Librarian support for online learning

From Guest Blogger, Margaret Lincoln, middle and high school Media Center Specialist.

During the two short weeks of school being closed, we've seen a vast number of resources made freely available by publishers to support learning during the Coronavirus crisis.

As we move into this new normal of teaching online, I'm pleased to share with you some COVID-19 support pages and curated lists of instructional materials.

COVID-19 Information - LHS Library webpage with real-time news feeds from Michigan eLIbrary databases and links to key COVID-19 portals

EBooks to use during school closings - Access to EBooks from LHS Library, LMS Library, Michigan eLibrary, Willard Library, Public Domain & commercial publishers

Follett Destiny Coronavirus Collection - Informational resources (webpages, articles, lesson plans, media) to support teachers, students & parents during the Coronavirus crisis.

Online resources during school closings - Access to Michigan eLibrary databases, Open Educational Resources (OER), free materials from commercial vendors during school closings.

Storytime resources - Sites offering read-alouds, book talks, animated stories, videos, engaging activities from OER & commercial sources.

I am also more than glad to help students and staff with their information & instructional resource needs.

In addition to having taught Introduction to Information Literacy at LHS for the past 12 years online via Moodle, I have experience with Google Classroom and am ready to support colleagues as they move their own instruction online.

We can communicate by email, phone, Zoom or Adobe Connect at any time that works for your schedule.

Please feel free to embed an “Ask Your Librarian” widget on any of your course website pages which triggers an email to MLincoln@LakeviewSpartans.org



Thanks very much and I look forward to our all being back together in the real world!

Gigi


Margaret Lincoln, PhD
Lakeview Schools District Librarian
National Honor Society Advisor
Phone: 269.565.3730
Email: MLincoln@LakeviewSpartans.org

Virtual Meetings

With the understanding that we need to start providing virtual learning activities, now would be a good time to start checking in with your students and seeing how they are doing if you haven’t already; most students are probably missing the interaction that comes with school, some more than others. We have a number of ways to interact with our students at this point, some teachers have been posting videos to Facebook with them reading books to their younger students, others have been posting videos on their YouTube channels trying to engage their students and communicating in the comment sections (did you all know that you have a YouTube channel linked with your Lakeview account?), and some have been emailing them on a regular basis with ideas to keep them learning.

One method that allows you to interact with your students in real time is through virtual meetings like Google Hangouts Meet or Zoom. Both of these platforms allow you to invite students to a safe, online meeting space where they can communicate with you in real time, and you can also share screens with each other allowing you to work with your entire class, or at least the students who are able to attend.

There are a few differences between the two, Google Hangouts Meet, for instance, has a limit of 25 attendees while Zoom allows for up to 100. While they both have the ability to share screens, Zoom also has the ability to share a whiteboard so you can include text and other features, but there are other online programs that you could use in conjunction with Meet.

Before we left for our “break” Fred pushed Zoom out for all student and teacher accounts so I’m going to be focusing on that going forward, but that doesn’t mean that Zoom is the only option available to you. I’m attaching a document shared by Tina Tribu from KRESA (the Kalamazoo Regional Education Service Agency) that has a great resource page for online tools, including Zoom, to help you with the in’s and out’s of setting up your meetings (ignore the NSCDS information as this was shared by a school district from Chicago, all of these things carry over to our Lakeview accounts too). I’ll also be offering more specific tips and tricks for using Zoom as time goes on and I hear questions from all of you. If you’re interested in trying a Zoom meeting with your students, I would start by reading this document, Tips & Tricks: Teachers Educating on Zoom to get you started. 

Some of the takeaways before you start your first meeting with students include:

• For your first class, set aside some time to introduce your students to Zoom and ensure that they’re able to connect their audio and video.
• Give an agenda or plan for each class by Screen Sharing a document or slide at the beginning of class. This gives students a clear idea of how the class will progress, what will be covered, and the activities they’ll engage in.
• Discuss online etiquette and expectations of the students in your first virtual class and periodically revisit the topics.
• Utilize the Whiteboard or Annotate a shared document and let your students engage as well. When sharing a whiteboard, document, screen, or image, try whiteboarding math problems or have a student use annotation to highlight items such as grammar mistakes in a paper you’re sharing.
• Take time to promote questions, comments, and reactions from your class. Give a minute to allow your students to utilize reactions, write their questions in chat, or be unmuted to ask their questions live.
• Divide into smaller groups for a discussion on a certain topic. You can use Zoom’s Breakout Room feature to either pre-assign or auto-assign students into groups for a short period of time so they may discuss things together.
• Have students be the presenter and share projects with the class. This allows your students to show what they’re working on while practicing their presentation skills. It also allows students to hear from one another.

Once you feel you’re ready to try your first meeting, go ahead and set it up in Zoom, find the meeting ID and password, and share it with your students. If you decided to use Google Classroom or another learning management system as your communication tool, you can just paste the login information for them there, otherwise you can simply email the codes to your students before the meeting, it’s a good idea to let them know about the date and time well in advance and ask them to check their Classroom updates or email before the meeting for the login information.

I know this can seem overwhelming to some of you but understand that you are surrounded by so many amazing teachers and administrators who can offer suggestions and support if you’re feeling out of your comfort zone, and as always, I’d be happy to work with you, or your PLC, on ways to teach virtually - perhaps we can schedule a Zoom meeting so you can try it out first. Whatever the case, take a deep breath, try the new thing, and don’t be afraid to fail, remember, that’s the first step in learning something new!

Virtual Learning Support for Teachers

How Do I Handle This E-Learning Thing?

Now that we’re stuck at home and trying to offer support and continued learning opportunities for our students, I keep hearing the question “What do I do when I can’t assign work for kids but I still want to keep them learning?” I’ve been communicating with Instructional Technology contacts from other districts and reading the tech blogs that I subscribe to, and I’m seeing a common thread about how we offer that support to students: start slow, and keep it simple. In an attempt to keep the number of emails at a minimum, I figured using this newsletter  would be the best route to take.

As a district, we have been communicating with parents about resources that are available to students, but I want to make sure teachers are equally well resourced. I will use this newsletter to share ways that you can use technology tools to continue to work with your students in whatever way seems the most useful for your class . This could be continuing to offer enrichment opportunities, keeping in contact with your students to continue building relationships and offering support, or trying to build your virtual classroom to be used both now and in the future when we’re all back at school. 

I also want to share a document that the Ed-Tech department has been working on for the past four years full of online resources. I will be highlighting some of these resources over the next couple of weeks and will continue to do so after the school closings have been lifted. I will work with the building tech-coaches on continuing to research and share best practices from other ed-tech specialists, but I’d love to hear from you about things that you’re trying with your students that are working, even if it’s only with a few students - every success deserves to be celebrated!  

First, some general rules for working with students in an online environment, especially if you and your students don’t already have experience working together in this way.

I’m going to start with a distillation of the best ideas from ed-tech blogger Alice Keeler’s recent post, As someone who has been doing this digital learning thing for 10+ years: @thomasson_engl @guster4lovers. Another good blog post that has mirrors these ideas is “Don't worry about making things perfect…” by education blogger Rebecca Barrett-Fox; rather than getting things perfect, it’s more important that you’re trying to meet the needs of your students at this point.

• This one is important “You can't have the same expectations for students in the digital realm. They also will have younger siblings to watch and maybe sick family members and food to procure. Their whole schedules are disrupted, just like yours. If I'm dealing with anxiety, how much more intense is it going to be for a teenager who feels every emotion turned up to 100?”

• Limit the amount of time that you’re “on” with your online presence. It can be stressful trying to do everything at once, so set some office hours during the week and check in occasionally on student work; otherwise, focus on settling in yourself.

• Having said that, try to keep some sort of schedule, even if it’s not an everyday schedule, with your students. If you are asking students to submit assignments, even voluntarily, try to have a consistent due date, perhaps by midnight on Sunday.

• “Don't try to do 300 new tech platforms/programs.” Start with something that you and your students are comfortable with and slowly grow your tool list.

For your first assignment, if you haven’t already, create some sort of online classroom (Google Classroom, Schoology, or your classroom website to name a few) where you can post enrichment projects, assignments, videos, etc. and where  students can turn things in or ask questions. If you’ve already got this taken care of, keep calm and carry on.

Remember, as Andrew Thomasson said in his post “Give students the space and grace you would want your admins and district office staff and government officials to give to you. The Golden Rule is always important, but especially now.”

Illuminate's New Lightning Grader

As some of you may have noticed, Illuminate has updated the gradecam function this year. For those of you who were happy scanning the bubble sheets in with your computer's camera, there won't be much of a change, but for those of you wanted a faster way, you're in for some good news - you can scan all of the sheets into the copy machine and upload the entire file for Illuminate to input.

In addition to the different way to input the tests, there are also some changes made in types of questions that you can put on the bubble sheet. Along with multiple choice and true/false questions, you can also print lines for short answer and essay questions and they will be visible when you look at the answer sheets in Illuminate.

Check out the CISD's overview video here. A quick and easy reference guide is also available.

Update for Google Drive

If you use Google Drive a lot in your work, you may have noticed a recent addition - Team Drives.

In the past, If I know that I'm going to be sharing a lot of materials with a certain group of people, say my PLC, I would create a folder and share it with all of the members of the team; doing this means that any materials that are saved to that folder will be automatically shared with the people who have rights to the folder. The one problem with this was that if a team member left for some reason, their documents left too. Team Drives fixes this issue, when a team uses Team Drives, all documentation stays with the drive even if a member leaves.

Scanning Bubble Sheets into Illuminate

It's been awhile since I've talked about Illuminate, so I thought I'd share what many of you might find a time-saving tip. For those of you who are not using the hybrid online assessment where students log into the student portal, and see the test and the question bubbles side-by-side, but are having students fill out the bubble sheet printed on paper, you can actually take your stack of bubble sheets to one of the copy machines and scan the sheets that way.

Scanning Documents into the Copy Machine

Step 1: Place the stack of bubble sheets in the copy tray at the top as you would for making general copies.

Step 2: On the copy machine, push the Scanner button in the lower left-hand corner.

Copying the Contents of a Cell to the Bottom of the Column

I find it really annoying when I'm working in a large spreadsheet and have to copy a formula that I just entered all of the way down to the bottom of the column. Mind you, this isn't much of a problem if the spreadsheet only goes down to the bottom of the screen, but I often work with spreadsheets that contain information on students in multiple buildings; this can mean that I'm dealing with thousands of rows of information. Having to click on the "auto fill" cursor (you know, the little plus sign in the lower right hand of the cell) and drag down through thousands of rows can be a real pain...if only there were an easier way.