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.

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.

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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!

For When You Just Need the Text to Speak to You

Last year, our district started its 1-to-1 initiative by putting Chromebook carts in my classroom and each eighth grade classroom (because we had all taken REMC's Blended Learning in the Classroom course).  I was on one of the teams that had a number of students who had accommodations stating that texts and assessments be read aloud to them.  My problem that year was that I only had support during one quarter of my classes, so if I was going to read every chapter from the book, and every quiz and test aloud, ALL of my students had to hear me; while this benefitted some of my students without IEPs, many of my students complained of being distracted.

In order to make sure that I was meeting the needs of all of my students, I started recording myself reading chapters using Audacity, but found that that was very time consuming; there had to be another way.  I'm not sure how I discovered Chromevox, which is a screen reader extension for Google Chrome, but I do know that many of my students benefited from hearing the text read aloud while they followed along in their books.