Assignment #7: Assessment/Polling-Data gathering

Here is a Kahoot we will be using in Early College Prep.  It was a public Kahoot that fit our needs.

https://play.kahoot.it/#/k/9703effb-18f9-4c68-b9ef-d1b27f964162

This is a Socrative quiz I made.  I did not know that I could make it into a printable PDF to use/share with students who may have been absent.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6X564GuZ2JsMWFJdFJ2b19wRFU/view?usp=sharing

Assignment 6- Classroom

I really liked this idea of classroom.  I think it will make it easier for students to have all of their classes in one place.  The thing I really like is the possibly to add the links as resources to complete assignments.  I will for sure be using this in the current year.

Activity 5- Apps, add-ons, and extentions

After being consumed by all of the options out there (really spent too much time looking at all of the different things out there), I can say that I have mixed feelings about the options for me personally and professionally.  Here is why:

• Excited: so many cool, and free, options for diving deeper into content and technology.  The add-ons for Google forms alone is something that can have a major impact on my timing and effectiveness as a professional this year.  Knowing that if I ever think about something that I want, or think would be great for use in my classroom, all I have to do is search for it and it probably already exists.
• Negative: I feel that I wasted a lot of time trying out some bad tools and just having some okay results with others.  My fear is that I could become too obsessed with the tool and forget about the purpose the tool is supposed to fill.  Dare I say that maybe I am becoming a little old fashioned here, but I think some of these things could fall under the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) theory?  Outside of a few things that I find really useful, I feel that I would have to spend a lot more time with some of the others to feel comfortable enough to use it with students.

This being all said; do I think that I should keep trying in order to stay up to date and to know the best options out there for my students and me-  YES!!!  

Activity 4- Google Suite

20% time: First week ideas

The above link is for the first week of using 20% in college prep.  It is mainly ideas from another educator's webpage, but customized for our use.  Rather than referring back to the webpage, I thought it would be easier to have it in a working document that can be used and shared by everyone teaching college prep courses.  We are still working on determining if this is the way that we want to go or if we just use more of a "Genius Hour" idea.

• How will you use your Google Drive in your teaching practice?
• I will use Google Drive for all documents that are going to and from my students this year. With Chromebooks in the classroom and use of Google classroom, it will provide my students and me with the ability to easily access all of the information. Plus, I really like that it saves in real time and I can go back and see revision history for the "I swear I did it. I don't know how it got deleted" problem.
• How could cloud computing be a useful tool in your classroom?  
• I think it can be very beneficial by allowing more individual student feedback and attempting to go paperless. It will allow me to send students feedback on their progress and/or final projects that I can do from home instead of one on one. Plus, I don't have to worry about hauling paper around and having a student claim that I must have lost it.
• What are the pros and cons of using it with students?
• Many of my thoughts are listed in my previous statements, but I feel the biggest con that I have right now is that I am worried about staying on top of the organization of it all. My own drive gets disorganized quickly without many students sharing things with me. Also, I am a little worried about having students with an organization system in their own Drive. I plan on ensuring that all of my students set up a seperate folder in their drive for just my class. It is the modern way of students buying notebooks and folders for each class.

Screencasting

I have done screen-casting in the past and find it very valuable for the idea of staff training and/or student use to demonstrate understanding.  This is a video I made with SMART record to help our staff understand how to use the mastery manager online test option.  I plan on doing a follow-up version to show how to send results out via our school email.  The only thing I need to figure out now is how to get a test-safe browser onto the Chromebooks to prevent students from opening new tabs during their test- if you have any ideas, I would love to know.