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.

How To Join Multiple Cells In A Spreadsheet.

In my last post, I showed you how to take information from one cell and split it into two different cells. In this post, I'm going to show you how to take multiple cells and combine their data into one cell.

There are a couple of ways to merge the cells, but they are both based on the concatenate feature. When you concatenating things, you are linking, or joining them together. In the example that we'll be looking at today, we're going to be taking lists of student first and last names that we have in different cells and putting them together in a different cell.

How To Split Cells In A Spreadsheet

Have you ever had a spreadsheet where you'd really like to split a cell that contains multiple data points (last name, first name) into individual cells with only one data point each? I know that I used to use this a lot for taking my class roster and separating the last and first names. Today I'm going to show you how to use the Text to Columns feature, in both Google Sheets, and Microsoft Excel to do just that.

Google Sheets:

As you might expect, with Google Sheets generally being a simplified version of Excel, the process of splitting text to columns is fairly simple.

1. Right click on the column to the right of the column that contains the text you'd like to split.
2. Choose the option Insert 1 left; you're going to need to do this for each additional word. Since I will end up with two separate words in this example, I only need to do this step once as I only need one extra cell.
3. Highlight the cells that you want to split.
4. Click the Data heading from the toolbar.
5. Click Split text to columns. This will take the first name and place it into the second column that you just added.

You Asked For It, We Answered!

Since we started using Illuminate and Schoology as a district, teachers have been lamenting the fact that students are able to open other windows or tabs in their browser while taking online tests. While there are programs that can lock down the browsers, those have a cost associated with them.

I'm happy to announce that I've developed kiosk logins that can be used with the Chromebooks that are similar to what we used with the M-Step assessment last year. Now, you can have students log into one of two kiosks before they log into the Chromebook and they will be taken either to either the Illuminate student portal, or to Schoology.

Before students login to their Chromebooks, they should click on Apps which can be found in the lower left hand corner, right next to where they click to shut the Chromebook down. Once they click there, a window will pop up with the different Kiosks that we have loaded into the machines. Have students choose the app associated with the program in which they are testing.

If they're using the Illuminate Kiosk, they will go to the Student Portal and will be asked to input their username and password as usual. If they are logging into Schoology, they will be asked to enter their email and password.

When logged into any of these kiosks, students are unable to leave the window that they're logged into, making it impossible to tab over to different websites to look up answers. When students are done with the assessment, they will need to power down the device in order to freely move around the web.

REMC Classroom Maker Project (#cmakers)

I just wanted to share some exciting information with you that I just heard about through the CISD.

The REMC Classroom Makers (#cmakers) project is a multi-year effort to provide local REMCs with maker training, curriculum and materials to be used with their districts to support and expand curricula and learning.  Makering is the convergence of hands-on DIY and technology.  It involves problem solving through failure, creativity, exploration and often collaboration. 

I went to one of the training sessions with Melinda Waffle last week and got some hands-on training with the different kits that she is putting together, all available for you to check out!

Some of the kits available for you include:

• Circuitry Kit - create circuits that turn on lights, make noises, spin motors, etc.
• Coding Kit - create code that makes robots move and interact with their surroundings
• Construction Kit - allow your students to be creative with hands-on manipulatives
• Gaming kit - create games that can be played on tablets
• Robotics Kit - program robots to perform different actions

Individual Items

• 3D Printer with laptop Bloxel set
• Breakout EDU Box Dash (robot)
• Google Cardboard (up to 5) Green Screen
• Keva Planks Little Bits kit
• Makey-makey kits (up to 5) Osmo (Numbers, Letters & Tangram)
• Ozobot set Snap Circuits (up to 2 kits)
• Sphero Strawbee connectors

If you're interested in learning more about these exciting items, check out the CISD website.

Saving A Google Doc In Another Format

If you're like me, you probably think that Google Docs are the greatest things since sliced bread. That is, unless you need to use the document in a way that doesn't involve the web, say like if you want to upload the document into another program that isn't setup to accept Google based files.

If you need to convert your Google document into another format, the process is simple. With your document open, click on File, and then on Download as, which is about two-thirds of the way down the page. This will open up a list of seven different formats you can choose from, such as .docx, .pdf, .epub.

When you click on your option of file type, it will save it in your downloads folder. From there, you can upload it to that pesky program that hasn't quite gotten the hang of playing nice with Google.

Syncing Your Schoology Gradebook To Your Skyward Gradebook

In this post, I'll be explaining how to sync your Schoology and Skyward gradebooks at the beginning of a new course:

1. Choose the grading categories that you plan on using from Skyward.
2. Next, log into Schoology and navigate to your Schoology course.
3. Click on the Skyward app on the lower left side of your course and click Configuration.
4. If you don’t already see a dropdown box under the Schoology Course Categories header, press + Include Category for the categories you want to map from Skyward to Schoology.
1. Select (Create New Schoology Category) if your Skyward categories do not yet exist in Schoology.
2. Choose the corresponding category from the dropdown if it already exists.
3. If you have chosen to weight your categories in Skyward, you will be able  to view and set the weights of each category. (Note, this must be ok’d by building principals before weighting grading categories.)

We've gone Enterprise! Schoology enterprise that is.

https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/90/231478071_24bf502c2e.jpg

Great news everyone, we've decided to purchase the Schoology enterprise version this year for the secondary buildings. This is going to change the way those of you who used the free version in the past have done things, and I feel that it might interest many of you who haven't tried it in the past.

1. You no longer have to build your courses from scratch, We've linked Skyward and Schoology which means that all of the courses and sections that are built into Skyward are automatically pulled into Schoology.
2. Along those lines, you no longer have to have students join your classes by giving them the code. Because of the Skyward link, all teachers and students are already rostered to the class.
3. You only have to enter grades one time. Schoology will now become your "go to" gradebook. Any assignments that you build in Schoology will automatically be created in your Skyward gradebook, no more grading in Schoology and then turning around and entering them in Skyward.
4. You, and students, have the ability to record audio right in the assignment, discussion, or quiz/tests.

There are too many more things to list in one blog post, so I'll be sharing other tips and tricks as time goes on. If you're concerned that you don't know how this Schoology thing works, don't worry, we'll be having training sessions once school gets underway.

I'm looking forward to "...boldly going where no one has gone before" with all of you this year!

Google Classroom Users Can Now Assign Quizzes Through Quizizz

For anyone out there who has used Kahoot, you probably already know how much fun students have playing, I mean studying with it. I recently found a new tool that is similar in some ways to Kahoot, but offers some interesting differences - that program is called Quizizz.

Like Kahoot, Quizizz allows you to create multiple choice questions. Like Kahoo, Quizizz gives you a code that students type in to their device after going to a login screen (join.quizizz.com). And finally, like Kahoot, students gain points by answering questions correctly, and the faster they answer the questions, the more points they receive. The way that Quizizz differs from Kahoot is that students are not tied to the teacher's overhead to see the questions; students see the questions on their own devices.

Tip of the Week - May the 4th be with you!

Happy Star Wars day to everyone! Today's tip has to do more with general time savings rather than a specific tip for one of our commonly used programs. Most computer mice now a days have a scroll wheel, or some part that allows you to scroll up and down on the computer screen. I've been using mine for quite some time, but it wasn't until recently that I started using one of the functions of the scroll wheel - the double click.

Tip of the Week 4/25/16

Last week's Tip of the Week is a little late, I got all set to write it and then noticed that many of the images that I'd uploaded in previous posts had disappeared and spent the afternoon chasing down the missing images. Hopefully things will go more smoothly from now on.

I wanted talk about keyboard shortcuts this week. I've already told you about two timesaving shortcuts that I use on a daily basis, Ctrl+Tab (for moving between tabs) and Alt+Tab (for moving between open windows) you can see that post here.

Customizing Your Profile Photo for Your Google Account

Have you ever received an email from someone and saw either their picture, or a picture of something that represents them and think "How do I get MY picture to show up?" Today I'm going to show you just how easy it is to link your picture to your Google account.

Tip of the Week 4/15/16

I've decided that, in addition to blogging about educational technology in general, I'm going to start writing weekly tips for programs that we commonly use in our district, mostly centered around Illuminate, Skyward, and various Google programs that we have available to us. If you'd like to learn about something specific, feel free to send me requests and I'll add them to future Tip of the Week posts. 

Now, without further ado, here is this week's Tip of the Week...

Using the Tab Key to Quickly Enter Data

Changing a Student's Password to the Online Testing Portal in Illuminate

If you're having students test online using the Illuminate Student Portal and the student is having trouble logging in, you may need to change the student's password. First off, make sure that the student is entering in the correct username, this will be the students UIC, or state ID number, which can be found in the Illuminate roster; it will be the ID column to the left of the name.

If the username is correct, but it's still not letting the student log in, the next step would be to change the password. There are two ways to do this: the first way would be through the student search function, either through the search bar at the top of the website, or through the Students tab in the toolbar. The second way would be from the online test roster.