Using Revision History to battle procrastination and cheating

Google Docs has a great tool called Revision History that can help teachers look out for the nefarious issue of cheating and the prosaic but pernicious issue of procrastination.
Revision History lets you click through all the changes in a document, along with a timestamp and the person that made the change. You can restore older versions of a document, or just see what changes or progress has been made (and if any large chunks of text were posted or if any other user made contributions). This can corroborate (or disprove) a student that claims to have been working really hard and but not making progress by demonstrating when they've accessed or modified the document.

It's easy to find.

The revision history is grouped into time periods but can be expanded to see individual changes. 

Eric Curts, a Google Education Trainer, has a more detailed post on avoiding and addressing cheating using Google Apps here: http://www.controlaltachieve.com/2016/01/student-cheating-google-apps.html

Gale Opposing Viewpoints database now at HHS!

If you are not yet using Gale Opposing Viewpoints with your classes for research and curriculum support, you may want to explore it. This is the first year that Homestead has subscribed to this database and it has a number of great features for both teachers and students.

Gale has a wide variety of content, from traditional reference to consumer-driven publications to more than 2000 academic journals.

The content is searchable by level, from easy-access (green) to general audience (yellow) up through academic content (red), which makes it accessible for students at a variety of achievement levels.

The content itself is easy to work with. All articles provide persistent links to content, an audio read-aloud feature, direct download to Google Drive, sharing to Google Classroom and a variety of annotation features. The coolest option is the ability to download annotated articles to Google Drive with the annotations intact.

Please explore this fantastic research tool with your students.