2024 School Year Kickoff

Welcome back to another school year!!
Please see below for updates on Google Classroom. 

Providing student engagement signals for Google Drive file attachments in Google Classroom:

With this update, teachers will have easily accessible visibility into whether students have made progress on assignments with Drive attachments through pre-existing workflows in Classroom. This helps identify students who may need additional support and make more informed decisions about how to assist their students. 

Click here for more information. 

Creating Groups in Google Classroom

Teachers can create groups in Google Classroom, which is convenient for issuing work to a group of students rather than the entire class. Now, teachers can differentiate content across sub-sections of their class based on their students' needs. For example, teachers can create groups based on reading levels, and as their class adapts, they can edit group members or delete groups within their class. 

Student groups in the Classroom

Click here for more information. 

Sharing Google Classroom Resources

Teachers can share materials like assignments, lessons, etc.; the recipient will import and adapt them in their Classroom. 

Click here for more information.

For more updates on your favourite Google Workspace tools. Please subscribe to the Google Blog https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/ and fill out the following.

Google Workspace Updates

 Stay up to date with Google Workspace Updates! Click on the icon to visit the subject-specific blog. 

  

New to Google Classroom - Practice Sets!

 New to Google Classroom - Practice Sets!

Google has recently announced a new and powerful tool that will be coming to Google Classroom, called 'Practice Sets'.  Practice sets can be given to students in the same fashion that homework is assigned.   Practice sets can be created using new or existing material.

The power behind practice sets is twofold, for the student's and the teacher's experiences.  Once the practice set has been created, Google's powerful artificial intelligence tools will review the practice set and find useful videos and concept cards that can help the student better understand the concepts being presented.  Upon the teacher's approval, these videos and concept cards can be embedded into the practice setting.  The 'auto grading' feature within practice sets will let the students know when they are correct and will provide the teacher-approved videos and concept cards where appropriate.  This will provide immediate feedback for the students as they are working through the practice set.

From the teacher's experience, practice sets provide an enhanced grading view which will show the class's performance and results of every attempt made by the students.  Furthermore, the AI tools will provide insights using classwide trends to inform teachers on what concepts the class or individual students may be struggling with.

Check out a detailed video on Google Practice Sets here

5 minute assessment reviews: Triangulation

 

Hello again,

Today we are going to begin looking at how to triangulate your assessment, both by including observation, conversation and product in judging your students' mastery and by using three points of data guide your assessment.

The first video discusses using observation, conversation and product to assess our students.

The second video begins to look at using three points of data collection (that is three assessments) to both guide your teaching and also make your assessment more valid.  This video is assuming that the 3 points of data are all equally weighted an that the course, or the unit is scaffolded and one concept is built on another.  In a subject like English (my area), the assumption is that the entire course builds upon earlier concepts and understandings.  In a subject like science or math, each unit of study might build upon earlier concepts in the course or just the unit and be scaffolded in that way.

I hope that these ideas can open a conversation about how teachers use triangulation to make their assessments fair and reliable.

The next video will dig deeper into looking at most recent and most consistent marks and I will do an English teacher explanation of measure of central tendency.

Let's keep the conversation going.

5 Minute Assessment Reviews: Damian Cooper on Triangulation & Curriculum Expectations

This begins a short series of 5 minute (or less) assessment reviews.  Like many of you, I hear terms in education and know what they generally mean but find myself needing to do a quick google search to get the specifics if I want to think more deeply about the topic.

Now that I am focusing on assessment as your faithful Secondary Assessment Teacher, I thought I would share a few deeper dives into some of the terms and concepts we teachers talk about and are guided by every day .

The first in this series is an overview that is presented by Damian Cooper.  It will give you a quick, 5 minute overview of what triangulation is and how that fits in with our own overall and specific curriculum expectations. Cooper suggests that using technology is the way to collect triangulated evidence and we will explore this more later in the series.

In the next post, I will look more specifically at triangulation and what that means in a short video.

If you would like to learn more about a specific aspect of assessment, evaluation or reporting and all the terms, ideas and examples therein, please email me and suggest a post.  

Now, on to Damian Cooper:

Assessment v. AI

Will the struggle between valid assessment of students and Artificial Intelligence Chatbot generated work become the new Battle Royale in teaching?  

The P.D. session on February 17, 2023 on ChatGPT and other AI applications gave us a glimpse of what is to come.  Some teachers expressed concern that applications like ChatGPT might make plagiarism and cheating harder to detect.  So, let's take a look at some ways that we can make our assessments and evaluations of students reliable, valid and rich (and more plagiarism resistant).

You can download a copy of the infographic here.  Feel free to print it or share it.

Don't forget that Growing Success and Learning for All still apply and can help guide you.

Combatting "Fake News": Helping Students Distinguish Between Fact and Fiction

There is so much information in the world that we must teach students to distinguish what is true information and what is false information.  EBSCO has a useful infographic to help you teach students to use critical thinking when choosing what to believe.

There is a link below the image to a .pdf that can be shared with students.

FACT or FICTION? Ferret Out Fake News