Want to Learn to Code?

Coding for the Masses:

Many of you have probably already been exposed to the code.org movement. Code.org is a not for profit organization dedicated to growing computer programming education. They have received a lot of attention in the past year with high profile celebrities giving testimonials and a splash of media exposure. If you haven't checked out the video on their site I highly recommend you do. I'm very interested in hearing your thoughts on the ideas presented in the video.

During the month of June, Connectedlearning.tv will be presenting a four part series of webinars titled "Coding is for Everybody: Learning through Creating, Personalizing, Sharing, and Reflecting with Scratch". The full description of the webinar series can be found on their site but here is a small excerpt: 

"Many people view computer programming as a narrow technical skill, useful only for a small subset of the population. But coding can be for everyone, enabling people with diverse interests to develop new strategies for thinking, learning, and expressing themselves." 

The live webinars run on June 3rd, 10th, 17th, and 24th. The agenda and topics are on the site. They post their recorded webinars shortly after they are completed so if you can't make the live broadcast you can always watch it later. I'm planning to watch all four parts of the series and would love to sit down with anybody else who watched it and discuss the ideas presented in them. 

Happy Coding,

Ryan Archer 

Note from Lara: For the last couple of years we have taught Scratch in grades 4 and 6 here at the Prep and this year we began an optional Scratch Club. Scratch has been a part of our computer image for years - check it out!

Online Student Response Systems

A few weeks ago we talked about using Google Forms for formative assessments or surveys.

Here are two more online tools that teachers can use to collect information on the fly. These tools work well on both tablets and laptops and all responses are anonymous. If you want to track individual responses, your best bet is to design your own Google Form.

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Socrative

"Take a snapshot of student thinking through real time formative assessment. It's super easy to gather responses and get whole class participation. Just choose your question type, ask a question, and wait for responses."

Socrative is an online student response system that allows teachers to construct their own online quizzes and see student responses immediately. If you don't have the time to design the quiz ahead of time, you can ask the questions orally in class and have students respond online. You can then discuss their results immediately. Multiple choice, true/false and short answer questions are all possible.

What do you need to do? Sign up for an account at socrative.com. When setting up your account, you will choose a room number. This room number is all the students need to connect to you to complete your quizzes or provide feedback. See the video below for an example of how it works.

Poll Everywhere

Poll Everywhere is primarily designed to allow students to text their responses to a poll or quiz and have their responses displayed immediately. Responding via a website is possible too, so this tool will work quite nicely in our one-to-one environment.

With Poll Everywhere, you can create your quiz with multiple choice or open-ended questions and receive feedback immediately as students complete the quiz.

What do you need to do? Sign up for an account at polleverywhere.com. Since we will want our students to respond by using a web interface instead of texting, you will want to reserve your own polling response page at http://www.polleverywhere.com/my/pollev. Once you set that up, your students can go to a fixed site (like http://www.pollev.com/msbarclay) to enter responses to any poll you run. At any time you can launch a poll and then clear your response results and start again. See the video below to see how it works.

As always, if you would like to try out either of these tools, just let Sarah or Lara know!

Tips and Tricks for Sharing Folders in Google Drive

It’s Tech Tuesday and up this week is Google Drive and the ins and outs of sharing folders.

Google Drive allows you to create and share individual documents, forms, presentations, spreadsheets and drawings. Google Drive will also allow you to upload other documents and files (even videos). In turn you can organize your files and documents into folders.

Like individual documents, folders may be shared with others. This allows everyone with whom you share the folder to view it’s contents (regardless of the sharing permissions on the documents within the folder). Conveniently, whenever you add a new document to the folder, everyone with whom the folder is shared will be able to access the new document as well.

Some Ways to Use Shared Folders

So, how could you use shared folders in your class?

You could create a folder for your class and share it with students to distribute assignments to students by just adding new content to the folder. This could be a great way to share assignment descriptions, templates that you want students to use, checklists/ guidelines/ rubrics, videos uploaded to your Drive, or other reference materials.

Shared folders can also be created by heads of departments or meeting organizers and all Agendas and relevant documents could be housed in them and regularly updated for everyone with access.

These could even be used to replace what you currently store in your Groups folders on the school network thereby giving access from anywhere.

How to share a folder (from The Paperless Classroom )

1. To share a folder, first click on the folder name on the left side of your Drive screen.
2. Now click the down-arrow to the right of the folder name, or right-click on the folder name.
3. From the drop-down (or pop-up) menu choose “Share...” and then “Share...” again.

1. This will open the “Sharing settings” window.
2. Now share with people or email groups and change the privacy settings by giving rights to view, comment, or edit.
3. Note: When sharing folders there is one extra permission setting for editors. By default editors of a folder are also allowed to add new people to the folder and to change the permissions on the folder.
4. If you do not want editors to have these rights, then click “Change” at the bottom of the “Sharing Settings” window.

5. Now select the option for “Only the owner can change the permissions.” and then click “Save”.

6. When you have finished sharing the folder, the folder will show up for the users under “Shared with me” on the left side of their Google Drive screen

A few words of caution:

CC Licensed (BY) by Highways Agency's flickr photostream

1. When you share a folder with someone, they have access to whatever is in the folder. If you move a file or document out of the folder, they will no longer see the document or have access to it.
2. Shared users may move an entire shared folder to their “My Drive” and everything within the folder will remain visible to them. However, if a user moves an individual file or subfolder from the shared folder into their “My Drive”, that file or subfolder will disappear for everyone who previously had access to it. The user will receive a warning and also have a chance to undo this but it is best to not move anything that has been shared with you.

Some Tips:

CC Licensed (BY-NC)
by Will Hastings' flickr photostream

1. To add a file to more than one folder from your "My Drive", for example if you wanted to share the same document with multiple classes, hold the ⌘ command key and select multiple folders.
2. If you set the permissions on folders that you share with others to 'Can view' access then no one with whom you share the folder can remove or add files. This is the safest way to ensure someone doesn’t add or remove content from a shared folder. This is probably the best way to share reference documents with students.
3. Instruct students to not drag files or subfolder folders that are already in a Shared folder to 'My Drive' because it will remove it from the shared folder for everyone with whom it is shared.

Want to Know More?

For more information on how to use folders to share handouts or as a turn-in folder, see The Paperless Classroom document created by North Canton City Schools.

Remember, you might want to have students use a form to turn in assignments. Using a form, they could give you their name, the name of the assignment and the URL of their assignment. This will help you manage work turned in because you will be able to see the timestamps on all assignments and access each assignment from a single spreadsheet. In turn, you can use this same spreadsheet to grade the assignment. For those of you who are interested, this process can be automated through the use of Doctopus.

One suggestion for a Google Classroom Model includes setting up the following three folders for each class: Class Edit, Class View, and individual student Dropboxes.

For example, if you taught 2 classes: video and computer apps, then your folder structure might look as follows:

Class Edit ~ Files in this folder are created by the teacher and are editable by everyone in the class e.g. group assignments

Class View ~ Files in this folder are created by the teacher and are only viewable by everyone in the class e.g. syllabus, templates

Student Dropboxes ~ Files in this folder are created by students and shared only between the teacher and the particular student. e.g. handing in homework

Formative Assessment can be provided directly on student Google documents through the use of comments within the page. Teachers and students can choose to be notified via email when new comments are added or view them as a stream within the document itself.

There are several tools such as gClassFolders that you can use to create these automatically. That might be best to tackle in another blog post...

Want Help?

If you would like any help creating, organizing or sharing folders please feel free to ask.

Happy Googling,

Lara

Google Calendar and Tasks - Keeping Our Students Organized

These tools will be the online replacement of the paper-based agenda for our Form 6 and 7 students next year. Teachers will need to model use of these tools so that students see them being used daily. Sarah, Lara and Kathryn will be around to help with this process throughout September. 

In preparation for next year, Sarah has been putting together a reference website for the students, but much of the material on this site is relevant for our teachers as well. If you aren't all that comfortable with using Google Calendar or the Google Task List, please watch this tutorial that Kathryn has put together. For Form 6 and 7 advisers, consider watching this during the first week of school as a whole class.

As always, if you would like to sit down and learn more about Google Calendar or Tasks, let us know. Sarah and Lara are always happy to help.

Google Forms in the Classroom

In Google Drive you can not only create documents but also presentations, spreadsheets, forms and drawings.

We would like to point out how Google Forms can be used in an educational setting. Google Forms are very user-friendly and allow you to easily send surveys and gather information from students or record your own data. When you (or whoever you share the form with) fill it in, the owner of the form can receive all the responses in a spreadsheet. This makes it easy to view all responses in one place, summarize the data as a graph or even use other plug-ins to “grade” the responses.

To better understand how Google Forms work:

• click here to view a form - please fill it in so that we can gather some data
• click here to view a summary of the responses - this can be set for respondents to see or only for your eyes
• click here to view how data can be presented in a spreadsheet after a form is completed

Forms allow you to ask a variety of questions:

• Text - short answers
• Paragraph text - longer answers
• Multiple choice
• Checkboxes - tick multiple options
• Choose from a list - choose one option from a dropdown menu
• Scale - rank using a scale of numbers (e.g., from 1 to 5)
• Grid — respondents select a point from a two-dimensional grid

There are several websites and blogs that describe many examples of how forms can be used in education. Here are just a few:

1. Tom Barrett has a collaborative list of 80+ Interesting Ways to Use Google Forms in the Classroom that you can peruse as well as add to.

2. Mr. Sapia, describes how he uses Forms in his own classroom in his blogpost about “A ‘Semi-Paperless’ Classroom Using Google Forms and Edmodo”

3. This ed tech website describes how to use Google Forms as an In Box. Students can submit online work to you using a Form so that you can access all student submissions for an assignment in one spreadsheet.

4. On Kern Kelley’s website you can find examples of Google Form Templates that you can download to your Google Drive and use.

5. Molly Schroeder has a brief slideshow about how Google Forms work and then, below the slideshow, links to several examples of educational forms.

6. Flubaroo is a tool that you can use together with Google Forms to automatically grade Forms as students complete them.

If you would like some help getting started with Google Forms before the end of this year (maybe for exam review or a math unit on data handling or literacy assessments?) please don’t hesitate to let Sarah or Lara know and we’ll find a time to meet with you to help.

Update May 15, 2013: Images can now be embedded in Google Forms. Click the down arrow next to "Add Item"--- and images is now an option. (You can also find it in the "Insert" menu). View a sample here.