Hello!! There is A LOT going on at Arrowhead High School right now, so today's tip is a super quick one. 123apps is a website with quick tools for video, audio, PDF and file conversion. There is no login required and tons of tools for each of those file types. When you need a quick crop, conversion or compress (among MANY other things), give it a look!

Today's tip is another way you can use Canvas's IgniteAI right inside the platform. 

If you use Discussions in your class, you will now have two AI options: Insights and Summary. The buttons should show right in your prompt box when you open a discussion.

If you click on "Go to Insights", it will open a new page where you need to click on "Generate Insights" when the new page opens. Once it generates, you will see a column noting whether each student's contribution is relevant or not along with "Evaluation notes" which give a quick explanation as to why each response is relevant to the prompt or not.

When you click on "Open summary", it will give you a summary of multiple posts to give you a big picture view of trends or commonalities in the responses. You can also ask it to focus on a particular part of the responses in its summary.

These AI tools can make Canvas Discussions a quick and easy way to do formative exit tickets or other formative activities where you're looking to get a pulse on the class rather than assess individual students. I hope they help you gain insight while saving time!

Welcome to "Enhanced Rubrics" in Canvas! The two big upgrades here are AI created rubrics and the ability to allow students to self-assess using the rubric you put on an assignment.

When using IgniteAI in Canvas for rubric creation, the important thing to remember is that you need to start in the assignment or new quiz to which you want to attach the rubric, NOT in the Rubrics tab. (Keep in mind you can only attach a rubric to an entire new quiz, not to just one essay question.)

Once you have created your assignment, you need to save it and get back to the details screen. Below all of the assignment information, you will the "+Create Rubric" and "Find Rubric" buttons. Click on Create Rubric.

The screen that opens will look quite different (and in my opinion much nicer) than the old rubric creation screen. You still can type in/create your own rubric from scratch (or have it create criteria from existing outcomes in your course), but now you will see the option to "Auto-Generate Criteria". Be sure you set all of your criteria before clicking on the Generate Criteria button in the lower right. Here's what you should set:

• Give the rubric a name.

• Type - Choose scale to get a rubric with defined criteria for students to read according to the score they receive, and written feedback if you'll provide that individually.

• Rating Display - Choose Level if you want the 0-4 type rating and Points if you want to be able assign points.

• Rating Order - Your choice. High to low (left to right) or vice versa.

• Scoring - Is this a scored rubric or unscored/just for feedback?

  • Be sure to mark "Use this rubric for assignment grading" if it will count for a grade. Otherwise it will just be for feedback purposes and even if you assign points it won't "count". 

  • It would be valid to leave this unchecked, still assign points, but have that "grade" be simply for feedback for kids!

• Grade level - It seems to default to "Higher Education", so be sure to set the grade level.

• Number of criteria - You can choose for it to create between 2 and 8 criteria.

• Number of ratings - You can also choose between 2 and 8 levels for rating.

• Total points - How much will the assignment be worth as a whole?

• Enable Range - Click this is you want to be able to assign different point values with in a range, not just a preset number.

• Standard/Outcome information - if you know this aligns to standards or outcomes you use, add them here!

• Addition prompt information - Give it anything you want it to consider. What to place more emphasis on. General background on the students who will be submitting. What kind of criteria you would like. So many things you can add!

  • If you have an existing rubric that you don't want to have to type into Canvas, you could give it the titles of the criteria here and see how close it comes. Hopefully you'd just need to clean it up a little instead of typing the whole thing in!

Once you have your criteria set, click on Generate Criteria!

Once generated, you have the option to edit, delete, duplicate or regenerate any criteria.

• One thing you will most likely need to edit is the point ranges. It will divide your points into four levels. Unless you are truly working from a mastery grading standpoint, you will most likely need to adjust those to match your grading scale. (As you can see on the left, it's taking the top rating down to 13.34 points out of 20.)

  • If you've used a range rubric, you can just adjust the top end of any rating category, which will automatically adjust the low end of the rating above it. You can see in the next screenshot how that works.

• You can also edit the Criterion name, description, and the descriptions for each rating.

• Once you have the rubric to where you want it, you can preview it. It will show you three versions so you can see which would work best for you for grading purposes.

• When all is to your liking, click Create Rubric!

• Once you have created the rubric, you will still be able to preview it, edit it, delete it or replace it.

Once the rubric is created, you can click on the option to "Enable self assessment". This will allow students to rate themselves on the rubric that is provided. Another great formative opportunity!

We will be talking in the next couple of weeks about more in-depth AI creations that can be shared with your students, but today we're going to look at a quick way to guide the start of their AI usage by giving them a pre-filled Gemini prompt by just giving them a link. 

This will take you just seconds to create and can be made ahead of time or on the fly. You just need a way to share the link with students - most likely by linking in Canvas. You could use it as a study resource for them, creating a solid prompt for Gemini to lead them through review. Or you could use it to give them a starting point while allowing for prompt tweaking to see where it takes them. Or you could have them do something with the results and compare what they got with what other classmates got.

In the example I ran, I used the prompt "Explain the important steps in experiment design in science." (Here is the link I created.) I ran that prompt in two different windows, and in both cases, Gemini gave me an analogy before discussing the foundational steps of experiment design. (Screenshots to the right.) Perhaps this could be used as a starting point for creating a visual to synthesize the information in a new way. That is a very specific example, but playing with the link ahead of time could give you some new ideas on how to work with a topic in your class.

To create a guided link:

1. Open a new tab in Chrome and start your link with this URL: https://gemini.google.com/guided-learning?query=

2. Add your prompt to the end of that. Include spaces and punctuation. It is not normal in a URL, but Chrome will take care of adding the %20 where you have spaces to make it a functioning URL. 

3. Just hit enter and then copy the link it has transformed it into. Share that link with students to get them started!

This tip is for those of you that find yourself having to flip between different tabs often while working. In the past, I did share a way to organize various windows on your screen. And that still works, and would be necessary if you're going between a web browser and something else like Microsoft Word. But if you're looking at different Chrome tabs, it means splitting them out to separate windows.

But, recently Chrome has added a built in way to split one Chrome browser window into two tabs. To do so:

• When you're in one tab that you want to have open, right click on the other tab you'd like to also view. 

• You will see there is a new choice - New split view with current tab.  When you click on that, you will get the split window without getting a full duplicate of all your bookmarks, the address bar, etc. The screenshot to the right is a little hard to distinguish, but trust me. 😊

• Once you're in the split view, you'll have a turquoise icon to the left of the URL address bar. From there, you can separate the view back into two separate tabs, close one or the other, or reverse the order in which it is displaying them.

• You can also close out one tab with the x in the bottom corner of the tab.

• If you are docked, this could easily give you four open tabs at once if you use the monitor and your laptop as an extended screen.

Nothing earthshattering, but I have used this multiple times a day since discovering it last week. Hopefully it will help you have less clicks in your day!

Recently, Google opened up some handy study tools for students under 18 years of age. So, students can now just give Gemini a topic or bring in notes, vocabulary lists, etc. in and ask for Gemini to:

• Create a practice quiz

• Create flashcards

• Create a study guide

The examples to the right show what it gave me when I did the following.

1. "Give me a practice quiz in English to test my knowledge of this Spanish vocabulary." (And then I pasted in a vocabulary list from Quizlet.)

2. "Create a set of flashcards on the Bill of Rights." (The black cards are the "question" and the blue are the "answer".)

3. "Create a study guide on the basics of HLA." (In this case, Gemini produced a text version, giving me the option to export to Docs. Here is that doc. You can see it needs a little cleaning up, but this is a VERY quick way to create study resources!)

You can just type in a topic, copy and paste materials/notes, or attach a Google file for Gemini to work from. (Attach a file by clicking on the Plus sign icon next to "Tools".)

One thing to keep in mind is that Practice Quizzes and Flashcards sets can't be "shared out" like the Doc. You could share a prompt for kids to use, but the quiz and flashcards function within Gemini and can't be shared out with a link from your AHS account. 

Today's tip is actually just passing on a resource that I found by Tony Vincent. It's a simple handout that you can use or adapt to help your kids learn to use AI to help them think and study, rather than to AI do the work for them. It gives prompt examples for students to use when they want to:

• Study/Review for a test

• Understand or Explore a topic better

• Get feedback on the work their doing

• Think deeper about the topic they're working with

 They could come in handy for us in teaching, too! I hope you find something on here helpful.

QUICK TROUBLESHOOTING TIPS:

• If you have students that aren’t showing up as being online, even though you can see they are - have them restart their Chromebooks.

  • Pro tip - before any online assessment where you want to be able to see everyone in Classroom, have the whole class restart before having them start the assessment. This will guarantee that they’ve got the most updated settings for Chrome and for the Chromebook operating system. 

• If you have not renamed your classes in Canvas, you may want to do that as otherwise you will see the same Skyward name for all years of classes. Once you know which classes are your current classes, you can "pin"  them to the top of your Classes dashboard.

GENERAL REMINDERS:

• Remember to deselect any students in your class that are not in class during your session. If you don’t and they are elsewhere trying to use their computer, it will take their computer over and not allow them to work. So, be sure you’re not taking control from afar!

• Don’t be afraid to explore! You will see as you use the program that there are many options to enable and disable to customize how you use Securly Classroom. Click around!

• But, don’t forget that you cannot run a “just for fun” session to do that clicking around. Any session you start will take over their Chromebooks wherever they may be.

• Also - be sure you’re either making sure to close the session when you’re done OR set it to end after a certain period of time/at a certain time if you think you’ll forget. If you don’t release a class session, those students will not be able to use their Chromebooks properly in their subsequent classes.

WEB LINKS / BLOCKING PLANS:

• Consider your class/material and choose which makes more sense for you and what you’re trying to accomplish.

  • If you have a specific set of websites that your students need to be able to access for an assignment/project, create a list of those. For example, in our Adobe class, they would need access to Adobe, a couple of sites for free HD photos, etc. 

    • Before your class, click on “Web Links” on the left side of your dashboard. 

    • Click on “Add collection” in the upper right corner.

    • Name your collection and describe it (this is for your information when you go back to use it again) and then add the links you want to keep your class in on the right.

    • Once you’re in class, you’d click on the “site lock” icon at the top (a chain with a padlock), and choose the collection you want to have them work within.

  • If you have a particular site/group of sites that you DON’T want them to access, you can also create a blocking plan. This will allow kids to get to nearly anything, except the sites you block.

    • Before your class, click on “Blocking plans” on the left side of your dashboard.

    • Click on “Add blocking plan” in the upper right corner. 

    • Give the blocking plan a name and description and then add any sites or apps that you want to block.

    • Once you’re in a class, click next to where it says “Blocking plan” and choose the one you have created.

SUPER QUICK CANVAS ASSESSMENT TRICK:

• If you are giving an assessment in Canvas and the students do not need to be able to move elsewhere online after they finish that assessment, you can push that Canvas assessment from the Push URL menu to them all at the same time and they will not be able to access any other sites until you release that lock.

• You might use this if students will be moving to paper based work after they finish.

NEED THEIR ATTENTION QUICKLY?:

• If your students are all working on their screens and you need to grab the class’s attention for something, simply click on the Screen lock icon (screen with lock - first icon on the left). That will basically block anything they’re looking at and show them a message (you can set what it will say). You can also set it to auto release after a minute or two if you just want to send a message and don’t need their attention.

GENERAL INFO:

• Check out Securly’s “Cheat sheet” for a basic explanation of what you’ll see when you’re in Securly Classroom. 

Welcome back! Today's tech tip is less tip and more just a Canvas update. I promise to be more exciting after next week's testing day. 😄

Canvas:

• Two new integrations are available to everyone this year: Canva and WeVIdeo. Basically this means you can assign projects to your students that they would complete with those platforms, right in Canvas. Training opportunities to come!

• It's not you, it's Speedgrader. Many of you may have noticed that when you try to switch between sections in a course in Speedgrader, it instead goes from showing you one section to showing you multiple. The Canvas discussion boards are flooded with complaints about this. And Canvas says they're working on "a fix". Unfortunately, that means that for now we have to deal with some extra clicks. Here is what's happening:

  • When you go to Speedgrader from the gradebook view, it will take on the same filters. So, if you're only looking at your 2nd block, only your second block will initially show in Speedgrader. If you're looking at all of your sections, they will all show. Etc.

  • Once you're in Speedgrader and go to where you'd normally switch sections, imagine there is an invisible set of checkboxes. When you click on a different section, instead of switching to it like it always has, it now activates/deactivates it.

    • Which wouldn't be so bad if you could activate and deactive sections all at once. When you click on a new section, it adds it and closes that dropdown. You then have to open it again to deactivate the original section to just get the new section you want to view.

  • Yes, IT IS VERY ANNOYING. 🤪

  • You can see which sections you are viewing in that dropdown because those that are activated are bolded while those that aren't active are not bolded.

  • If you deactivate all sections, it defaults back to viewing all sections.

  • I promise to keep you posted on any changes to this.

• In good news, they did add more functionality to accommodations and modifications, including the much desired ability to add extra time to a quiz while the student is taking it. Here is a doc for you with instructions for setting accommodations permanently for a student, how to add time to an attempt in progress, and how to let a student close an attempt and pick it back up in the same spot later on.

• As we start a new year, you may get requests from parents for a pairing code in Canvas. Instructions to generate one are here. 

And in case you missed it in the body of the email, here is the link to my survey I'd really appreciate you all filling out. I'd love to dive into more hands on tech training for you and more integrations with your students this year. Thank you in advance!