Category: Middle School

End of Year Reflective Portfolio Assignment

As we approach the end of the school year, it is a great practice to have students reflect on their work and learning. It also serves as an indicator for you about what lessons and activities had the most impact on students.

John Sowash on his blog, Chromebook Classroom recommends that you use Google Slides for the portfolio and have students insert audio on each slide (or they could record a screencast with Canvas Studio). He suggests three questions:

What was your favorite assignment?
What’s one thing you learned this year?
What is your favorite memory from the school year?

You might also ask a question about how COVID-19 impacted their school year.

To see examples and get more information about how students might create these, visit his blog post or reach out to a Technology Integration Specialist.

Nearly unrelated, but because some might wish to use Google Documents instead for this exercise or down the road, please know that you can or will soon be able to create and import documents that contain images above or behind text in Google Docs — a welcome feature to be sure!

See this announcement for more on this new feature: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/05/images-above-or-behind-text-in-google-docs.html

End of the Year Canvas Support – Action Required

*PLEASE NOTE: In early August, ALL MISTAR created courses will un-sync and therefore courses will be deleted off of dashboards. Please make sure you follow the directions below to ensure all work (assignments, discussions, videos, etc.) will save correctly.

With Canvas being utilized for the foreseeable future, and with the end of the year approaching, we wanted to pass along some directions on how to ensure that your course(s) and work created this year can be used for next Fall. The directions below will enable you to copy your course into a “Sandbox” type course, so when you return in the Fall, all you will need to do is import your “Sandbox” course, into your MISTAR rostered course.

Watch the less than 3-minute video below or watch it on YouTube. https://youtu.be/ibyFUeqSurY

Printable PDF directions

Optional, further back up step: For Directions on saving your course to your computer/google drive click here

New Canvas Feature: PDF Assignment Annotation

Coming Saturday, 5/15/2021, an exciting update to Canvas! Instructors can now use an annotated assignment type for students. If you have a PDF that you want students to write on, you’ll be able to upload that in assignments and there will be functionality for students to mark-up and submit directly in Canvas.

A few notes to consider:

Cannot be used for Group Assignments
The teacher needs to upload the document for annotation, the students can’t upload and annotate their own
Although annotations are supported in the Canvas Student app, this specific assignment type is not currently supported for mobile devices. If instructors want students to be able to annotate a document via the mobile app, they should also use the File Uploads submission type and provide the original file in the assignment description for students to download and annotate in the app.

Interactive, Beautiful Images with Canva and Thinglink

Canva: A fantastic tool for creating graphics. The service offers teachers free premium accounts. When you sign up you will see that they have amazing templates for Education.

ThingLink: A tool that allows you to place “hot spots” on images to result in an interactive learning experience. These can be easily embedded onto your Canvas page. Click here to view an example.

Now these tools have partnered to make it even easier for you to create interactive, beautiful images that can immerse students in a topic. See below to see how a 5th grade Math teacher has used them to guide her virtual students. Click on it to go to the interactive experience.

Or see this Primary teacher from Scotland uses thinglink to guide her young students through a lesson on writing sentences.

If you are interested in learning more about how to use these tools you can read Canva’s blog post, view the webinar, or check out this creation. As always, you can reach out to your Technology Integration Specialist to get your own, personalized tutorial.

Google Apps for Primary Students

Are you wondering how you can use Google Apps with younger students? Kindergarten teachers Christine Pinto and Jessica LaBar-Twomey, who are also the authors of Innovating Play have a great blog with ideas, a spreadsheet with templates and can be followed on social media.

Below is a video of an interview with them.

Spring Inspiration: Get Students Creating!

Link to inspiration resources and lessons

As May approaches and we anticipate the rest of the year, it is a great time to encourage students to create to show all they have learned. There are so many unique ways for students to produce and publish something meaningful. Here are just a few tools and ideas.

WeVideo: WeVideo is a video editor built for all skill levels! When you get started, it will ask you a few questions about your comfort level with video editing and provide you with a dashboard that fits you. They have also rolled out real-time collaboration so students can work together. *WeVideo premium is available at the middle schools.

Canva: Canva is a great tool for graphic design. They offer free, premium accounts for educators. Students can learn design tips and use templates to create eye-catching posters, logos, and social media graphics. Maybe you could have students design the buttons and theme for next school year’s Canvas page. All students can access Canva via our Clever portal – https://clever.com/in/pccs.

Adobe Spark: Adobe Spark is similar to Canva, but I believe it is a great tool for walking students through a video creation process. Teachers and secondary students, when you are ready to get started with Adobe Spark, you can log in by following the instructions at http://links.pccsk12.com/adobespark.

Below is a tutorial made by students about how to make a video using Adobe Spark. https://youtu.be/UsH5-rcnSRg

Podcasts: Have students create their own podcasts. They can prepare episodes to help review material for upcoming exams or advice for next year’s class. When creating the assignment, select the submission option of “Media Recording.” For the best results, student recordings should be less than 15 minutes. If you want them to be longer, reach out for other tool recommendations.

Looking for ideas that will inspire your students? The teachers behind HyperDocs have curated some resources to get the juices flowing with recommended lessons to go with them. Click the image below to explore.

Visual Thinking with GitMind

GitMind is a great, free tool for mind maps and brainstorming. You can easily sign-up with your Google account. There are several templates ready for use and they have a category for education. Below is a video overview.

There are no ads on the page. The only “paywall” I can find is the ability to export in other formats, which you can do with “points” you earn by using the platform. You can easily share work with a link and you can add collaborators.

Ideas for Classroom Use

If you teach younger students you might not have them create their own, but you can work as a class. There are templates for the elements of a story and working with words.

Older students could create their own, there a templates for timelines and essay structures. At the year’s end students could create a mind map to review material from the entire course. You can also edit your mind map by editing or importing an outline and the program will add it to your mind map.

Introducing IconsMania

Visuals are an important element to help all people understand the message we are trying to convey. Finding good icons on the internet can be tricky as many sites want you to pay to use their icons and the emoji keyboard options starts to feel a little stale. The creator of the popular site SlidesMania (has a wide range of Google Slides/PPT templates that are free to use) has brought us IconsMania. These icons are beautiful, editable, and free. Just like SlidesMania (which she created during the pandemic, designing slides that her elementary student would enjoy), these are built with educators in mind and the collections will continue to grow.

Simply go to IconsMania and search for what you need or browse the collections. While browsing you can limit the options to colorful, outline, or monochromatic. For example if I want icons to help communicate the schedule for the day, I can use the school icon collection.

If you select that you are a Google user, it will give you a template that will open in Google Slides. From there you can copy/paste them. If you wish, you can copy them into Google Drawings and save them individually as a PNG. Doing it this way makes it easy to resize or customize as you need. If you don’t want to customize them you can click “I just want the PNGs” will allow you to download a zip file containing all the icons.

Student Project Idea

This can also be a great resource for student creation. One of my favorite possibilities is the Number Mania eduprotocol. In short, students fill out a Google Form with one fact about a topic. Then they look at a view only spreadsheet of facts collected by the class and design an infographic in Google slides. The Slides template can be pre-populated with relevant icons to streamline the creation process, eduprotocols are meant to be implemented in one class period. This a great way to build some background knowledge and interest around a new topic.

Image of linked slide — Slide made by Amanda Sandoval. Click it to view the templates and examples up close.

If you interested in trying this activity, reach out to Kaelyn Bullock by submitting a tech ticket and selecting “Technology Integration.” I’d love to help you plan this out for your grade level/content area.

If you are looking for more icon resources visit the Noun Project or Flaticon.

Math and STEM Activities with Jamboard and Equatio

Many teachers have found Jamboard to be a flexible tool for students. However, it does not have a lot of tools for Math. Teachers can utilize the free-for-teachers Equatio extension to bring in many more math tools to enhance student learning. The Mathspace feature allows teachers to incorporate shapes for all levels of math from shapes to clocks, coins, and protractors. It also have some great Science shapes like pulleys, gear wheels, magnets and more. To learn more about how to add Equatio and use it in Jamboard, check out the post by Eric Curts.

Google Practice Problems

multiplying fractions practice problem results

If you or your students are looking for practice and immediate feedback, look no further than Google. For example, if you type “FOIL practice problem” in the Google search bar, students and teachers can find topic explanations and practice problems right on the results page. See the image below for sample results from such a search.

image of Google results — Students that need help can get a quick overview of the topic and try several practice problems with immediate feedback.

These particular problems are sourced from ck-12, a reputable open-education resource.

Other topics you search for may come up with practice problems from other recognizable resources like Kahoot!

$multiplying fractions practice problem results$

This can be a quick resource for students that need some extra support or are studying for upcoming tests. Math and science topics seemed to be most successful in getting results.