Instructional Technology Update Andover High School Week Of March 31st-April 4th Google Groups & Forms

This week was a great week of working with teachers implementing a range of Google tools for collaborating with students and collecting responses.

The first teacher I worked with was Adriana Gonzalez. I have worked with Adriana on a range of projects during the school year which  integrated technology in her Spanish classroom. In this session we created some Google Forms which will be quizzes she can use across her classes and decrease the amount of time she will need to grade her traditionally assigned quizzes by doing them online. We worked together to create the forms and make simple reusable links to share easily and edit the quizzes for each class.  It took us only about 2 short half hour sessions to get her up and running with her quizzes and she will definitely be saving time in the assessment process moving forward. Each time we work together we are able to make her classroom more web based and easier to access online materials.

Social Studies teacher Lauren Ream was looking for a way to easily have students comment in a web based thread on specific subjects in her Western Civilization course. Lauren and I have already been working on a blog and adding more web based resources to add to her ability to share with her students more easily.

In just a short 1 hour period I was able to work with Lauren and her students to provide them access to creating a Google Group. Access for students was made more easily since students had provided their emails at an earlier time and they could easily be sent the invite. The benefits of creating a Google Group are that you can keep an exclusive or open group in which you can add comments to student posts or post discussion topics. Students add to the topics and create a stream of activity. The group can also be shared with a simple link. Emails can also be sent directly to the group as well.

Mrs. Ream used the Group to enable students to comment on specific classroom topics and to share perspectives. The link form the conversations can also be added to her current blog for revisiting at a later time.

I think from an integration standpoint Google Groups are a great place to start using a web based tool as you can commit to it on any level within your classroom. You can use it for just one assignment or use it for an entire course. Additionally those who are in the group are notified when a post or comment is made in the group. I feel as though this adds the element of being connected to the classroom.

This week I was also able to continue working with Art teacher Teresa Consentino on the development of her blog for her Art Foundations course. This week we worked at getting her older lessons created into PDF form on the scanner and adding the to her Blogger Blog. Creating her blog has been a process of selecting the most important lessons and what will work best being put online. With art it is also a challenge to choose art pieces which reflect a high quality of work and those which show the concrete concepts. We are working to develop her unit on 2 and 3 Dimensional Perspective Drawing. This process has been rewarding as it is a real model of transforming exciting art concepts into web based lessons and easy to navigate links.

On Thursday I had the opportunity to be a Judge at the West Middle School Science Fair. This was a great experience as I got to meet the students and find out more about their projects and what drove their scientific investigation. I spoke with students who did projects related to insulation efficiency,beach erosion and even the strength of spider webs.

I think a great component built into this fair was the integration of the "Green" projects. This really helped students choose to look into environmental issues in their science project and try to solve them. As an Instructional Technology Specialist it was great to visit and view the perspective of the students and their technology,engineering and science integration into their projects.

An Overview Of Google Drive With Sample Projects & Directions For Sharing Preferences

The following document provides an overview of the use of Google Drive for the creation of Documents,Spreadsheets,Forms and Presentations. I have embedded the document for easy viewing from my Google Drive. The direct link for this document is here.

This document includes links to link shorteners and also information on how to use and integrate the scripts for Flubaroo and Doctopus. These scripts enable the grading of Goggle documents and also how to create a classroom learning management by organizing the delivery of documents to students. At the bottom of the document is a link to a written tutorial which walks you through creating your Google Document and setting the sharing preferences.

Learn How To Grade Google Form Test & Quizzes Automatically with Flubaroo Script (sample videos to help) !

As an instructional technologist one of most interesting tools that I've been able to share with other teachers this year is Flubaroo which allows us to now be able to grade our Google Forms tests and quizzes automatically with the use of an additional script added to the application. This can be a great time saver and may provide a new way for doing assesment both in and out of class.

Flubaroo Helps:

• Quickly Grade Google Form Quizzes & Tests With Percentage Values
• Email the Grades & Correct Answers
• View A Graphic Spreadsheet of Student Performance
• View Student Performance on the Most Difficult Questions

Google forms have long been a great way to assess students knowledge on subjects or to collect data related to any variety of the subject. Now with the addition of a specific script you can add an answer key which will automatically go through all of the collected answers and provide an actual percentage grade for every different submission that is added to the form.

In order to successfully use Flubaroo you need to have created your test or quiz have a prepared answer key. You and also will need to know how to add the Flubaroo script into the application. The benefits of this application are great time savings as you no longer have to go to each students grades in order to grade them individually. Watch the videos in completion to get all the details before starting. I have walked through all the critical components in these videos.

Watch These 2 Videos To Learn How!

Video 1: Creating The Form



Video 2: Adding The Script and Viewing Results

Integrating Google Docs Into The French Foreign Language Classroom-Andover High School Instructional Technology

Editing the document collaboratively.

I recently had the opportunity to assist a French teacher with introducing Google Docs for creating a survey in his French classroom. Prior to me coming to his classroom and working with his students  we discussed how we could use Google Docs so that students could share surveys that they create in French with each other easily and streamline the process of having availability all of the surveys available on the web organized by class. This teacher was very open to the different possibilities of using Google Docs for integrating these surveys in his classroom. 

Foreign Language Lab

Prior to me coming to his classroom the students typed up the surveys in Word document format. To assist this teacher I came into the classroom to coteach and show the students how to create a Google form and how to edit the different types of questions and explain how they had many options. Students learned how to create a form, change the name of the form as well as choose a template for the appearance. Even though I knew Google Docs to be very popular tool amongst high school students I was very surprised that many had not created a form before. The students did a great job working within the Google interface and the options for forms is very intuitive and allows them to choose the different types of questions(multiple choice,text,paragraph,checkboxes,choose from a list). Form questions also enable for adding help text to each question and also gave an options for whether or not the question was required or not.

One of the most interesting components of this 

Adding the accent codes.

lesson was teaching students how to add the accent to specific letters in the French language using the American keyboard. We used a webpage with the keyboard shortcuts on the board to assist students with what they needed to type in order to get the accent to show. Many students entered their survey questions in a very expedient way and successfully created their forms. I then was able to show them the live link in which they could then share their form with anyone. I had them copy their link and add it to a document in which I shared with them. Students enjoyed editing the document collaboratively and seeing live the addtion of each survey to the shared document. The final document had all of their surveys links and names on it. I shortened this link and made it so the French teacher could then share these surveys with another class in France to comlete so that the American students could review the responses. 

The students in this class were now easily able to share their surveys with each other and were able to practice creating them using a tool which was intuitive and allowed them to create a variety of questions(multiple choice,text,paragraph,checkboxes,drop down,grid,choose from a list,scale). The sharing feature is valuable in that a variety of settings can be set once and editing by different people can be controlled. The person who created the form or anyone else can edit or not based on the settings. The form can be made available to the public or kept private. Google enables specific editing features for each document created. 

The opportunity to use the language lab was a great benefit to this group of students. This lesson could be done in any computer lab or classroom which has internet access. Google Docs provides a great free way to create surveys or web-based forms in which you can collect data about a variety of subjects. It is very user-friendly and with just a few simple steps can be applied to almost any classroom. It can be used to help with assessment by creating test or quizzes or even in a flipped classroom model so that students can answer questions at home and then have a discussion about them when they get to school.