Distance learning made "easy" with Formative

A while back I shared 8 Reasons to Love GoFormative. All of what I mentioned back then still holds true, but in this new era of remote teaching, GoFormative has become the most powerful tool in my teaching arsenal. Let me share why.

It is important to note that some of the awesome things I'll be sharing are available to premium/partner users. However also important to state that GoFormative is offering access to their premium features for those facing school closures and that any premium features you use during this time remain active in your Formatives even if later you downgrade to a free plan.

GoFormative and Google Classroom

 GoFormative "talks" to Google Classroom. There is nothing worse than trying to introduce a new tool to students. That initial walk-through of setting up student accounts, having students remember passwords, etc is a pain even in the best of times. GoFormative allows you to import your classes, assign work and pass back scores to Google classroom. Students do not have to do anything other than click on the assignment in their Google classroom, log in to GoFormative using their Google credentials and get to the actual work at hand.

Everything in One Place

This is the best part. GoFormative allows you to embed practically anything directly into your formative assignment. What this means is that you can have a full lesson on Formative that starts with a screencast or video, then a simulation, followed by a slideshow and a Quizziz, all in one place. No need for students to open up new tabs or get lost while trying to remember where to go.

Last week I was tasked to give a PD on using GoFormative for distance learning and created this slideshow walking you through what I consider the best things to embed for distance learning.



And just to be clear, embedding is not a premium feature. It is always available as a stand-alone embed, though as a premium partner you can embed directly into a question type.

And while we are on the subject of embedding, if you embed a Google document using the "second way" mentioned above, and give editing rights to the document to your students, you can effectively transform that document into a discussion board that the students can type into while still in GoFormative!

Of course, if you want to close the "discussion board" you simply change the permissions of the document back to anyone with the link can view.

Real-Time feedback

Once students are working in your Formative, you can give feedback in real-time or asynchronously.  This GoFormative article shows you how. Now, while in a Google meet (or Zoom), you can also choose to display the student answers, hiding their names (which is an actual feature in GoFrmative) and have a full discussion about their answers.

Formative Library

If you don't know where to start or just want to find something quickly, GoFormative also has a library of teacher-created Formatives shared by teachers that can help pave the way to your use of GoFormative during this time.

Some more information about the use of GoFormative during school closures, including a recording of a webinar that walks you through setting everything up can be found in their article "COVID-19 Virtual Classroom Action Plan"

This is how GoFormative has made my transition to remote teaching easy. How about you, what tools are you using and found especially powerful during these times?

Covid-19: Where am I during school closures?

It has been 3 weeks since my school site closed, and a week since we got the news that our schools will be closed for the remainder of the school year. As many of you, I have been scrambling to get things in place so that my students can continue learning. I have now had Google meet check-ins with my middle schoolers, and developed a slew of online lessons and experiences, and I've had to redifine what this school closure means for me and my students several times over. As I was working through this I came across a graphic posted by @CarolLRead that helped me focus and recognize my feelings over the situation and in some ways gave me a path forward. So, I set about re-creating it for use with students as a way to help them recognize that:

1. Their feelings are valid, and their reactions are completely normal.
2. They can move from one "zone" to another at any given time.
3. There are ways to change their outlook and use this time in meaningful ways.

I don't know where we will all land when this is over, but I am hopeful that we will all come out of this a little bit stronger.

If you'd like a copy of the graphic to share with your students, you can create your own by clicking here

Biogeochemical Cycles Digital Dice Games

During my career as a middle school teacher, I've made use of a number of biogeochemical cycle dice games that are readily available in several variations on the internet. A couple of days ago, as I was bringing the illustrated dice I had for the water cycle, I thought that this would be the last year I could use that particular set - they were a little crumpled from handling and the pictures had faded. While creating the dice is not hard, I was a little unmotivated to do it and wondered whether there was another way to still use the activity but save me the work of recreating the dice every so often.

It has now been several days, but I did it! A digital version of the water cycle dice game.




Now, of course, this would not be the way to show it to students, so I posted it up for actual use on a Google site, with a link to a record sheet -

Biogeochemical Cycles Dice Games

Not being able to stop myself at just the water cycle, I then went ahead and created a page and "game" for all other cycle games I use. 

• Carbon - both pre and post-industrial revolution
• Nitrogen
• Phosphorus
• Rock

I purposely re-used the illustrations to give students an idea of the similar reservoirs for matter as it cycles through on Earth and to allow for easy comparison between the cycles.

After playing any of the games, you could have students write stories or draw cartoons with the information they gathered or discuss how difficult/easy it is for a molecule to leave a specific reservoir. If they play more than one, they can also compare their journeys in both (which reservoirs are present in two or more, which processes are similar, etc.)

I would love to hear more ideas about what you could do with them.

Plate Tectonics Google Map

For several years I have been teaching Plate Tectonics to students and we have done several paper-pencil activities that have to do with plotting earthquakes, volcanos and landforms on maps. Over those years, I've searched far and wide for a Google map that included the outlines of the plates in the hopes of turning those activities into a digital product. I've only ever found Google Earth maps with this feature and while cool, the idea of navigating Google Earth with students has always been daunting. This year I had some time and decided to create my own Plate Tectonics Google map.

The link to the map, which you can see above and can use to make a copy is https://bit.ly/2VOCDO. If you decide to use it, I only ask that you share it forward, freely, to any teacher who may also be looking for it.

The project I use it for, which includes not only the link but also a Google slide deck with instructions on how to make a copy of the map, add markers and share it (see below), can be downloaded here

If you do download it, consider leaving a review. Thanks!

Interpreting graphs with "What's Going on in this Graph?"

It's been three years since the New York Times partnered with the American Statistical Association to bring "What's Going on in this Graph?" to teachers and students. The premise is simple, every week during the school year they publish a graph asking students to think about it and discuss their observations whether on the site itself or on Desmos. A week later, they have a reveal, with more information and highlights from the moderation.

I started using the activity with my 8th grade Science and Engineering classes last year, as I struggled to teach them to interpret motion graphs. What I was looking at at the time, was students who jumped to conclusions without stopping to actually look at axes or units,  or choosing to bar graphs over line graphs simply because they were more familiar. I also, at the time, was invested in having students create infographics for projects, but again, they were doing so without actually looking or thinking about why one choice was better than another, or even worse, Googling for ready-made ones and pasting them without realizing that what they had included actually contradicted or was completely irrelevant to the message they were trying to send. The need was obvious - How do I help students acquire the skills they need to analyze graphs and charts.

During the first few months of using them, I presented the graph posted by the NYT that week and used their prompt:

• What do you notice?
• What do you wonder?
• What's going on?

This was fine except for one little thing, they started looking at the comments posted for "correct" answers or as a guide for what to write in their response to me. While it did force them to at least open and read the comments, they were still taking that short-cut of having someone else do the thinking and noticing. So I started adding some other questions that would require the act of reading the graph in order to answer them. These questions were not necessarily of a very high DOK, but rather of the "actually look at the graph" type. Things like

• "What is the military spending worldwide presented on the graph?" for this installment
• "Which destination seems to be the most popular for Thanksgiving Travel?" for this one
• "Describe how the author represents data in the graphic."

These types of questions are always presented before the analysis questions and have served us well to help students look at the graphs before moving on to the deeper analysis posed by: 

• What's going on in this graph? (i.e. what would be an accurate conclusion that can be supported by this graph). To answer this question use the CER framework
• Write a >140 character Tweet that could accompany the sharing of the graph. Your response must include a relevant hashtag.

By now, I have a bundle of 29 such activities in the GoFormative library. Most of which come from the weekly NYT publishing, with a couple added from other sources due to my students' interest in a topic. The activity for me is weekly and takes up about 30 minutes of class time. Since many of them are related to my content it ends up supporting not only the acquisition of the skills for interpreting graphs espoused in the CCSS and NGSS but also addressing ISTE standards for students, making the activity an absolute win.

Documenting Peer-Reviews leads to better builds

As a project-based learning teacher, I know about the importance of feedback during project runs. I constantly conference with students, formally and informally, trying to push them to think critically about the project as well as what they are creating. Unfortunately, these conversations and documents don't always make it into their final projects, leaving both me and the students frustrated come unveiling day. You see, often my students become enamored with an idea and it is really hard to sway them, even when they realize that they should have taken a different approach. They come up with "patch" solutions to "fix" the immediate problem, but they seldom take a step back and realize that they should start from scratch. While I know that the learning is in the process, I also see a lack of transfer of those lessons from project to project - i.e. this did not work last time, why would it work this time?

Case in point - I run a project based on Teach Engineering's "Adding Helpful Carrier Devices to Crutches", and have this whole set-up that walks students through the engineering design process for it (Assistive Technology - Crutches). Last year we even had one of the students as an actual client that needed the device and built to her specifications, supposedly. What happened was that students basically attached whatever they had on hand without much consideration for usability - boxes and bags that make holding the crutches almost impossible, or too big causing a severe imbalance, etc. When challenged about this during first testing, their solutions were always about fixing what was already there (create a hole for the hand or adding dividers so help with the swaying of things), but they never included "take the whole thing off and re-work from scratch". After weeks of patches, students unveiled final products that did comply with the requirements but were not actually useful. The posed to the student we were building for, "Would you buy this?",  was always met with, "No, not really" - even for her own build! This led me to a bigger reflection of where I was dropping the ball and/or what could I do to help promote better builds.

As I pondered this question, I came up with two key things that I've implemented and seem to be working:

The fast build 

As soon as the project is introduced, the students have one class period to create and test a quick prototype. This happens even before the brainstorm. The goal of the fast build is to help students identify where the problems may eventually arise.

The Peer-Review documentation

After the fast build, my students continued through the engineering design project as usual. However, when it came time for testing the first full build, I introduced a "Prototype Evaluation" rubric.

 

The key portion for us was the requirement of providing specific ideas to help the team improve.  I "sold" this to the students as "your team has already thought about different ways to address issues, but that is only 4 brains. You are getting the benefit of 28 other brains that are seeing other things you have to address." After the testing and prototype evaluation rubric has been filled out, each team is responsible for compiling the feedback and presenting a summary of the information obtained from those rubrics and creating a plan of action for the next prototype. 

This peer review documentation seems to be working, though it does add three days of work for each prototype. In this case, I am requiring at least three rounds, extending the project 9 more class periods.  while this may not be feasible in every situation, I believe that it will be time well spent.

What do you think? What scaffolds do you have in place to ensure yous students are successful during their project runs? I'd love to hear about them.

Declutter your district Gmail

Having a district Google account has many benefits. From single sign-on to sharing documents with students and using Google classroom, it provides many opportunities for collaboration and communication, which makes it an invaluable tool. However, dealing with the e-mail attached to that account has always been a nightmare for me. That e-mail account is clogged with newsletters from different vendors and notifications of shared documents from students to the point of making it completely useless. In the past, this has not been a problem since my district was also using an LMS  which made it easy for me to bypass the use of that Gmail. However, it looks like it may no longer be the case, so I needed to find a way to make that Gmail account work more efficiently for me, and the answer was not as difficult as I thought it would be. It all relies on filtering your e-mails.

Filtering the vendors

1. Click on any e-mail you receive from a vendor to open it

2. Click on the three little dots at the top right of the message to open the "more" menu and select "filter messages like this"

3. On the screen that opens, select "Create Filter" and then choose what you want to do with those e-mails.

Filtering the invitations to edit

This was my biggest issue. No matter how many times I've asked my 240 stduents that when they share something with me (which I do want, of course) they should "skip sending a notification", they almost never do - that requires paying attention to details, which is not their forte. So on any given day, I would get hundreds of "____ has shared a document" e-mails. Filtering those was not as straightforward since the option to "filter messages like this" is not available. However, it can also be done.

1. Open your Gmail. Click on the Gear icon and then on Settings.

2. Select Filters and Blocked Addresses

3. Scroll down until you see Create a New Filter

4. In the box that appears, create the filter

5. Once you click continue, select what you want the filter to do and then click "create filter"

I selected "skip the inbox" for these types of e-mails just in case something gets filtered that I then need to go back to at some point. These e-mails will never make it to your inbox so if you ever need to see them, you will need to click on "more" on the left side of the screen, and then on "all e-mail".

It is important to note that all these filters you created do not necessarily apply retroactively. Anything received before you created the filter will still appear in your inbox unless you do something about it. However, anything new will be filtered according to the rules you just created.

So there it is. I hope you find this useful and if you have other tips I'd love to hear about them. On to teaching students about the wonder of BCC and never using "reply all".