Just out, the October newsletter offers details on 10 free virtual courses, Teaching Strategies for Virtual and Blended Learning Environments webinars and their FREE TOOLKIT: Election + Media Literacy

Two highlights are pasted below:

FREE WEBINARS: TEACHING STRATEGIES FOR VIRTUAL AND BLENDED LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS

FREE COURSES: WE’VE ADDED YOUR FAVORITE REMC COURSES TO NOVEMBER’S VIRTUAL COURSES LIST!

Our department apologizes for any anxiety we generated with our October 4th blog post around Google Cloud Drive Assignments in Canvas. On October 7th, following input from the community when our newsletter with the posting circulated, we rescinded our decision to remove GDCA access on October 14th.

While staff will continue to have the choice in Canvas to use either integration (GDCA or the new Google Assignments), the underlying reasons to transition to Google Assignments remain and we share them below for your consideration.

1. GDCA will not work after next September and any course content relying on it will have to be recreated using Google Assignments.
2. Canvas support won’t address tickets involving GDCA apart from telling staff that the issue is likely a limitation with GDCA and the Canvas user should move to the new Assignments.
3. Google Assignments functions akin to Google Classroom. Students get their own copy of an assignment, and then submit the assignment back to you for grading. Similar to Google Classroom, you will have a folder in your drive of your class where you can look at the progress of the assignments.
4. By shifting from Canvas’ SpeedGrader and using Google Assignment speedgrader instead, you can still have functionality to quickly grade between students, and return all student work at once. You will also have access to comments and editing rights to their google docs.
5. In order to be IDEA and 504 compliant as well as use best practices of providing Universal Design for Learning (starting with the end in mind) we want to give our students the most flexibility and access when showing what they know. Unlike the new Assignments, GDCA does not allow for our current UDL/accessibility suite Read and Write for Google to be used. This means that when you create an assignment for a student via GDCA, you are eliminating their ability to use tools that they may need to complete the assignment (ie. speech-to-text, text-to-speech, word prediction).
6. Google Assignments has the ability to use Originality Reports. As a teacher you can designate up to 5 assignments per course. With originality reports you can compare student work against hundreds of billions of web pages and over 40 million books with originality reports. Allow students to scan their own work for recommended citations up to three times.
7. Assignments includes all the features of the GDCA, except Canvas Collaborations. Google asserts this feature is coming soon.

Click Here to learn how to use Google Assignments

Based on the feedback received, we have decided to delay hiding access to Google Drive Cloud Assignments (GDCA) until August 1, 2021.

As always, feel free to submit a service request and we will be able to help support you any way we can.

Thanks!

TIS

Google continues to add to its Arts and Culture site offerings https://artsandculture.google.com/

To celebrate World Tourism Day, Google Arts & Culture partnered with UNWTO so that, despite the current restrictions, educators and students can experience different cultures, from the safety of your desk. AR, StreetView tours, videos, and exhibits bring the world to you. Check it out HERE!

The first ever retrospective of this 15th Century Italian female artist at the National Gallery, London. Watch videos, painting tours and exhibits to find out about the life story, work, and heritage of a pioneering woman. Check it out HERE!

Please see the following documentation and video to understand how MISTAR and Canvas work together:

Click HERE for a step by step click doc. [Thanks to Erica Powell for these materials!]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMMztnnTexE

Google’s collaboration tool, Chat, was enabled for staff last month.

To learn more about using it via chat.google.com please see this support document.  

To learn more about using Google Chat in Gmail, please see this support document. 

For an overview of its features, please see this support document. 

For more on the consolidation, visit this support document.

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Staff have the following access: Chat // Google Chat is included in Gmail and works everywhere. Classic Hangouts works on web.

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Students have the following access:

elementary — Classic Hangouts only // Classic Hangouts is included in Gmail and works everywhere. All Chat clients are turned off.

middle — Classic Hangouts only // Classic Hangouts is included in Gmail and works everywhere. All Chat clients are turned off.

PCEP/Starkweather — Chat and classic Hangouts // Classic Hangouts is included in Gmail and works everywhere. Chat also works everywhere except Gmail

For future reference, these web pages report the current operational status and, in service interruptions/outages, restoration details for…

• BrainPop
• Canvas
• Clever
• District services
• DRC (MSTEP, WIDA)
• Google Apps
• Illuminate DnA
• MISTAR
• NWEA
• Seesaw
• Zoom

Some of the above listed services have free email alert notifications that you can subscribe to — ours is one of them http://links.pccsk12.com/techstatusnotify

The Google Apps LTI for Google Drive Cloud Assignment in Canvas is no longer seeing development support and will stop working altogether next September. To ensure that any Google assignments you might have in Canvas remain viable next year, if you haven’t already done so, please consider shifting to using the Google Assignments integration instead when interested in distributing Google assignments moving forward.  Using Google Assignments in Canvas will yield more functionality, the use of Speedgrader, the use of Read&Write for Google tools, and the ability to easily distribute drive file copies to students. [To hasten our adoption and use of the new Assignments, access to Google Drive Cloud Assignments in Canvas will *NOT be turned off beginning next Wednesday, October 14th. Existing assignments using the tool and access to related student work will remain unaffected.]

* WE ARE NOT TURNING OFF ACCESS AS PREVIOUSLY NOTED. See more below.

MORE INFO:

The Google Assignments tool is designed to allow teachers and students to take full advantage of the collaborative content creation, review, and editing tools built into Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Slides. Differences between this tool and the Google Drive Cloud Assignment tool (developed by Instructure) include the following:

• Unlike the Google Drive Cloud Assignment tool, which converts Google documents to PDF format upon submission to Canvas, Google Assignments submissions remain in their native format once they are submitted and file ownership is transferred from the student to the teacher (students retain read-only rights).
• Teachers can freely edit and comment on the original Google Drive files.
• Grading takes place inside Google Assignments, and grades are sent back to the Canvas Gradebook. Teachers can simply enter point values, or create and use rubrics for grading.
• Teachers can create a bank of reusable comments that can be inserted into any Google document submitted via the Google Assignments tool.
• When Google submissions are returned to students, ownership is returned to the student, but teachers retain editing rights. This allows students to turn in new versions of the same file for a resubmission or another assignment.

For even more information on Google Assignments and the reasoning behind this transition, please review these articles: https://www.instructure.com/canvas/en-au/blog/google-canvas-better-together

https://support.google.com/edu/assignments/answer/9381694?hl=en

https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/The-Canvas-tl-dr/New-Meet-Google-Assignments-LTI/ba-p/388622

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*Based on the feedback received, we have decided to delay hiding access to Google Drive Cloud Assignments (GDCA) until August 1, 2021.

The Chrome Apps Launcher, or “Waffle”  as it is more commonly called, appears in G Suite in various places like Drive, Gmail, etc. At times, it is unstable, and therefore drops the connection it has to district apps like Canvas, Savvas Easybridge, Zoom and others. Google admits their apps launcher is sometimes flaky and won’t always present 3rd party apps such as the aforementioned. Knowing that the waffle sometimes might not offer access to some of the apps we frequently use, we recommend bookmarking the Google apps dashboard so that you can always have access to what you need from another convenient place if the waffle is not working: https://gsuite.google.com/dashboard

Consider encouraging your students to also bookmark the apps dashboard so that have an alternate way to access certain apps.

How to bookmark websites in Chrome: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/188842?co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop&hl=en

You may also want to bookmark the direct log in url for these specific apps:

CANVAS — https://pccsk12.instructure.com

 FRONTLINE —  https://login.frontlineeducation.com/sso/plymouthcanton 

   ZOOM — https://pccsk12.zoom.us/signin   OR   https://zoom.us/signin and click Sign in with Google

While not in the apps launcher, another login url for an app some staff have asked about is:

RUBICON ATLAS — https://pccsk12.rubiconatlas.org/Atlas/Authentication/View/Login?idp=5 

If you’re in the mood to bookmark, consider browsing to the DIGITAL TEACHING HUB and bookmarking that site for future reference too.

Monarch – MISTAR Teacher Tools Training available September 2020 through January 2021.

You are invited to transform your use of MISTAR-Q by participating in Monarch, an online learning experience focused on the teacher tools and applications in MISTAR-Q.

As a participant, you will complete activities designed to increase your skill and knowledge of teacher apps such as Class Attendance, Grade Book, Seating Chart, generating reports, and more.

Working online from any device at your own time and pace, you will have until the end of January 2021 to complete the learning activities. As you finish missions and levels, you will earn digital badges in recognition of your learning. You may even want to create a friendly competition in your building/department!

Monarch is especially beneficial for teachers new to MISTAR-Q, and seasoned teachers will also benefit from participating. Technology integrators, technology coaches, paraprofessionals, intern teachers, secretaries, and building administrators may also participate to better understand and support the applications used by teachers.

Registration is open and on-going. This course is free. Register and start learning here.