Category: Middle School

Summer Workshop: Creating Screencasts for your Classroom

REMC and Michigan Virtual are partnering to offer a FREE workshop on exploring the #GoOpen Michigan Resources and how to create screencasts for your classroom. Participants will earn 11 SCECHs and a $200 stipend.

Open Education Resources (OER) for Quality Teaching and Learning

Schools are continuing to use blended learning classrooms and look for affordable resources to quickly adapt. #GoOpen Michigan provides many quality free resources, many of which are both designed by and for use by Michigan educators.

During this multi-day hybrid workshop experience cosponsored by Michigan Virtual, explore, mine and contribute to the rich resources that are available for quality instruction on #GoOpen site. Participate in rich learning experiences, gain resources, and leave as champions of using OER in your school and with your students.

Commitment: Each session requires attendance at one (1) face-to-face day and one (1) virtual day, along with some pre-workshop activities, and completion of a learning object (eg. lesson plan, classroom activity). In total, it will require a minimum of 11 hours of time to complete all required activities.

SCECHs: 11 hours of SCECH Credit are available at no cost

Earn: participants will receive a $200 stipend for fulling participating in the workshop and completing all activities including:

Attendance at the face-to-face and virtual days
Uploading their custom screencast to Mi Streamnet
Uploading their learning object to #GoOpen Michigan

View the flyer above here.

Before Summer Break Technology Checklist

As you make plans to close up your classroom for the summer (and a well deserved break), please take care of the following items:

Please comply with the directions of your principal and main office to turn in or secure all classroom technology equipment such as document cameras, microphones, interactive pens, and remotes.
Please also secure or take home all District-assigned devices (laptop, Chromebook, iPad, etc.), as well as all personally-owned devices..
- If you are leaving the District, complete this form.
Power off projectors/IFPs, sound amps, and desktop computers.
- You may leave printer and copiers plugged in and powered on
Follow the care suggestions for classroom audio
Consider what you may want to save from Canvas, but no action is necessary

Thanks for your cooperation!

end of year

Be Aware: Google Dictionary Extension

image showing what the use of the extension looks like on a page

A few teachers have noticed that students have access to install the Google Dictionary Chrome Extension. This is an approved and useful educational extension. However, teachers have noticed it being used in online Canvas Quizzes or Google Forms. The extension allows a students to double click on a word and get the definition.

If a student clicks “More,” a new tab is opened up with more definitions, synonyms, and usage examples.

If you are going to give an online tests or quizzes, it is important to set expectations with students about what behaviors are permitted and monitor students actively. Here’s what the extension looks like, but keep in mind that extensions can be installed and not pinned. You would need to have a student go here: chrome://extensions/ to determine if it is installed.

Additionally, it important to work with grade level and department teams to develop “non-Googleable” questions. Not only will this help curb cheating, but more importantly, it will also help teaching and learning progress to greater depths of knowledge.

To find out more about non-Googleable questions, check out these resources:

Fun Summer PD Bingo

We hope you are looking forward to a well-deserved summer break! When you feel ready to start making plans for next year, we’d like to offer this fun PD Bingo Board. Feel free to challenge your grade level team or PLC to see who can earn a BINGO first. All the offerings are free. Submit a tech ticket if you need any help.

Year-End Canvas Info

The good news is, there isn’t much to worry about with Canvas at the end of the year. It will automatically convert your course to read-only for students and roll your course into Past Enrollments. When next year’s course shell appears you will be able to import last year’s course content with a few clicks.

There are a few things you can do if you’d like to make adjustments to your course over the summer or if you like to have a just-in-case copy. Peruse the items below for more information, save it at this link, or get a PDF copy here.

Canvas

Canvas New Quizzes Update: Fill in the Blank RCE

Summary

In New Quizzes, this feature allows Instructors to add content as part of the question stem and make portions of the content fillable in the student response.

Change Benefit

This change allows instructors to create fill-in-the-blank questions with rich content such as scientific or mathematical formulas or a table. Additionally, instructors can format fill-in-the-blank questions to appear on separate, distinct lines.

Feature Workflow

new quizzes question editor — New Quizzes question editor

When adding a fill-in-the-blank question, type a statement in the rich content editor and surround a word with backticks to indicate where a student fills in the answer.

fill in the blank answer options — Fill in the Blank Answer Options

In the Answer Type drop-down menu, select the Dropdown option [1], enter the correct answers and distractor answers, if needed. Possible Answer Types include a dropdown, open entry, or word bank [2].

Check out the overview video below.

Canvas

Sharing Digital Resources with Colleagues

If you are retiring from teaching, changing roles, or changing grades, you might be wondering how you can best share some of your teaching materials with colleagues from your department or team. This post will offer some suggestions. If you are retiring or leaving the district, a separate email will be sent to you regarding how you can use Google’s services to make copies of some of your materials for your personal Google account and return district technology at the end of the school year. Please be on the look out for that email if it applies to you.

Share Google Content with Colleagues

You will want to make sure that a colleague you want to share files with is made the owner of a document or folder. You can change this if you are the current owner.

image showing where to update the owner — This option is best if you are leaving the district. Change this setting *after* you have used Google Transfer or Download.

If you are not leaving the district and want your files shared, but not altered, you might download a folder and then re-upload it to your Drive naming it “3rd Grade Originals.” This will allow you to maintain a copy of your versions of the documents.

Please be mindful about checking folders before you share them to ensure confidential, student information is not shared.

Share Canvas Course Content

You are able to export your Canvas course as an IMSCC ZIP file that can be uploaded into many Learning Management Systems (if you are leaving the district) or shared via a thumb drive.

image showing course copy option If you want to share your course with another teacher, you can make a copy of your course (found in Settings). When you make the copy you can select the specific content you are willing to share, give it a name (i.e. Bullock Shared US History) and then add your colleague(s) as a teacher in the course. Finally, to make your course more widely available to others at P-CCS you can export your course to Canvas Commons, when you export you can choose to make it viewable to the public or only to P-CCS teachers.

Share Video Content

While it is best practice for instructional videos to be made by the existing teacher, it might be helpful for others to reference your video lessons. If you would like to share your video lessons, we recommend this workflow:

Upload videos to Canvas Studio, if not there already
Organize videos into Collections (i.e. Algebra 1) Instructions to move Media into Collections
Share the Collection (with editing rights) with a colleague

Please submit a tech ticket if you have additional questions about sharing content.

Easy Digital Business Cards with HiHello

We are excited to share the tool, HiHello. Spend about 5 minutes getting signed up and entering in your information and you get a professional looking email signature and Zoom background. The Zoom backgrounds (pictured below) are especially helpful because they can display your name, position, and pronouns which is helpful if you are in a lot of meetings with families and community members. You can also upload the P-CCS logo or your school logo. Get the mobile app and have access to a digital business cards that can easily be shared. Check it out!

Use Canva for Year-End Slideshow or Video

As the year comes to a close, you may be looking for a way to put together a slideshow of photo memories from the school year. You can use Canva to help create and share these. You can set up a slideshow with images on each slide and add background music. Canva also has the complete video editor so you can customize it to your liking. See the tutorials for each of those options below.

Canva

Google LTI and Canvas Known Issue 4/12/22 – RESOLVED 5/9/22

UPDATE: Canvas and Google have worked together to RESOLVE the issue described in last month’s blog post shown below. Thank you for your patience.

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Some teachers are experiencing Canvas assignment submissions that are subsequently inaccessible to them. This has been occurring when a Canvas assignment is created and students load a file from Google Drive. When the teachers open Speedgrader, instead of seeing a preview of the document they see a link to an unknown file type that they are unable to download or view.

Error teachers experience with Google Drive submissions

Students will have a clue that submission didn’t come through correctly when they select and attach an item from Google Drive they will see this:

error on student side — Students will see this when their attachment is unsuccessful. They should follow the directions linked below to upload the file as a PDF.

This is a Google LTI issue and we are currently working on a resolution. There are several potential workarounds:

You can create a Google Assignment in Canvas that creates a copy for each student.
Students can download the file as a PDF and upload it to Canvas.
Students can paste the Shared Google link into the comments of an existing assignment.
Teachers can check the “Website URL” entry option under the submission type and students can submit the Shared Google link.

location of website URL option — Teachers can select this Website URL option where students can paste the Shared Google link to their file.

We will update this blog post when the issue has been resolved. Resolved as of 5/9/22