BrainPop recently made significant updates to their Primary Source feature, making it even more useful for remote and in-person learning needs. Now students can answer free-response questions directly on their site and submit answers immediately for a teacher’s review.
With Primary Source, students can deepen their understanding of a topic by closely examining real historical artifacts and answering free-response questions designed to prompt critical thinking and deeper exploration.
This post is for teachers who do not “see” some of their students in Canvas because those students’ enrollments have ‘concluded’. Enrollments are concluded, for example, as students move from one school track to another (e.g. between Virtual and Safe Start schools). If you are unable to “see” some students, there are three areas in Canvas (via Grade or People in the Course Navigation Menu or via User Details) to do so. We recommend using the Grades option described below.
For concluded student enrollments, all content in the Gradebook is read only and cannot be changed. You will need to input any grades into MISTAR manually that weren’t already moved via grade passback when the student was still active.
To see the grades of students who have concluded their enrollment in your Canvas course, do the following:
HINT: Be sure to drag the right side dividing line of the Student Name column so that you can see both the entire student name AND the label “concluded”.
The above guidance is from: https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Instructor-Guide/How-do-I-view-grades-for-inactive-or-concluded-student/ta-p/753
As with the Gradebook, individual grades can also be viewed through this approach.
As with active students, you can review grades and other details of your concluded users. Please see https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Instructor-Guide/How-do-I-view-user-details-for-an-enrollment-in-a-course/ta-p/1216 for elaboration.
Below are a few suggestions to address sound issues you might be experiencing in a video meeting.
*** In a pinch, JOIN BY PHONE instead of COMPUTER — While continuing your video stream, if you joined computer audio automatically, you can leave the computer audio and join by phone. For visual guidance on how to either join initially by phone or transition during a meeting, see this article https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/201362663-Joining-a-meeting-by-phone
*** FOR WINDOWS 10 devices – Microsoft released a recent update that might resolve this issue. We recommend running the update when you don’t need your laptop for an hour or so since it takes nearly all of that time for the update to run. Make sure the laptop is plugged in. Close any open tabs/programs as well before clicking on the link below to run the update.
Please go to this link https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10
Click on update now, it will download a small executable program, then run the program when it finishes downloading (should be quick) then follow the prompts to update the Windows 10 operating system.
Or you can go through the Start menu, up to PC Settings, select Update & Security, and run the 20H2 update.
*** OTHER CONSIDERATIONS
By default, Zoom enables a suite of sound enhancements to suppress background noise. In some environments, though, these settings can make your audio choppy. If this is the case, you can disable them.
If you’re on a PC or Mac, start the Zoom app and click the Settings icon, then click “Audio.” Click “Advanced,” and use the drop-down menus to disable the audio processing options.
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.
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.
In the next few weeks we will be welcoming students back into our buildings. This will be a very exciting time and it will be important to help students feel at ease and games can be a great way to do that. If you are looking for fresh ideas for group activities and games, the Playmeo website is a great resource.
Many activities are free and you can search by learning theme, program outcome, or activity type. Additionally, you can sort by group size and how much time you have for the activity.
Shelly Sanchez Terrell’s blog, TeacherRebootCamp.com offers a number of musings and resources. Her December 19th posting within her December 2020 STEM Resources Digital Calendar, comments on student search engine and research site usage and reminds us of sites geared more towards education than the default Google and YouTube students might otherwise lean towards. Sites such as The Kids Should See This, DK Findout, Ducksters, Science News for Students, are just some of the ones she calls out. Certainly you might already be familiar with some, but perhaps you will encounter one that is new to you that you find worthwhile enough to bring to the attention of some of your students. Happy researching.
Sworkit Kids is a great place to find fun activities to use as physical brain breaks during in-person and online classes, according to Richard Byrne. The video embedded below is his overview of the site.
Closed captions are an essential accessibility tool for people who are deaf or hard of hearing (and for people with other conditions as well). Captioning is also a useful feature for many students as an additional representation of information in a virtual setting. Previously in Zoom, closed captioning was only available from third party providers or by assigning someone to type captions. Now automatic, live transcription of closed captions is an available feature in the Zoom desktop client (not the Chrome browser application). Once enabled, this automatically adds text to the bottom of the video with what the host and others are saying. Please note however, live transcription does not work in breakout rooms, only within the main session.
When closed captioning is enabled, as the host you will see the live-transcript below your video, but they DO NOT automatically appear for your participants. Instead, participants will receive a notification and must click the “Closed Caption” option in the menu bar (and usually click Show Subtitle) to start viewing the captions. Once they have done so, the size of the captions can be adjusted under “Accessibility” in the video settings.
Elaborating on the CC options:
Bear in mind:
If you are hosting a meeting with live-transcription, we recommend making a comment at the beginning of your meeting informing your meeting participants that live-transcription is available and a note about how to enable them. Encourage all your students to try turning the captions on to see if it has an impact on their comprehension or capacity to pay attention. Make it a best UDL (Universal Design for Learning) practice to enable closed captioning during all of your meetings.
For more information on UDL and closed captioning, please read this article.
With the start of the 2nd semester arriving soon, we’d like to again provide step by step directions (please see below) for those teachers interested in transferring content from one Canvas course to another. We shared similar directions covering the export/import process at the outset of our school year to assist teachers in migrating content out of courses they had created and built in to the MISTAR-rostered course shells that appeared in their accounts.
Bulk adjusting due dates and times:
*Please note that canvas exports do not include backups of student interactions and grades. Grades can be exported separately as CSV files.
**Year-long courses do not apply here. However, it is still good practice to make backups of your courses.
Below are some best practices when transferring content, this includes exporting your grades, settings, and downloading additional data.
Best Practice: Keep Sem 1 and Sem 2 clean and separate to have easier content management and processing. For those with a course that spans the year, consider just copying the last module or most recent content from your Semester 1 course into your Semester 2 course so that you are starting with an almost fresh course. (You can always have view access extended to the Semester 1 course so that students are able to review their past work at any time – unless you’d prefer to restrict access to that course content.)
You could also extend course dates in Semester 1 courses if you need students to have more time to participate/work in those courses, although you will need to bear in mind MISTAR grade submission deadlines.
BrainPop’s January newsletter for K-12 instructional staff can be found HERE.
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
Pics below show some of what’s in their latest newsletter.
