Socrative

This was originally written for teachers at my school and shared with them November 28.

We had a student stop by 125 and ask what the name of the site with the little rocket ships for answering questions that Mrs. Le used in history.  He wanted to use it in his math class. I think it’s great that the student was able to see the flexibility of the resource and that it could be used in other classes.  I thought I’d share it with everyone in case you are looking for something different to do as we head into December.

The answer is socrative.com  Socrative is basically a clicker type app/website that collects students responses in a variety of ways. You do not need to book chromebooks because it works just as well on any devices the students have - it is very mobile friendly.

Here’s a video that briefly describes what socrative does.

Socrative.com is an easy on line tool that you can use in your classroom with students for quick check-ins, quizes, exit tickets or what socrative calls space races (the one with the rocket ship).  

Reports are collected and can be emailed to you.  Quizzes can be done either teacher paced or student paced.  In “Quick Question” you can poll the class and find out where the class stands on an issue, or with their understanding of a concept.  I haven’t used Exit Ticket at all, so I can’t speak to that one.

I’ve been using the space race in my classes.  I create a quiz (in manage quizzes) before class based on work students had been doing.  In class I login to socrative, click space race, choose my quiz and the number of teams I want to have.  I then break students up into teams and have them compete against each other to answer the questions.  They login using my class room number (assigned by socrative).  One device per team.  As they answer questions correctly, their rocket moves across the screen (I put it up on the data projector).  They enjoy the competition and get pretty excited.

I’ve also done this with new material.  Students are expected to research the answers while they do the race.  This works best if teams can have 2 devices - one for research and one for the race, but it can be done in different tabs on one device.

Socrative allows for multiple choice, true/false or short answer type questions.  The short answer can get a bit tricky because the student answer has to match yours exactly (capitals, spelling).  I try to avoid this type of question.

If you want help getting started with socrative let me know.  It’s not difficult to pick up, but it is easier if you play around with it the first time using more than one device - one as teacher, one as student.

My Reflection on PLCs

I am fortunate enough to be in a school board and school that has focused on PLCs (Professional Learning Communities) for many years.  My school dedicates 30 minutes, every other week to staff working together in small groups as PLC time.  We have also been given the afternoons of many of our PD days to work in our PLC groups, an annual day with Allison Zmuda for our departments and (I believe) an on going offer of release time if we feel it necessary or beneficial to have more time to work on something specific with our group.  I have the impression that this is not the norm across the province, and I feel lucky to be in a board/school that dedicates this much time to the opportunity to work together.

(Can you hear the “But…” coming?)

Earlier this semester we were asked to share what we were doing in our PLC groups.  This was my reply:

_______ and I are currently using PLC time to work through the new Big Idea in 2D, and make sure our assessments match the Essential Questions for each unit.   I guess our goal is to have common assessments that we are comfortable with that focus on the Essential Questions and have a Big Idea that we can work with.

I hesitate to call this a Professional Learning Community, because I'm not sure what it is we are learning or that 2 people make a community.  I am disappointed that we do not have a clearer focus and I feel that we are on the same path we were on 4 years ago.  

I am also sad that no one else expressed interest in the book The Big Six, as I thought for sure that could be a unifying focus for history. ______ had told me she was willing to read it when I first mentioned it the first week of PLC. [Another colleague] didn't respond to the email about the book because she [is still working on a project in a different PLC], but she thinks she will be done by the next PLC time.  She is interested in reading the book, whether in a group or on her own. I was so sure this was would happen that I actually put it down on my ALP for my department goal.  

Lisa Unger

My concern was (is) that we are changing things simply because we have been given the time to work on something, and we don’t know what else to do.  The big idea and essential questions we have developed are not that much of a change from what we had before, and are not getting us better results.  I had previously suggested that we spend PLC time studying the book The Big Six to help us learn about teaching disciplinary skills in history.  I thought this would help us focus on our learning in our Professional Learning Community.  This had gone nowhere.  The response I got from my email was basically to stay the course.  That it was better to have 2 people making decision about a course than 5 so that something could be accomplished and that we are great teachers and will come up with something that everyone could use.

This past Friday we had Steven Katz as a guest speaker for our PD day.  He spoke about the importance of learning in a professional learning community.  Here are a few of my tweets from the session:

I really appreciated his message, and felt it fit really well with where I was in my PLC journey.  My challenge is figuring out how to make that learning happen.  I recognize that not everyone is in the same place in their journey.  One of my problems is getting to the “learning conversation” rather than “great discussions.”  In my PLC I have a problem with what Katz called being “superfice” (his word - cross between superficial and nice).

Our PLC has changed the Big Idea and Essential questions for each unit.  We keep playing with trying to come up with the ‘right question’ to ask grade 10 students that they can answer using evidence well. I feel like we are on a hamster wheel - we keep going around and around, but don’t get anywhere.  I think we need to figure out (i.e. learn) how to get students to use evidence better.  I am not convinced that it is about finding the exact right question as much as it is about increasing their skills with using primary sources or other evidence.  I just don’t know how to get off the hamster wheel to do this.

Read&Write for Google part two

The following was originally written for my school's staff newsletter (Bear Essentials), but was never published there.

Previously, I wrote about using Texthelp as a marking/feedback tool. You can refer to it here.

This time I’d like to share with you how to use Texthelp as a tool to annotate .pdf files.

If you have a .pdf in your Drive (you can save .pdf files in your Drive without converting them to google), right click on the document, choose “Open With”, then select “Read&Write for Google.”  This will open your document with Read&Write capabilities.  

By selecting text, you have access to highlighting tools (4 different colours), dictionary, fact finder, translation, and picture dictionary.  If highlighting is used, you can collect all highlights as a separate google doc if you want. Selecting text only works if the text in your .pdf is recognized as text, and your .pdf doesn’t act like an image.

There are 2 different ways of creating notes on your .pdf as well.  You can choose the T at the top of the screen and it will allow you to choose a place within the .pdf to type your own note.  That note will stay there, on the .pdf (you can relocate it or delete it, but it’s right on the document). If you print your document from Read&Write, your notes will appear on the printed page. Or you can choose the thumbtack with the comment looking box beside it and place a thumbtack on your document.  You can then type your annotation in a box that will disappear from the document, unless you click the thumbtack to open it. These will not appear if you print your document.

I was a little concerned that I didn’t see a save button.  I didn’t know if I had permanently changed my .pdfs or not.  (Since I was randomly playing, and I didn’t know if I wanted them permanently changed or not, I was kind of scared.)  I discovered if I close the .pdf and reopen it not in “Read&Write for Google” I still have my originals with no notes.  If I re-open the .pdf with “Read&Write for Google” all my notes, highlights and thumbtacks are still there. You can also share the document in Read&Write for Google with someone else and they will be able to see your comments/notes.

I just started playing with this.  It was relatively easy.  I’d be glad to help you play if you want.  I’d also be interested in feedback if you use it.  How can you or your students use this?  If you share .pdfs with students for notetaking purposes, can this help them take notes on line? Can you see this being useful as a research tool?

Read&Write for Google part one.

The following was first written for my school's staff newsletter (Bear Essentials) May 30, 2014. Bracketed and italics have been added after publication in Bear Essentials.

Have you enabled Texthelp in your ugcloud account?  If you have, you see a gold and green pull down tab at the top of your documents.  Or maybe it is already pulled down and covering your document title - you can click the little up arrows and make it almost disappear.  But don’t do that, because I want to talk to you about how useful it can be.

(If you are not part of UGDSB, Texthelp, also known as Read&Write for Google is a Google app you can add to your account through the chrome store.)

If you are familiar with it, chances are you are in special ed and are using it as a text reader with some of our students.  It is a replacement for kurzweil in some cases.  It works for text documents, webpages and .pdfs if they are opened through Drive.

But it can do so much more.  There are 4 highlighters that you can use, much faster and simpler than using the highlight tool in the menu bar across the top of your document page.  There is also a button that will collect your highlights and collate them in another document.  There are a number of reasons both teachers and students might find this useful. The following ideas come from Rebecca Grimes (@glblcanuck), a fellow teacher in UGDSB.  

Ideas for Teacher Use in the Classroom

• Teachers could use the highlight tool to provide visual feedback --> provide students with a legend of what the colours mean, then just highlight the common errors without having to write the same comment over and over again (ie: verb tense = pink, sentence structure = yellow, missing citation = green)  If you make the legend consistent in your class or department it will be easy for you and your students.

• You could then use the "Collect" option to create a list of sample errors you could use with the class quickly and easily.

Ideas for Student Use in the Classroom:

• In Language classes, students could use the different colour to identify required language components in assignments.

• Students could use a colour to identify the facts that they've included in their assignment.
• Similarly, based on the business department’s self-evalution, they could use the different colours to demonstrate where they’ve met the requirement for the assignment.

• In English, students could identify quotations used in their essays.  (Use a different colour for each book if doing a comparative essay or, one colour for quotations from the novel and another colour for quotations from secondary sources.)

• Students could use the "Collect Highlights" feature to collate the highlighted information into an overview document that they could then share with their teacher.  

• For study purposes in any subject, students could highlight their notes and then export their highlights to create a page of key facts / ideas / etc to study.

Rebecca’s original blog post can be found at http://mllegrimes.blogspot.ca/2014/04/improving-feedback-and-student-self.html