Edmonds Digital Learning

One of the benefits of using Google Forms is the fact that it automatically creates a summary of the data in an easy to read format.  Pie charts, bar graphs, and percentages that provide an overview of the information.  This works great if you are a collaborator or own of the original form.   What happens if you want to share the summary of results, but don’t want to provide other people with editing privileges to your original form?    Don’t worry!  There is a way. Scenario 1:   The class takes a survey.  You then decide that it would be great if the students were able to view and analyze the results.  Is this possible?  Yes! Go to the the summary of results page.  (From the Form this is under the Responses Tab , from Sheets this is under the Form Tab ) Once you are on the Summary of Results page, select Publish Analytics at the top of the page.   This action will allow the people who responded ...

Common Sense Media have launched a new game that allows you to check your Digital (Moral) Compass.  Called Welcome to Anywhere , it allows students to explore real-life issues with social media, online peer pressure, self-image, and more. Using simple story paths, players take each character through a dilemma and see how their choices affect them.  Each "level" ends with a game of some sort (e.g. sorting statements into positive and negative online behaviours). It's a great way to look at consequences of online/offline decisions, and to show students how the divide between the real world and digital world is being eroded rapidly. The cute animation and overly moral tone will likely be a turn-off to high school students, but could always be used as a springboard for a project for students to design their own "choose your own adventure" story and game to teach younger students about issues they may face in high school.

The newest updates to Google Classroom allow multiple teachers to work and collaborate in a single Classroom class. With the exception of deleting the class altogether, additional teachers can perform all of the same functions as the primary teacher, including: Creating assignments and announcements Viewing and grading submissions Participating in comments on the class’ “stream” Inviting students to the class Receiving email notifications related to the class Finally, in response to teacher feedback, Google have made two additional changes that will make Classroom easier to use: Autosaving grades - Grades will now be autosaved as they’re entered, meaning teachers can grade assignments over multiple sessions but still return those assignments to students all at one time. Improved notifications - Teachers and students will now receive email notifications when private messages are left on assignments.

In my last post , I mentioned the concept of "fair use," which is a term that many students think they understand, and many completely misunderstand, thinking that it gives them carte blanche over copyrighted content because they are a student. The video below explains the concept of fair use in a classroom-friendly way: In most cases, students are covered by fair use laws, until they decide to make their work public (ie. published on the web).  At that point, they need to ask themselves serious questions about the nature of their use of copyrighted works. Here are some tools that can help them decide: University of Minnesota: Thinking Through Fair Use -- a simple checklist to help students understand fair use. Fair Use Evaluator -- more in-depth resources to go deeper with copyright law. A solid bibliography will help students understand the ownership of the information they use.  The golden rule always should be: "if in doubt, leave it ou...

Guest post from AMS teacher, Dean Nakanishi : Unfortunately, I had to discover a new way to detect shared plagiarism within Hapara / Google Docs. If you suspect two students have shared significant portions of their essay with each other (but you can’t remember who paper #1 belonged to and you don’t want to go back and re-read 40 to find it)… Go to Hapara -> “Sharing” -> “All Docs” Copy a few sentences of suspected Paper #2  Click on the Search “magnifying glass” icon  Choose the drop down arrow to “Full Text Search” (instead of “Title Search”)  Paste in sample sentences and search class by class  It will eliminate students until you arrive at the class that had “sharer” of Paper #1  You can confirm that they shared by checking Sharing History  You can confirm the copy and paste by student #2 by checking Revision History (more details) to see how their essay “suddenly appeared”

Now that many of our students are publishing content beyond the walls of the classroom, we need to make them aware of real world consequences of content they are using. While it can be considered "fair use" to use copyrighted music in a class presentation, when that presentation hits the web, students can be subject to copyright infringement claims.  This rarely results in a lawsuit, but students can have requests for their material to be removed from a hosting site (YouTube, Blogger, etc.) -- too many requests and they can find themselves banned from publishing to these sites. Good digital citizens will try to find copyright-free content to use in the presentations (and cite correctly).  A great resource for this is the Creative Commons Search: http://search.creativecommons.org/ Creative Commons is a licensing system where content creators can allow for the use, re-use, and modification of their content (either with or without attribution). The search ...

Have you checked out Synergyse yet?  There have been a few posts previously about this great training tool for Google Apps that is provided for users in the Edmonds School District.  The great news is that Synergyse has added to their training materials!   Google Forms Have you been wanting to create a formative assessment, quiz, or survey using forms, but not sure how to start?  The training modules for Google Forms range anywhere from 10 seconds to 2 1/2 minutes and can be accessed right from the form you are creating.   These modules will help take you through the steps.   Each training is divided into these categories: Introduction to Forms Working with Forms Adding Questions or Other Items to a Form Collaboration Publishing your Form Managing Forms response data Additional Features You can choose to play all of the modules in a category or simply select the topic you are interested in learning about at the time. Google+ Go...