February is Black History Month. Wayne RESA has put together several resources that teachers can use this month and throughout the school year to help infuse Black History in the curriculum.
Additionally, Flipgrid has curated several topics for students to engage with on their platform.
Wide Open School by Common Sense has linked several Black History and Culture lessons organized by grade, Preschool-12th grade. Google for Education has also released several new lessons in their Applied Digital Skills curriculum.
Our email inboxes can become quite difficult to manage, creating a filter is a great way to clear the clutter without removing important messages that we may need to access later. For example, you may get LMS notifications that you want to filter to a specific place. Follow these steps to help your inbox manage itself using filter rules.
Suppose you get Exit Ticket response emails. You want to move them all to one folder (Gmail calls them labels) to view all at one time.
You may receive several notifications from Google Forms that you want to create a filter for.
It is best to identify the sender and/or subject of these emails to type into the Search bar. You’ll do an advanced search, so click the drop-down arrow.
Add as much information as possible to ensure you get the right messages filtered. Then click, “Create Filter.”
Select any filter rules you see as appropriate for that kind of message. You should apply the appropriate Label (or Create one). You may also want to select “Skip the Inbox.” If the case, rest assured, archived emails in Gmail are not deleted permanently after 30 days. They are permanently stored in your email (and now labelled) until you delete/trash it.
You can always remove or edit your filter in Setting by clicking on the wrench icon in the upper-right corner.
When you are ready to view the filtered emails, access the Label on the left-side menu.
The Webby Awards annually note websites with interesting design and elements to explore. Here are some sites you might want to check out, in no particular order:
Future of Tech hosts a free & growing library of resources to get you up to speed on what’s new & next.
Poly is an online library where people can browse, share, and remix thousands of 3D models or scenes.
One way students can show their knowledge of a topic is by creating an infographic. Infographics, by nature, require students to summarize their learning and choose important information to present visually and textually.
Google Drawings is a great tool to create infographics and it’s likely familiar to navigate. Google Drawings offers options for uploading images, drawing shapes, and adding color. Below is a short video tutorial for students on how to use Google Drawings.
For those who are familiar with Google Drawings and want some super neat tricks you may not know about, check out this video from Matt Miller.
For even more information on student-created infographics, check out this blog post by Matt Miller!
For teachers who are seeing non-student names in their Google Assignments within Canvas — here’s an explanation and what can be done about it. Non-student names can appear when students submit work using personal devices that have active and commingled Google accounts. With our district Chromebooks, we enforce the use of only district Google accounts (“… @pccsk12.com”) so students using district Chromebooks can only submit Google assignments within Canvas with the expected name associated with their accounts. On the other hand, on personal devices, any number of Gmail accounts might exists and be set up as profiles within an installed Chrome browser on that computer. On such devices, if a student opens up a Google Assignment and they are logged in with a personal Gmail account in Chrome or in a family member’s Chrome profile, the Google assignment will “assign” to that personal account and when it is submitted in Canvas the teacher will see the associated name, which could be another profile account name other than the student’s district one. There are two (2) things student should do to ensure their assignments are properly associated with them in Canvas. Please let your students with personal devices know, especially those that might claim to have submitted work that might actually be present in Canvas but under an unfamiliar, non-student name.
On the Google Assignment, the students should click “switch account” and choose their @pccsk12.com account if it isn’t already listed
For teachers who would like to remove the non-students from your assignments, while not ideal, you can remove the “non-students” individually from each Google assignment by going to the manage people tab — the vertical dot dot dot in the upper right…see screenshot below… [Please consider before removing the non-student, should they have made a submission, trying to identify which student actually inadvertently is behind that submission — and then crediting and providing feedback as appropriate for it.]
Google engineers are aware of this issue and Canvas is hopeful that at some point it can be mitigated.
You can always remove or edit your filter in Setting by clicking on the wrench icon in the upper-right corner.
