Blog – Page 36 – P-CCSK12 Tech

FREE online PD available between Dec. 13th, 2021 and Jan. 7th, 2022

The Ditch That Textbook Digital Summit hosted by Matt Miller promises valuable knowledge from top innovators AND tips you can implement immediately. All videos — more than 70 — will be available in December and early January. Like any other conference, when it’s over, it’s over and the videos will disappear. Speaker videos last anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour. They’re practical and inspirational, from hand-picked education leaders. Each video is accompanied by a PDF notes page summarizing the message. Download the notes, share, and keep them as long as you want.

To get a flavor for what might be shared, check out some past Ditch Summit Sketchnotes created by Jen Giffen (@virtualgiff) below:

Some of the latest enhancements included with our BrainPOP subscription

Take a peek at some of the latest enhancements included with our BrainPop renewal this year.

IMMERSIVE READER: Level the playing field with more support for students across all reading levels on BrainPOP Quizzes with Microsoft’s Immersive Reader.

Teachers and students using BrainPOP’s Quizzes now see the icon for Immersive Reader. Through features such as read aloud, line focus, translation and grammar markings, as well as the ability to adjust the size, style, and color of the font, learning becomes even more accessible to all students.

MODIFICATION STRATEGIES: Get helpful ideas for adapting BrainPOP tools and features for a variety of contexts and learners.

This modification “chart” features strategies for modifying each BrainPOP tool and feature for varied context and learners. This includes synchronous and asynchronous learning, offline instruction, diverse learners, and language development for ELLs.

The table is organized by a traditional learning arc. This will support teachers and students to use BrainPOP to build background knowledge, practice thinking skills, and assessment or reflection. Download this useful reference for planning lessons and differentiating instruction.

NEW READY-To-GO STANDARDS ALIGNED LESSON PLANS: Looking for ideas about how to use BrainPOP with your students? Click HERE to find top-notch lesson plans from the BrainPOP Educator community. Explore our growing collection of lesson plans or submit your own!

Want to quickly find lesson plans for a specific BrainPOP topic or game? Click the “Lesson Ideas” button that appears on every topic or game page. You can also find a collection of lesson ideas for each topic in the BrainPOP, BrainPOP Jr, GameUp, or, BrainPOP ELL directories that appear in the Lesson Plans menu.

COVER THE LATEST TOPICS: Timely content: Explore 40+ new and enhanced SEL and academic topics including—
COVID-19, Self-Esteem, Graphs, Voting Rights, and more.

Coming Early 2022: Movie Pause Points: Engage students with embedded questions to encourage active viewing and meet more standards.

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As a reminder, all district students, K-12 can access our paid subscription to BrainPop/BrainPop Jr via Clever at https://clever.com/in/pccs

REMC’s December Virtual Courses, earn 10 Free SCECHs

2021 DECEMBER REMC COURSES

Stay warm and learn something new! Take advantage of next month’s courses to learn new skills and tools to enhance your classroom.

December is a great time to learn in an instructor-led virtual course setting. REMC courses offer 10 free SCECHs, and are open to all Michigan school personnel.

Registration deadline is Friday, November 26th. Through the support of REMC SAVE’s vendor partners, all courses are FREE and there are no SCECH fees. You won’t want to miss out on these virtual courses that are a great way for educators to learn, connect, collaborate and grow from the convenience of their home.

Register by Friday, November 26th – Classes Begin Monday, November 29th

If you have questions or need further assistance with your course registration, please contact Erin Rommeck, REMC Event Coordinator.

November Canvas Updates

On November 20th Canvas enabled the following updates for course instructors:

New Quizzes
- By clicking the 3 dots you can bypass the assignment details page and go directly to “Build” the quiz by adding questions.
  - This is helpful for when you have already set up the assignment details and just need to go in to adjust questions.

- Stimulus orientation. When you add a stimulus question (an image with questions associated with it), Canvas defaults to having the image to the right of the questions. You can now put it above the questions. This is especially helpful if you need to print the quiz for a student. https://tech.pccsk12.com/print-canvas-new-quizzes/

Text Entry Word Count
- When working in SpeedGrader, instructors will be able to view the word count on a text entry submission.

If you have ideas for Canvas update and improvements, let them know by adding a post to Idea Conversations. https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Idea-Conversations/idb-p/ideas

Canvas

Canvas Assignment Submission Tutorials, and More!

In an effort to support students, teachers, and families we have created additional technology tutorials. We have put special emphasis on tutorials for various, Canvas submission types for students. We hope this will help all stakeholders as Canvas remains the best way to continue coursework when students need to be out for an extended time. Please keep in mind, the users on a the mobile app will have a different experience and should consult these guides: https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Canvas-Mobile-Users/gh-p/mobile

This resource is available for teachers on the Digital Teaching Hub. https://tech.pccsk12.com/canvas-lms/

It is also available for students and families on the Digital Learning Hub. https://sites.google.com/pccsk12.com/hlh/canvas

For your convenience it is embedded below.

Canvas

Keeping YouTube Safer for our students

REMINDER: Due to the nature of YouTube, and the easy availability of inappropriate content, the Tech Department has enabled severe restrictions on YouTube for elementary students and moderate restrictions for middle school students. However, it’s easy for staff to approve content on the fly when they need to. Please note the following steps to approve content, but please remember to approve only the content that you would want students to access.

Visit YouTube. https://www.youtube.com

Click sign in on the top right if you are not already signed into a YouTube account.
Make sure that you are signed into your district YouTube account. Click on the icon in the top right to verify. Should say managed by pccsk12.com (see pic below)

3. When you go to any YouTube video you will find a blue bar stating the status of the video below it. This video can be approved for our organization — when someone is signed in to YouTube — so at this point, not applicable to elementary as is. See pic below.

approval bar

4. If the video was already approved you will see the remove button. Anyone can click this to also remove the video from approval.

5. Some videos are allowed by YouTube automatically. It will say watchable.

6. You can also approve a whole channel. This will allow you to approve school channels or curriculum sites, for when and if we opt for restricted mode, but permit sign in where we can then allow all white-listed videos to be accessible.

Important note: By approving or removing videos from YouTube, you are a affecting the entire district, and therefore it is important to approve videos ONLY if they are appropriate for K-12.
All creators are now required to tell if their content is made for kids in order to comply with the Children‘s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and/or other applicable laws. As part of a settlement with the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and NY Attorney General, YouTube is now requiring YouTube creators to set future and existing videos as made for kids OR not. Even creators who don’t make content for kids need to set their audience. See this posting for more information https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9527654

P-CEP High School Grading Periods

As of November 19th, now that Quarter 1 grades have been turned in at the secondary level, Grading Periods will be in place in Canvas to reflect the closing of Q1 grades in MiStar. Students will have view-only access to first quarter course content and will be unable to submit work for assignments associated with the first quarter (Q1) since it is not the current grading period. While teachers can edit their previous term’s course content, they cannot make further adjustments in the feedback or grading of any non-current grading period submissions.

When grading periods are enabled, the due date of an assignment will determine the grading period within which the assignment will appear in the Gradebook. If no due date is set, the assignment defaults to the last (current) grading period available for the course. Therefore, if there is a quiz or assignment that a student must still complete from a past quarter, you might make a copy of that quiz/assignment, give it a due date in the current grading period, and assign it just to the few students that need it. In that case, grade passback to MiStar should be avoided and, should you want it reflected in MISTAR manually enter the grade for those students in the Q1 quiz or assignment instead (note, even if this is done, the student’s viewable-as-of November 12th report card, won’t reflect any change).

Importantly, while students will still find their definitive grades in MISTAR, this grade period demarcation will also result in a more accurate current grade average, as far as what Canvas reflects, since only the current marking period will be presented.

Please find quick overview directions and screenshots in this document.

*Please note elementary teachers — it is very conceivable that we will similarly update Canvas for courses that span grading periods too, in the coming weeks, to allow for term filtering.

Submit a ticket for more support.

Canvas

REMC November newsletter

*REMC — See this month’s newsletter HERE. Some highlights are found below. Click on images to read more about it.

* The Regional Educational Media Center Association of Michigan promotes the transformative use of technology and provides Michigan schools with access to educational resources to help teachers increase student success.

Middle School Teachers: Transition from Quarter 1 to Quarter 2 in Canvas reflected by grading periods

As of November 10th, now that Quarter 1 grades have been turned in at the secondary level, Grading Periods will be in place in Canvas to reflect the closing of Q1 grades in MiStar. Students will have view-only access to first quarter course content and will be unable to submit work for assignments associated with the first quarter (Q1) since it is not the current grading period. While teachers can edit their previous term’s course content, they cannot make further adjustments in the feedback or grading of any non-current grading period submissions.

When grading periods are enabled, the due date of an assignment will determine the grading period within which the assignment will appear in the Gradebook. If no due date is set, the assignment defaults to the last (current) grading period available for the course. Therefore, if there is a quiz or assignment that a student must still complete from a past quarter, you might make a copy of that quiz/assignment, give it a due date in the current grading period, and assign it just to the few students that need it. In that case, grade passback to MiStar should be avoided and, should you want it reflected in MISTAR manually enter the grade for those students in the Q1 quiz or assignment instead (note, even if this is done, the student’s viewable-as-of November 12th report card, won’t reflect any change).

Importantly, while students will still find their definitive grades in MISTAR, this grade period demarcation will also result in a more accurate current grade average, as far as what Canvas reflects, since only the current marking period will be presented.

Please find quick overview directions and screenshots in this document.

Please also revisit this blog post from last November on how to extend access for students to a Canvas course past the term end date based on an interest in allowing students an additional time period to access course content or to interact with and submit coursework.

*Please note elementary and high school teachers — it is very conceivable that we will similarly update Canvas for courses that span grading periods too, in the coming weeks, to allow for term filtering.

Submit a ticket for more support.

Canvas

Zoom’s Focus Mode feature

While we highlighted this feature before school began (see blog post here), we continue to get questions about how to use it so are providing more details below.

Focus mode is designed with the digital learning environment in mind, allowing students to stay attentive or work on their tasks while under supervision, without being distracted by others and their tasks. This feature gives the host and co-hosts view of all participants’ videos without other participants seeing each other. This extends into screen sharing, as the host and co-host can view and switch between each participant’s shared screen, while the participants can only view their own content. If the host finds a participant’s content should be shared with others, they can easily begin sharing the participant’s screen with others.

Besides the host, co-hosts, and participants spotlighted by the host, participants in focus mode can still see their own video but only see other participants’ names, their nonverbal feedback or reactions, and hear them when unmuted.

Prerequisites for focus mode

Start a meeting as the host
Zoom desktop client
- Windows: version 5.7.3 or higher
- macOS: version 5.7.3 or higher

User

To enable or disable Focus mode for your own use:

Sign in to the Zoom web portal.
In the navigation panel, click Settings.
Click the Meeting tab.
Under In Meeting (Advanced), click the Focus Mode toggle to enable or disable it.
If a verification dialog displays, click Enable or Disable to verify the change.

How to engage focus mode as the host or co-host of a meeting:

Start a meeting as the host or co-host.
Click More on the meeting toolbar.
Click Start Focus Mode.
Click Start to confirm, or select the Don’t ask me again check box to skip this confirmation going forward.
When Focus mode begins, you and the participants are notified with a banner along the top of the video window. Additionally, the focus mode icon is always visible in the top-left corner of the video window, next to the encryption icon, while focus mode is active.

Once Focus mode has been started, participants in focus mode will only see the video of the host, co-hosts, any participants spotlighted by the host, and their own video. They will only see other participants’ names, their nonverbal feedback or reactions, and hear them when unmuted.

Participants’ shared screens are only visible to the host and co-hosts, but the host can allow all other participants to view as well:

Click the up arrow to the right of Share Screen .
In the Shared screens can be seen by section, click All participants.
(Optional) To return to just host and co-hosts viewing shared content, select Host only.
Note: These options are only available when in Focus mode.