By Christophe Gevrey

It's A Blog Post

About Nothing...

@joe_edtech/@LisaBerghoff

I was recently asked why I started writing this blog (more than 7 years ago in another district). My honest answer was that I wanted a place to share some of the incredible teaching I had seen and some of the really remarkable ways colleagues were using instructional technology in their classes. Very few of the Free Tech Tools were "discovered" by me. They were being used in ways that impressed or intrigued me, and I think we should share good teaching ideas as much as we can. We are stronger when we learn together.

By the way, few of them were strictly technological solutions to teaching problems. Most of them were about using the resources around us to help us or our students think about things in ways we never had before. Knowing that this is probably the last post on this blog that I'll author, Dan Kim will partner with Lisa next year, I spent a lot of time thinking about what I should focus on here. Then it hit me like a Festivus Pole. I should focus on nothing...well, almost nothing.

Being nostalgic, I went back and had a conversation with the first teacher I ever paired with on a 1:1 project. He is an economics teacher and I asked him if there were any really interesting online tools he had used in his classes recently and he turned me on to yadayadayadaecon.com.

Economics professors from Eastern Illinois University (one of my alma maters and what many consider to be the Harvard of the Midwest) and Baker University developed economics courses based on Pop Culture and put their heads together to create a web resource for teaching economics based on TV's Seinfeld. From the website, "This site will be part of an ongoing and expanding attempt to make these sorts of popular culture teaching materials widely and conveniently available. We are doing this in the hopes that the materials hosted here, now and in the future, will be useful to economics educators."

Head to yadayadayadaecon.com and you'll come across 7 full web pages of economics lessons ranging from savings and cost-benefit analysis to variable costs and product differentiation. The TV Clips are available to the classroom thanks to criticalcommons.org, an "advocacy coalition that supports the use of media for scholarship, reasearch and teaching, providing resources, information and tools for scholars, students, educators and creators."

I'll let you grab a Twix or a Big Salad and peruse the site on your own. (By the way, the restaurant pictured above, which was called Monk's in the series, was famous before Seinfeld, the focus of a Susanne Vega song in the 1980s. There - a useless fact about nothing.)

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Pop Culture can be a powerful tool to use when teaching new concepts. Critical Commons is just one of the many teaching tools for video in the classroom. If you know of other, similar sites, please post them in the comments below.

Thoughts and Ideas For Ending The School(ogy) Year

4 Schoology Most FAQ

@LisaBerghoff/@Joe_EdTech

Remember when you were a kid and you thought your teachers lived at school? I can remember thinking that my teachers must be so sad when the kids leave for the summer. Really, who will fill out all of their worksheets? Now that I have a few years in on the teaching perspective I can honestly say that I think often the teachers are more anxious for summer to begin than the students. One thing that non-educators don't really understand about this time of year is that we still have one foot firmly planted in this year and another foot already planted in next year. Planning and organizing for next year has, if not already begun, is definitely on our minds and our to-do lists. 

There are many questions as we look to utilizing Schoology as our learning management system for next year. Here are four of the  most frequently asked questions about closing out the school year, along with some tips and suggestions for the future.

END OF THE YEAR 4 Most FAQ WITH SCHOOLOGY

I've got my class materials organized just the way I like them in Schoology, do I need to re-do that whole process for next year? 

Actually, you can easily save all of your materials to your resources and copy them to your new courses in two simple steps.

Step 1: When you are in your course, click the Options button and then choose Save Course To Resources.

Step 2: When you have your new course, you will click Add Materials and then Import From Resources. 

Here's step 1: 

And here's step 2:

What if I don't do anything? Will my old classes and materials disappear?

Not to worry. At the end of the grading period, all of the classes will automatically be archived. You can still access your archived courses in the future by 

1. Click on Courses in the top navigation bar.

2. Click the See All tab in the lower right hand corner of the box. 

3. Click on the Archived tab. 

Archived classes don't go away. You can still access your materials, grade book, and members page. 

Going through my grade book is making my head spin! Is there anyway to see all of the assignments and their settings at once?

This is a great question. And there is a great answer.

Yes! 

1. In your gradebook, click the three vertical dots in the upper right hand corner. 

2. Select Bulk Edit

I know everything is saved and archived, but I would still like to have a hard copy of my grade book. How do I do that in Schoology?

This is definitely possible and easy to do. 

1. In your grade book, click the three vertical dots in the upper right hand corner.

2. Click on Export

3. Export the CSV file

Do you have any suggestions for wrapping up the School(ogy) year? I'd love to hear them!
Post in the comments below. 

Standards-Based Grading in Schoology

@Joe_EdTech/
@LisaBerghoff

This week's guest post is by Dan Kim. Beginning in August of 2018, Dan Kim will begin serving as Deerfield High School's Director of Instructional Technology.

Carol Dweck, the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, has written extensively about student mindsets in the way they value motivation, intelligence, and academic success. Dweck’s 2006 book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success differentiates between two types of learners: those of a “fixed” and “growth” mindset. Carol Dweck’s work is often credited with partially inspiring the movement towards Standards Based Grading as an alternative to Traditional grading systems. Adherents attempt to promote the growth mindset through changing the way that they assess student work. According to Tomlinson & McTighe 2006, Standards-based grading “involves measuring students’ proficiency on well-defined course objectives.”

Here is an example of one of the standards-based grading rubrics used in the DHS English Department

So Schoology:

To set up your gradebook for Standards-based grading first click on the “Grade Setup” on the left-hand side of your course page. The first thing to do is to create a Scale. Now traditional graders will be using either the THSD 113 scale, or the THSD 113 P/F (Pass/Fail) scales. Clicking on the yellow star next to the scales will make it the default scale 

To create your own scale click:

·         Click Add and select Scale

·         Once you Add Scale it will give you the option to base it off of percentage or points.

Here is a (very simple) example scale:

Before you create and grade assignments you should change the default Gradebook Scale to the one that you've created. 

Now when you create an assignment, you can attach your newly created scale to it.

For teachers who do not grade based on numerical values, Schoology's gradebook unfortunately does not allow for Alpha characters to be entered. There is, however, a way to display only text in scores for students. 

The paradox of Standards-based grading is that there are no universal standards and procedures that teachers use. Within any department, there can be teachers who use SBG in a variety of ways. While Schoology may not have the perfect answer to accommodating all grading systems, we can be successful by making adjustments and being creative.

What are your thoughts and experiences with Standards-Based Grading? Post your ideas below. 

May 8 - Gmail Upgrade

Gmail's Official Blog Photo

Gmail Gets An Upgrade!

@joe_edtech/@LisaBerghoff

It is May and even I cringed when I first heard that Gmail was getting a big facelift. I think it is natural to wonder, "Well, what favorite feature am I gonna lose now?" But my fear quickly turned to pure happiness when I saw the new update to Gmail! We didn't lose anything and they added 3 features that make Gmail much more user-friendly.

View Your Calendar Side by Side With Your Email

Actually, it's even more than just the Calendar, but that's a start. With the new Gmail upgrade, you can see your daily calendar at a glance on the right-hand side of the screen. While you are reading an email with a deadline, or a suggested meeting, you can scroll through your calendar, add items, or pop your calendar out to look at a larger selection.

Seeing my calendar on the same screen with my email would be a big enough win for me, but you actually have options. There are icons that let you choose Calendar for the side view:

Or Google Keep if you use that:

Or Tasks:

Use Smart Reply to Quickly Answer Emails

Smart Reply is a feature many of us have had on our phones for a couple of years now. Essentially, Google uses AI to suggest short answers to questions posed in your emails. In a pinch, you can just click the Smart Reply suggestion and hit send!

Image from TechWeez

Snooze Emails for Response Later

It's about time! I've been using 3rd party apps for this for a long time now. But snoozing is now native to Gmail. 

When you hover over your messages, you'll see some pop-up icons on the right-hand side of the message box. The clock icon on the far right is "Snooze." When you click it...

You can choose to hide the email until you are ready for it. Hit "Snooze" until next Monday, and the email will be hidden from your Inbox, but return next week!

When you are ready to try the new Gmail features, you can click the Settings Gear at the top of the page and select "Try the new Township High School District 113 Mail."

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I only covered my favorite 3 new features. There are more! If I didn't cover your favorite new feature, please tell us about it in the comment box below. We'll be sure to add it in a future FTT post.