaborizeClassroom” is a really neat site that’s a little like Black Board’s blog or assignment feature, but much more intuitive and it’s free.  Their platform allows students to engage in conversations, ask and answer questions, collaborate on projects, and vote on issues and ideas.  Here's how it works.

1. Create a class, give it a name and add your students.
2. Create an assignment.  You can embed a video from You Tube, attach a pdf file, or paste in photographs.  
3. You can also choose assignments from a library of topics by discipline and copy it to your class. 

Here's an assignment from the Topics Library on feudalism and here's another collaborative assignment I found on Rome in the Topic Library.  This assignment asks students to watch a video clip about Roman engineering and comment on the similarities of Roman housing to housing today. The platform allows for student comments.

Next, the assignment asks students to choose another  achievement of the Roman Empire to research from a menu provided. They post their response and read the responses of their peers who researched different topics.  I like Collaborize because it gets kids to do something with their reading or viewing without simply answering a few multiple choice questions.

Women in World History/ Primary sources

Earlier in the year, I wrote about a primary sources program at Stanford University with complete lesson plans.  George Mason University has a similar program called "Women in World History."  If you click on "modules," you come to a menu of different modules. If you click on one, like the Islamic Empire, you'll get primary sources and teaching strategies   You can download the sources and strategies into a word document. Both are very good and usable.

All of the sources and modules here have to do with women.  The module above looks at the impact of women in growth of the Islamic Empire.  Another module deals with the early Hindu practice of Sati and another concentrates on Bhakti poets.

Greek Sculpture

Excellent  excerpt from the BBC documentary "How Art Made The World" concerning Greek sculpture.  Presented by Dr Nigel Spivey (University of Cambridge). Only 10 minutes. Thanks to Ron Peck for his tweet about the documentary.

The Art Project/ Really Cool

This is absolutely one of the coolest sites I've seen! If you have a Google account, then you can use the Art Project.. Create your own gallery of art. For Greece, look at the post below. But you can create a gallery for anything you're studying, as long as you can find the artwork from one of the hundreds of museums on the site. You can even look at hundreds of other user galleries. Of course, some art is easier to find than others. I found this on Richard Byrnes site, Free Technology for Teachers. Here's a collection of Hindu art I created.

Acropolis Museum in Greece

Maine teacher, Richard Byrne, has put together a site called “Free technology for Teachers.” In March, he posted “7 Good resources for Art Teachers and Students.” One of the sources he posted is called the Art Project and I love it. It’s powered by Google and “features interior tours of seventeen world famous art museums.” Once in the site, I clicked on collections and found the Acropolis Museum, a great site for the Greece unit in World History.

You can also save each piece of artwork that you want into a collection you create.  For example, if you find Buddhist artwork from three or four different  museums, you can move the pieces into a collection of your own and share on twitter, email,  Google+, etc.  Here's one I created very quickly for Buddhist artwork.

It has great images that you can click on and zoom in and out for detail. The site might make for a great web quest. Some of the other museums in the collection include the Frick, the Denver Art Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

It's really cool the way the images are presented and the way you can zoom in and out on them.

If you Flip, Read this

Caitlin Tucker, a Google certified English teacher, in this excellent post suggests that flipping can be about more than videos. She also wishes that the conversation " focused more on what actually happens in a flipped classroom."

 She thinks there is lot of stuff out there we can use instead of or in addition to a flipped video. She'd like for us flippers to get the kids to DO something with the video they see instead of simply answering some questions to verify they saw it. " Lessons come from doing," she says "So why not pair the content with an activity that gets them “doing” then imagine where you could start the actual class activity?"

Tucker raises some very good points that we might discuss in our PLCs if we don't have to spend the time talking about testing and data, as Les Foltos, argues in the video in the post below.

Teacher Collaboration

“The biggest obstacle in the US is the single-minded obsession with testing and accountability with little or no effort to help teachers improve.”

Les Folotos, Director of Educational Innovation at Peer-Ed, a Seattle, Washington based educational training company, makes a compelling case for real teacher collaboration, not the kind that focuses on testing or assessment, or data, but one that focuses on what's happening in the classroom between the teacher and the student (the kind of collaboration that usually happens after our PLC or CLT meetings that focus on everything but real collaboration and reflection among teachers).

Foltos says that he grew up on a farm and that if all he did was weigh his cows every day, rather than feed them to fatten them, he'd probably have lost his farm. He argues that administrators should connect teachers with purpose focusing on common problems in classroom. In one study with about 70 teachers, he found that only two teachers had a class project replicated and that was by the teachers who graded it.

Research and Citation Pane Within Google Docs

As you can see from the short video above you now have the option of doing research right inside of your Google Drive document and then adding a link or even a citation automatically to the page you are writing. 

More Flipping, More Bergman

More flipping. Here is Jon Bergman's website. It's got some interesting posts about the pros and cons of flipping and hundreds of science, English, and math videos.  I especially enjoyed Bergman's  post "to Flip or not to Flip" and his response to several comments.

Johnathan Bergman on Flipped classroom

Anthony Salcito, Vice President Microsoft Worldwide Public Sector Education, interviews Jonathan Bergmann, pioneer in the Flipped Class Model of Education. I especially like  his idea that the flipped video is just one more resource for the student. He or she can use it or the textbook or whatever to learn the material. The teacher is no longer the disseminatorr of material,  More on the flipped classroom here.

Dos and Don'ts for Flipped Videos

Great story here at Eschool News about the best ways to make flipped videos for class. Some of the advice includes: keep the videos short, less than 10 minutes, add humor, inflect your voice, work with another teacher on the video,  and don't waste the student's time.

Monkeys in India

Interesting story about the monkey population in Dehli. It has zoomed. Officials have trapped more than 13,000 since 2007 all because the monkeys are living representative of the Hindu god Hanuman and Hindu tradition calls for feeding them every week. thanks to Frances Coffey for sending me this link.

Knowledge Graph

Today is the beginning of Google's Knowledge Graph.  Not everyone will see it initially and it is beginning first for those who use English in their searches.  But it is an attempt to better help you find what you are looking for.  For example and here, above is a search for Leonardo da Vinci.  In column #1 one finds the results of the normal search, while in column #2 are items related to da Vinci that also be of interest to you.  Thus Google is trying to improve its search process.  Think, especially of when kids look up dictionary words out of context.  Now they will be able to get a frame of reference on the right column, which if they use it, should help them see which definition, event, etc. should be the correct one for which they are searching. Finally be aware that this search engine is being rolled out slowly and will not work for everyone and even in every search for people in which it is working. 

Famous People Painting with Zoom-It

This is a cool painting called "Famous People Painting - Discussing the Divine Comedy with Dante." If you go here, you can use your mouse and scroll over the people for their names. Kids love figuring who the people are. The other cool thing is the zoom effect. You can go to zoom it and plug in the URL for any picture you like, from Picasso or Flickr, and it will create a zoomable photograph like the one here. You can embed it in a blog or website. You can also read more about it here.   And here, you can see the painting above on a bigger screen with the zoomable effect. You can also click the far right icon on the bottom left to toggle to a full page view of the picture.  My thanks to teacher Richard Byrne for alerting me to this site.