EdTech @ ISB

Transforming Teaching & Learning

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Uploading Videos to Microsoft Stream

Microsoft Stream (https://web.microsoftstream.com/) is a new feature of Office 365 that allows us to upload videos and share them with anybody in our organization. This means that in order to view a video shared on Stream, you must have an ISB email and password. This is not a suitable option for videos that are to be viewed by parents or by students in Grade 3 or below.

Some interesting features of Stream include automatic searchable transcript of the audio and the ability to link a form to the video for feedback and interactivity.

First, log in to Stream from any Office 365 tool (like Outlook Online, Word Online, etc.)

Upload your video under the “Create” menu. You can also create a Channel for your course (Grade 6 Humanities; Grade 10 Math; etc.) to group all the videos related to your course.

Once your video is uploaded, you can go to the viewing page. Grab the URL to share in a DX thought, or use the Share button to embed the video into your blog or into a DX Lesson.

Here’s an example of a video embedded from Stream. If you aren’t logged in to 365, it will not show properly. Click on the video and login to see it!

https://web.microsoftstream.com/video/06ecc1ce-4e04-4994-a485-bf9d4370c023

 

 

Using Handbrake to Compress Video

To make working with video easier, it often helps to compress the final video before you try to upload it anywhere. This is especially important if your video is large and/or if you are working on a slower internet connection. All ISB computers came with Handbrake installed. It is designed specifically to compress video. If you don’t have it on your computer, you can download it at https://handbrake.fr/ 

Once you’ve checked that you have the newest version of Handbrake (version 1.3.1), select your video as the source file and choose preset VeryFast720p30. This will ensure a high quality output without taking too much timeI encoded a 5 minute video (700MB to start with) in about 2 minutes (26MB when it was done). 

Please note, if you are downloading a video from YouTube or another service, these videos are usually already optimized and will not always benefit from being run through Handbrake. 

 

HS Online Learning Exemplars: Weeks 1-3

eLearning Exemplars Main Table of Contents

Chinese

Captivate/Confer/Consolidate: Students were given a task to discuss the impact of the coronavirus outbreak on their lives. First, they watched a video that explained the origin of the virus, the impact of the outbreak, and how we should protect ourselves from infection. Then, students participated in an online discussion to reflect on and talk about how their lives have been affected by this health emergency. The culminating activity was an individual recording to share their thoughts with the class. Finally, students commented on their peer’s recordings. View an example here.

Design

Confer/Clarify: Before CNY, students began working on posters to share their Designer Persona. This week, through DX and blogs, students have been able to connect with each other to improve their work. Their published posters demonstrate this cycle of feedback, refinement, and reflection.

Angela

Stephanie

Sofia

Bill

English

Clarify: In this DX post, Allison provides organization and clarity for her grade 10 students by having all of her assignments, rubrics, due dates, and FAQ documents for the unit, linked in one post that is pinned to the top of the page and easy to navigate.

Math

Clarify/Consolidate: Angie uses the DX Feed to post daily announcements while using the Materials section to keep things organized for students. Students are able to see both the big picture of the unit and the daily lessons that include written instructions and short instructional videos that have interactive questions embedded throughout.

Science

Captivate: In IB Biology, Caroline provided students with relevant information about COVID-19 from a science perspective on the 1st day of the extended break. She also finds ways for students to interact with biology through various online simulations.​

Links from posts:

SciShow Epigenetics video

Lick Your Rats

Epigenetics explorations

Flu Attack! How A Virus Invades Your Body (NPR)  + video

How Bad Will the Coronavirus Outbreak Get? Here Are 6 Key Factors (NYTimes)

Mining coronavirus genomes for clues to the outbreak’s origins (Science Magazine)

MS Online Learning Exemplars: Weeks 1-3

eLearning Exemplars Main Table of Contents

Humanities

Care/Captivate: In these videos/screencasts, Nikki & Krista connect with their students in a personal way by making videos that include their faces and voices, rather than just typing out instructions. This makes the e-learning feel less isolating for the students. They also keep the videos short enough that students won’t get overwhelmed and lose focus.

Intro to Animal Farm

Rise of Sumerian City-States + Book Talk

Math

Captivate: Lucas regularly posts optional opportunities for his students to synthesize and extend their learning, giving them choice on the level of challenge they feel ready to take on. Most of these opportunities are from outside resources. As some students might be in challenging situations, offering this choice to students is an effective way to differentiate and give them more ownership over their learning without adding a lot of stress for either teacher or students.

PE and Health

Collaborate/Care: In this team, the teachers make one workout video and share it across multiple sections of the grade 6 course, so as not to duplicate the work involved in creating the content. In the video and the teachers’ comments, they show care for their students’ well-being by explaining how physical activity contributes to physical and mental well-being. Having the video made by their teacher makes it feel more personal which helps students feel less isolated.

Science

Captivate: In this DX post, Mona & Matt get around the lack of hands-on materials available to their students by using an online resource. This resource lets students play around with virtual circuits, dragging and dropping them to experiment with the results. Using this resource is an effective way to engage students in inquiry and spark their interest in the topic!

Spanish

Clarify/Captivate/Confer: In this video, peek into Kevin’s Spanish 1 class. He provides a clear task (class agenda) and captivates students via the bilingualism and flexibility of the task.  Students share their work not only with their teachers but also with each other.

ES Online Learning Exemplars: Weeks 1-3

eLearning Exemplars Main Table of Contents

Routines

Care/Confer: One way to do set new routines and expectations is to ensure students have a dedicated learning space with necessary materials, free of distractions. To set up this routine, Tom shared his own learning space in a Seesaw post and asked students to share their learning spaces in the comments.

Clarify: In this flexible learning environment, making expectations, learning objectives, and the “schedule” clear will support students in building habits and developing a routine. For 4SM, Scott created a slideshow for the day before posting his Reader’s and Writer’s Workshop Lessons. The slideshow includes the Content and Language Objectives for the day. He adds reminders, directions, and sentence frames to help his students be successful.

Math

Care/Clarify: In this lesson, Julie reteaches a concept for her students who need extra practice/support using a combination of visuals, text, and audio.

Captivate/Confer/Consolidate: In this lesson, the grade 4 team uses pictures to engage students and encourages them to discuss their learning with their parents. They then helps students solidify their learning by creatively telling their teacher everything they know about fractions.

Reader’s Workshop

Challenge: In this lesson, Renee revisits Pointer Power and encourages her Kinder students to use this strategy to support their reading.

Clarify/Challenge/Consolidate: After explaining how to describe characters, Veronika challenges students to consolidate their learning by sharing a picture of their stop and jot. View lesson.

Writer’s Workshop

Care/Captivate: In this lesson, Judy speaks slowly and clearly. She uses visuals to engage students and support the flow of the mini-lesson.

Care/Clarify: In this lesson, Stephanie shares that she misses them and acknowledging that she will be reminding them of things they already know in this video. By re-explaining the strategy of ‘crashing the parts together,’ she clarifies understanding for her students.

Clarify: In this lesson, Erin offers structure and support via both a template and detailed, step-by-step directions.

Visual Arts

Care/Captivate/Clarify: The ES Visual Arts team has been making short videos for each day of eLearning. These videos have demonstrated care by making personalizing learning for students through being silly and having fun. They captivate students because they are short, interesting, and funny. They help to clarify by making the learning explicit through clear content & language objectives and directions. The team has also been leaving voice recorded comments for each student response, which helps students feel connected. 

Mix-a-Pokemon (Kinder)

Superhero Pose Drawing (Grade 3)

Getting Started with Rescue Time

Image result for rescuetime logo

 

 

RescueTime is an app that can help users understand how they are using their time on their laptop. It can be used in a lot of different ways, but here at ISB we want to focus on empowering students and teachers to take control of their usage and to strive for intentional, balanced and productive use of technology.

Getting Started

To get started, you need to do three things:

  1. Download and install the app from Self Service (or from the RescueTime website).
  2. Create an account for the free/solo/lite. If you are a student, I suggest you use your school email address.
  3. Once you’ve installed the app, be sure to sign in from the menu bar at the top of your screen.

 

Now what?

Once RescueTime is installed and running, it will start collecting data on how you use your computer. This includes websites you visit, documents that you are working on,  and other programs that you use (like PowerPoint or Photoshop).

Setting Up Categories

Part of the way that RescueTime works is by categorizing the sites and apps that you use. It has some default categories (like Communication, Social Media, Design, Entertainment) and default values (from Very Productive to Very Distracting) built-in. RescueTime may not recognize some of the sites and platforms that we use at ISB and might consider them as “Uncategorized” and/or might consider them to be “Distracting”.  As a user, you can create and manage different categories as well as change its productivity value.

For example, I have created a sub-category in “Miscellaneous” for the different ISB Platforms like DX and OneDrive and have rated that time as “Very Productive”:

Once your categories are set up (and I would not recommend spending too much time doing this! You can always refine your categories as you go…), you are ready to take a look at some of your reports:

The Dashboard

The Dashboard is where you get started with RescueTime. This will give you a quick overview of your time for the day. You can also quickly jump to some activity reports for more details.

 

The Productivity Report

The Productivity Report shows your “pulse” based on the different values that have been assigned to different sites and apps:

You can click on each level to see how much time you spent on different sites and apps:

 

The Applications & Websites Report

You can also view your usage data sorted by app and site. Because we use the free version, there are some limitations to the amount of data that we have access to. A very interesting view in this report is the “All Activities by Hour” view. This helps you see when and how you were using your laptop throughout the day (and night!):

Troubleshooting

There are a couple of things to keep in mind when using RescueTime.

The first is that users can disable RescueTime tracking at any time! It can be turned off (quit) or paused; it can also be set to NOT start automatically. Because our focus is on awareness, understanding, and empowerment, it does you no good to turn it off! But, if your RescueTime reports aren’t showing as much data as you were expecting, check to make sure that it isn’t being turned off on accident (or on purpose!).

The second issue that you may find is that RescueTime is not collecting individual web page data. First, your Mac must be on Mojave in order to collect this information. All students should be running this OS; most teachers will be. Second, you need to make sure you grant access to allow RescueTime to collect this information. In order to do this, you can follow the instruction here.

Enabling Parent View of Assignment Feedback in DX

DX gives teachers lots of tools and features to help manage assignments: from calendar deadlines, to seeing who  has and hasn’t turned in the work on time (and sending messages to those who haven’t). There are also some great feedback tools that you can use with students: rubrics, annotations to submitted work, as well as written and audio comments.

You can now let parents see this feedback on an assignment by assignment basis!

On a specific assignment, a teacher can enable the ability for parents to see comments and scores, and even to view the submission itself. This can also be done retroactively.

A parent can then navigate to a particular course for their child and click “View Gradebook”:

 

If the teacher has allowed parents to only view score and comments, the parents will see the rubric and the general comments:

 

If the teacher has also allowed parents to view the submission, they can get even more information: Comments, annotations, self-assessment and teacher assessment:

There still isn’t a way for teachers to know if a parent has viewed the submission, so you may want to send them an email (easy to pull from PowerSchool) or ask parents to sign some sort of slip to acknowledge that they have seen the feedback.

MS and HS Report Card Grade Entry Options

Because there are some limitations to how PowerTeacher Pro (PTP) allows us to view our assessment data, we have worked to create some different workflows to help you enter levels of achievement for each reporting strand come report card time.

** All of the following is assuming that you have entered your assessment data in PowerTeacher Pro **

Just Use PowerTeacher Pro

If you plan on just using PTP, there are some helpful hints that might make it easier:

  • When looking at the “Standards Grade” view, what is displayed in each column depends on if you are in Middle School or High School In Middle School, the default is to not show anything and teachers can make a summary judgment of how each student has done at each standard. In High School, the default is to show the most recent level of achievement and this can be overridden by the teacher at any time.
  • You can use the Inspector to see what data contributes to each standard level of achievement if you think it should be overridden.
  • If you have levels of achievement for different standards, you can use the filter in order to see all of the standards make up a given strand so that you can make a strand determination for the report card.
  • You can also use the filters to show only the strands (or the SALs) so that you can see what is going on the report for each student.

SBGR Report Entry: Student – by – Student View

We have developed a new Student-by-Student view that pulls together all of the assessment by strand an orders it chronologically to help you determine what level of achievement should appear on the report. You can also write your comment for the student here as you look over all of the student assessment data. Some pointers for this view:

  • You can access this view by selecting it from menu on the left.
  • Assessments are ordered chronologically from left (oldest) to right (newest).
  • Formative assessments show as blue italics.
  • If you hover over the level of achievement, it will indicate which standard was assessed.
  • You can go student-by-student using the sideways arrows, or use the dropdown to choose a specific student.
  • You can use the tabs at the top to see what feedback was given to the student in previous reporting terms.
  • To return to your list of classes, select the view from the menu on the left again.

Class View – Standards Data Report

In order to see all of your class’ assessment data in one view, ordered chronologically and separated by strand, you can generate a static report that we refer to as the heatmap. You can then use this report to make determinations for each student and then go back to PTP or the student-by-student view to input the data and to write your comments. You can access the heatmap reports through the Apps tab in PTP:

Once you configure the report for downloading, you will see your class roster with the assessment data for each strand listed chronologically. You can use this view to help you make determinations for each strand and then use PowerTeacher Pro to enter the data for report cards.

What’s Best for You?

As mentioned previously, all of these tools rely on teachers collecting and recording assessment data in PTP. Unfortunately, none of these individual tools will be perfect for everybody on their own so you may come up with a way to combine the functionality of each one to suit your needs. For example:

  • Continue to use PowerTeacher Pro to enter your grades and comments. Nothing changes from how you’ve done things in the past.
  • Use the Standard Data Report to help you determine your Strand levels of achievement. Enter your grades and comments using PowerTeacher Pro.
  • Use the SBGR Report Entry tool to view your assessment data and enter your Strand levels of achievement and to write your comment.
  • Use the SBGR Report Entry tool to view your assessment data and enter your Strand levels of achievement. Return back to PowerTeacher Pro to write your comments (so you can use the comment bank).

 

Embedding Slideshows from Office 365 into DX

Teachers use a lot of Powerpoints. And most of those Powerpoints, for us here at ISB, are stored in Office 365/Sharepoint Online. So how can you give access to those Powerpoints to your students in DX without making them download the file? How do you help the students find the resources that they need easily? The answer: Embed them into your unit pages!

  1. Make sure your powerpoint is stored in a folder that has “granted access” to view for everyone except external users. (Note: you could just make this file available to your specific students, but then you need to make sure you do this for every file that you want to embed. By changing this permission at the folder level, anything you add to that folder will be able to embedded easily.)
  2. Open up the PPT and copy the embed code (use ⌘+ C).

  3. In DX, on the materials page add a “link/embed” block and paste (⌘+V) it in. Resize and reposition it as you need.
  4. When the student views the page, it may say that they need to sign in to Office 365. They just need to click the “Sign In” button since we use Office 365 to log in to DX anyway… it will then show.
BTW, this works with other Office Online docs like Word and Excel too…

Adding Teachers to DX Classrooms

This is something that we often get requests for but it is really easy for you to do and will probably be faster than sending us an email and then wait for it to be actioned!

Step 1: Find a teacher that is currently in the class and ask them to open up the class in DX.

Step 2: Click on the People tab

Step 3: Click Add People

Step 4: Select Teacher from the drop-down menu (you can also add students in this way – just select the Learner option instead)

Step 5: Enter the email address of the teacher you want to add to the class.

Step 6: Click Add people

Step 7: For the teacher(or student)  being added to a class, you might need to log out and then log in again for this to take effect.

 

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