Should students be allowed to play video games at school? Absolutely- if they are playing Minecraft in Joel Solomon's technology classes at Village East Elementary or with the Minecraft Club at Thunder Ridge Middle School with Cary Joice and Justin Cantrell. These educators have leveraged student interest in gaming and use MinecraftEdu as a way to use to reinforce the teaching of standards. They focus not only on 21st Century Skills like collaboration, communication, and digital citizenship, but also on standards for core subject areas such as math, science, social studies and language arts. Check out the video below to learn more about Minecraft and using MinecraftEdu in the classroom.
We've got you covered! The Office of Instructional Technology provides Tuesday Tech Tips aimed at providing teachers with ideas and support to thoughtfully integrate and utilize technology in their instruction to maximize student learning. So, in case you missed these past posts, we wanted to share our top 5 favorite blog posts (in no particular order):
Office of Instructional Technology Top 5 Blogs:
Creating Thinking Maps in Google Drawings Check out the Google Template Gallery for access to Thinking Maps for you and your students. This could be a great link to include in Schoology as well.
Using Schoology with Google Drive Did you know that students can create content right inside of Schoology that also lives in their Google Drive? This blog post is all about working smarter, not harder.
Embedding Quizlet into Schoology
Quizlet is a fantastic site for your students to interact with vocabulary and content. Check out this blog to see how you can create a deck of flashcards and embed them right into Schoology.
Embedding Google Presentations into Schoology Assessments Are you wanting to provide your students with opportunities to analyze multiple sources from diverse media and formats? If so, check out this blog and the templates provided.
Differentiation using grading groups in COLE 3.0/Schoology Are you looking for a way to differentiate your content, the process or product? Schoology makes it pretty easy set up grading groups to meet the needs of your diverse learners.
Most computers and all current mobile devices today have built-in microphones, and one of the things you can leverage in Chome is voice search and actions. Giving students the option to speak into the computer for searching or other activities (and hear a verbal response) could add a new dimension for learning, especially for students with accommodations, younger students who aren't yet proficient at the keyboard, students who are not native speakers, or students who just need another method of input.
For those who have used Siri on an iOS device, Chrome gives you similar functionality in a browser. When you are in the basic Google search page in Chrome, look for the voice search icon, which looks like a microphone. Clicking on it will activate your computer's microphone, and you can speak your search or action terms into the microphone (you may need to "allow" Chrome to access your computer's microphone). You can also set it to speak the results of your search (see more info here).
So what types of things can you ask? You can ask questions about trivia, the weather, sports, mathematical computations, events, translation, etc. Google also recently released the beta extension for Google's Voice Search Hotword for Chrome. This just listens for the phrase "OK, Google" and it initiates a voice search without having to click on the microphone icon. You can get more information here or watch the video below:
While not extensive, voice search isn't limited only to Google Search. One of our district-wide resources (Encyclopedia Britannica) also lets you use the microphone icon to speak in your search terms.
If you have a mobile device, you can also install Google Now (available for both Android & iOS). In addition to voice search, Google Now also can give directions, alert you to flight changes, and it even suggests departure times for a Google calendar event based on current traffic.
While not yet a replacement for a fully-featured speech-to-text program like Dragon, voice search & actions could be a very useful tool for students using Chome & Chromebooks.
One strategy that we often use in the classroom for differentiation purposes is grouping, ideally in a flexible and dynamic way (Heacox, 86-90). Teachers have different ways of accomplishing this in the face-to-face classroom environment, but we also need to consider how to best utilize groups for differentiation in our online or digital classroom environments as well.
When using COLE 3.0/Schoology, this strategy can be employed using what Schoology calls "grading groups." In the "Members" area of any course, you'll see an area on the right hand side of the screen for "Grading Groups."
You can create as many groups as you want, and students can be in more than 1 group to allow for flexibility. Upon creating a group, you will see a list of students in your course. Clicking on the student names will add them to the group. If you need to edit the group after it's been created (like if you need to add new students), you can edit the group using the settings wheel pull-down.
Once groups are created, you can really start to differentiate the content in your course and do progress monitoring, either on an individual or group level.
When making an assignment, an assessment, or a discussion board look for the icon that looks like 3 dots in the triangle -- it's the tool that allows you to assign something to a specific student or to a grading group. Students in that group will see the item while others will not. If you create different assignments for different groups, COLE 3.0/Schoology will create each assignment in the gradebook for you.
And, speaking of the gradebook, creating grading groups also allows you to filter your gradebook assignments to see how different groups are doing on assignments. Using the pull-down where it says "All users" will let you choose to view only certain students in a group. If, for example, you have students who need accommodations due to a 504 or IEP, filtering your gradebook can help you see just that group.
For those schools using PowerSchool's gradebook, you can also create groups in PowerSchool for similar purposes; however, COLE 3.0 and PowerSchool don't communicate with each other in terms of groups. But, if a group assignment is created & graded in COLE 3.0/Schoology and pushed to PowerSchool, it will only record grades for students in that group.
* from Differentiating Instruction in the Regular Classroom, Diane Heacox, 2002
Using audio and video to help students understand or explain concepts or give feedback is something that is being utilized with increasing frequency as technology becomes more widely accessible in our classrooms or even outside of the school building. In addition, the inclusion of speaking & listening skills in the CAS for English Language Arts means that we should be providing multiple opportunities for students to practice these skills, both in face-to-face and digital learning environments. If you wanted to record your own audio or video (or wanted students to have that ability), you can use COLE 3.0/Schoology to do so.
COLE 3.0./Schoology has its own built-in tool for recording directly into the system, and it's available for almost anything you want to create. For example, when creating an update, you'll see a microphone icon, which lets you either record audio or video into your update.
You'll see that icon in a variety of activities, including assignments, test/quiz directions, test/quiz questions, and discussion boards. This means that you could record an audio or video version of your directions or questions for students who need audio in addition to written instructions or directions (and it's a great tool for students who are just learning to read).
Students can also record directly into the system, either in response to discussion board topic or as part of an assignment or quiz. They will see the same icon when that option is available, and they can either choose audio or video. Giving students a choice in how they respond best is a great way to differentiate how kids can show what they know.
Finally, teachers can also give audio feedback to students who submit an assignment digitally into COLE 3.0/Schoology. In the assignment dropbox area, you'll see a way to add audio or video comments as a feedback method. Clicking on the microphone icon will work in the same way as it does for other items in the system: you can choose video or audio.
Keep in mind that audio responses are limited to 11 minutes and video responses are limited to 10 minutes. If you find that those times are not sufficient, you may want to explore another web-based option that you can embed into your Schoology items or create something on the computer and upload the file (.mp4 is best for video, .mp3 for audio). As long as the files are smaller than 512MB, you can upload them into COLE 3.0/Schoology.
