Using videos to create complete lessons

If you are interested in flipping your classroom (where students watch the lecture at home and do the work in the classroom), you may be assigning videos as homework. There are a number of tools that let you modify your own videos (or videos from YouTube, Khan Academy and lots of other places) to get better information about how students are interacting with and learning from what they're watching. Two easy-to-use tools are EdPuzzle and Zaption. Both let you crop a video, add your voice and embed quizzes at specific parts of the video for student response. You can also view analytics (student quiz results, time spent on the videos, etc.) for each.

With EdPuzzle, you can log in with your GAFE account, and select a video from wherever you want. Then you crop it to use only the part you like. You can add a vocal overlay, or you can add audio notes (like text notes). You can also add as many embedded quizzes as you like, with open-ended questions, multiple choice, or "comments". EdPuzzle also allows you to set up classes (like Google Classroom) where you can see data on who viewed the video and how they did. Students do need to have an account to join a class (but they can also log in with their GAFE accounts). You can see an example here, although you'll need to join my class to participate.

Zaption is another tool with much the same functionality. It looks a lot like Google Drive in its interface, so it feels familiar and is pretty easy to use, but is intended for a broader market (EdPuzzle seems primarily for education). Zaption does have the option to add videos to a single lesson, so you can have multiple clips from different sources in the same lesson, which is very useful if you really want to flip your classrooms It also does not require that students join a class -- they can simply follow a link and enter their names. Here's a Zaption sample.

Both have "pro" features, which are paid accounts that can enhance functionality, but you can do most everything you might want with a free option.  Check them both out and see which works for you! This video below does a great side-by-side comparison of the two tools as well.

Google Classroom update

For those of you using Google Classroom to manage and respond to students' assignments, there is a new Classroom app for both iOS and Android, which allows students to view class resources and interact with Classroom from their mobile devices. It's also now on the campus Chromebooks.

Check it out on the App Store for Apple devices or on Google Play for Android. You can also learn more from Google here.

If you want to know more about Google Classroom or other tech tools, please contact the library or sign up for a training here. 

Grading assessments using Google Apps add-ons

One of the challenges of using technology for more formal and informal assessments is managing the grading portion. Even for quick form-driven assessment, grading can be difficult, and giving more meaningful, in-depth feedback can be extremely time-consuming.

Flubaroo is a Google Forms add-on that allows you to automatically grade Google Forms submissions, as either a formative or summative assessment. To get Flubaroo, go to a Google Form, click on add-ons and then go to "get add-ons". Once added, you'll go to add-ons to select and enable it for any form. When you are ready to grade, go to the form's "responses" spreadsheet. Then you can choose "grade assignment" to let Flubaroo work its magic.

You'll select a points value for each of the questions and an "answer key" which is usually the test that you take yourself.

Flubaroo will generate a second tab in the spreadsheet that lists each student's name, contact info, grade received and questions missed. You can even email grades to the students automatically. Pretty quick and easy! Several Homestead teachers are already using Flubaroo for grading Google Forms-based assessments.

For more involved feedback, as with essays and written work, there's Kaizena. Kaizena allows you to give verbal or written feedback on shared documents, grade some or all of student work using a rubric system and link to resources for students that need to re-learn or reinforce key concepts.

Kaizena is automatically enabled for our district; all you have to do is log in. You can create boxes for individual classes or assignments, and students can request feedback by sharing their documents with these boxes. I've included a short tutorial here:

Some teachers here are already using this very effectively. We'll be doing some Kaizena trainings later this year; let me know if you are interested!

Making friends between Google Apps and MS Office

Since most of us still use Microsoft Office for a variety of things, here are a few ways to work with MS Office documents in Google Drive.

Friends foreveer

First, you can convert Office files to Google very easily -- now with one click from a Gmail attachment, or with one click from Google Drive. This gives you the additional benefit of just one document to manage and access from anywhere. Google has upgraded the supported Office formats, so most documents can convert easily (not just MS Word, PowerPoint and Excel).

But sometimes, you want to be able to edit an Office file from within Google Drive without converting it. In order to do this, you'll need to install the Google Office Editor Chrome extension, which you can find here, and be using the new Drive. Once you have this extension, you can double-click on any MS Office document and open it in Office Compatibility Mode to make and save edits in MS Office format.

Of course, you can convert it to Google format at any time as well.

Here's a brief video tutorial of the process, and a link to Google's help page about Office Compatibility Mode as well.

Google Apps training

During October, we held a number of training sessions for various features of Homestead's Google Apps for Education account. If you missed them, you can find the documents here.

Educational technology for Homestead teachers

This blog will be a place to gather and curate all things ed-tech taking place at Homestead High School. Tech updates, new apps or technologies, new ideas and suggestions for integration, best practices, teacher successes, archived information ... we will keep it all here to attempt to build on the knowledge base we already have.