Educators! How are you using tech to plan, organize and run your classes?

Getting my students to watch video screencasts is a challenge for me too. On one level I understand – I hate watching and hearing myself in them. =8-0

One thing I’ve done that has worked is to offer some small extra credit projects that I only give directions for through the videos. Once my students hear from someone else that they missed something they see as important (though really the small amount of points makes no difference in most students’ grades) they start making sure to watch all the way through. I reinforce this by doing it again every few weeks.

Something else that helped was having the technology support office on campus caption each video. It’s done for disabled student accessibility and is great for a lot of students. There’s something about them being able to read the words I’m saying as they watch that some students say helps them focus better.

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I too make videos for my students and I think the key is shorter is better! I obviously do not know how long your videos are, but hopefully, they don’t reflect a whole lecture. (I’m sure we’ll wade into educational philosophies here soon lol). I try and keep it 10 minutes or less. You could cover many topics in one lecture, so just break it down into separate videos. We have such short attention spans (hello 6-second vine videos) that a whole recorded lecture is torturous.

I also think of @MacSparky’s draft videos. He could cover all of those in one long lecture, but it’s broken down into bite-sized chunks. Create a playlist with your class videos and then let kids go through what they want to, trust that they will (a huge part of a flipped classroom) and make it interesting.

This isn’t directed specifically at you @anneperez, just happened to be the comment that spurred my interest. Also, good call on the captions! They can be done for so cheap (or free in your case (yay higher ed)).

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@Jeremy :slight_smile: You’re so right about video length. I’ve never done them full lecture length, but confess they have been up to 20 minutes. I’m trying to keep them under 15 but your comments make me think I should break them up more. A friend of mine says her trick is having her face on the screen part of the time, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to do that… yet.

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I was education for a short time. I am an engineer. I spent 17 years with the US space program, switched to education, teaching chemistry, physics, and engineering, for 3 years, before coming back to engineering. However, I am still very involved with STEM initiatives in the community and my own children’s schooling. :slight_smile:

Your planning will come down to your school, district, and/or state requirements. I taught 2 years in a private school in Texas. My lessons plans were turned in weekly, but they were in a very brief table format. the administrator just wanted known the general direction of the week in case parents called, or students had missed class. However, I taught in a public school for a year in Tennessee. While the school didn’t require the lesson plans to be turned in on a regular basis, you were required by the state to turn in a detailed lesson plans on the day you had a surprise evaluation. I used Excel and/or Word for the lesson plans.

The private school I taught in used the Google Education Suite for its backbone, but used WhippleHill (now BlackBaud) as the LMS. (As an aside the only LMS worse than WhippleHill is Blackboard.) I therefore used the Google suite quite a bit. I also used iWork quite a bit since the students and teachers all had MacBook Airs issued to them, thank goodness!

My students loved Kahoot! for fun quiz games for unit reviews and final exam preparation. They loved the competitive nature of the site/program, and it got pretty heated sometimes. :slight_smile:

I used Quizizz.com to create tests and quizzes. It allows you to create multiple choice, short answer, true/false questions, which is nice. What I like about Quizizz the most is the ability to randomize both the question order and the answer order (with multiple choice questions.) This was very handy since my students sat pretty close together at their computer workstations (public school). It was harder to copy one another even in the close quarters.

Have you tried a service like https://edpuzzle.com for your video assignments? It might be perfect for what you are trying to do. Using a video from YouTube or other video hosting sites you can embed questions that pop up and pause the video until the student answers the question. They can’t fast forward past the questions. You then get a report of the student answers as well as a list of their time viewing the video. Although this doesn’t allow for background listening it does make it impossible for students to skip out on the watching of the assigned video without your knowledge. I haven’t spent a great deal of time with the service but I recall that you can create all sorts of questions such as multiple choice and short answer.

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This sounds like an interesting idea. Thanks!

Interesting file structure, I’ll have to look into something of the sort. @GraemeS what’s the script for focused individual feedback? I like that too you can use the data to see what students struggled with, data can be hard to use properly and I’d imagine you’ve made it simple.

I’ll see if I can share it during the week.
We have a spreadsheet with questions numbers and marks. For each section of a question we attribute the topic and a skill (eg recall, calculation etc).
We then enter each student’s marks in the table.

The useful part is a second tab that has a template for what we want to feedback to students. The script simply cycles through the students and saves rhe tab as a pdf, which is what we give to students.

Linking everything together is just done by including student emails in every list (they are unique) and Google’s wonderful ImportRange and Filter formulae (or by script).

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I’d imagine for instance in a math class this could be done too by which content standard or skill set they might be having trouble with. Even as a former history teacher and soon to be SPED teacher this would be useful as well.

Here’s a link to our Question Level Analysis spreadsheet. Feel free to use or adapt it if you want, but obviously I can’t offer much support and if you do improve it, let me know.
The front tab tries to walk you through the steps necessary, and it has a link to an instructional video on Youtube.

Oh, and it requires permissions to manage your files in Google Drive to do its stuff; it doesn’t touch any files except itself and creating a folder it can then put pdfs in, but as with all files you get online, treat it with caution and I’m not liable.

Lastly, a hack I have implemented yet: Resizing a blank column on the report tab to be wide will shrink the sheet down for printing as it uses ‘fit to width’. This allows for longer tables.

It’s been a while for this thread but I figured I’d ask a question or two.

I’ll be starting a new job as a SPED teacher with curriculum provided. How do you decide on new tech to use or implement? Should I keep a list of stuff I could automate or things I’m struggling with and then see if any tech tools could solve them?

Also what new tech have you been using?

Quick question for educators in this post:

  • I want to set up an easy to log my students behaviour and progress, e.g. how many times did they NOT do their homework, hand-in assignments, have their hand up in class, was late, talk in class when they shouldn’t.

I was thinking about doing an Excel-sheet and then log it easily and fast after every class and then do a new sheet for next week.

But I really dislike Excel-sheets. So does anyone know of a better way, a dedicated app or something like that?

THANKS

Depending on the number of items you need to keep track of for each student, you might explore setting up a Google Form for that.

If it’s just a couple of items per student, you could set up a form for the whole class. If there are a lot, maybe one form per student.

The nice thing about Google Forms is you can see a summary of responses in chart format, but if you need or want the data in spreadsheet format (it sounds like you don’t!), you can also have that.

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I use iDoceo for these purposes, and also from the same company GradeScanner for grading exams.

It has a really pleasant interface and it’s easy to import (i.e. class lists) and export the data. Statistics on attendance and performance are generated automatically and the grade sheets are highly configurable.

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How have you set it up?

I do all my attendances directly in iDoceo and when grading I have columns for every assignment. I also have a column for participation where I can note any good or bad things about students. I use contrasting colours to make it obvious when students do not submit and use weighted columns to calculate final grades.

For readability, I find the use of colours essential, so different types of assessments stand out.

There is an example included with the app that shows best practices in terms of layout, but it’s really configurable so you can pretty much record any information you want about the students.

I don’t use the scheduling functionality because I do not manage my own schedule, I get it in a published calendar that admin staff update for me. If you do manage your calendar, it could also be useful.

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Thanks Rob!

Would you say that iDoceo is the best resource for teachers on the App Store?

I was thinking along the same lines, but with an Airtable base rather than a Google Form. There’s a form view option in Airtable.

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I haven’t played with Airtable. I should probably have a look at it sometime.

For tracking simple behaviour such as that, all you need is a logger.

One option would be a Numbers sheet with the students’ names and a column for each behaviour. I say Numbers because you can attach a stepper to cells, allowing you to update info by clicking up and down rather than typing.

Another is iDoceo, which several teachers at my school have used for many years and still love it. I used to use it, but then made my own app as I like things done to my own specifications.

My app, Working Class, is much simpler but has a couple of nice features including six behavioural counters for tracking things and a random picker. To be honest, since my school moved to Google I’ve focused on automating things through Classroom and Sheets so I didn’t use my own app last academic year, but I’m happy to send you a promo code if you want to try it.

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