Goodbye Symbaloo, Hello Clever!

For students only, the homepage on their Chromebook will change from Symbaloo to Clever on May 19th.

While Symbaloo has been the hub for resources for a number of years, the move to Clever will enable students to access all the same resources, while allowing teachers to customize their own pages to provide additional links, bookmarks, and resources for their own classes.

To help you make the transition, the following supports are available:

• Symbaloo will still be available until the end of the year -- a link to the page is on Clever

• A one-page guide to creating and managing Clever pages

• A video guide to Clever Teacher pages

• A course on creating and managing Clever pages will be available in the Spring Training Series

The staff homepage will remain as Symbaloo for the foreseeable future.

Read Along for the WIN

Guest Tech Tips Article from Aaron Morehead at Hazelwood

This school year, one of our grade-level teammates discovered a useful tool during the fall training series—Read Along in Google Classroom. After exploring its features, our grade level team agreed that it would be a worthwhile addition to our WIN (What I Need) reading groups.

Read Along is one of the features in Google Classroom that helps students practice reading by listening to students read aloud and offering instant feedback. It’s perfect for creating more individualized experiences, as it caters to students’ unique learning levels and needs. For example, students can read stories aloud, and the program provides real-time corrections on pronunciation and fluency, all while tracking their progress. Teachers can use the student groups function to create custom assignments for differentiation. 

Since adding it into our WIN groups, we’ve seen how Read Along allows students to get instant support while reading independently. They’re able to engage with complex texts on their own level, and, if they struggle, the app is right there to guide them. It’s another effective way for teachers to differentiate instruction, giving every student the support they need to grow as readers.

Whether they’re working on vocabulary, fluency, or comprehension, Read Along is helping our students in our reading groups develop their reading skills in a more personalized and supportive way. We’re excited to continue using it in our classroom and seeing how it empowers our students to take charge of their learning. I had several students who could not wait to demonstrate their knowledge of the app for this video!

Custom Content Slides using MagicSchool

Guest Tech Tips Article from Jennifer Schultz at Hazelwood

Do you need a presentation made for you in less than 5 minutes? Do you need to teach or reteach a specific topic or skill that students need to learn? The Presentation Generator in MagicSchool AI will generate slides based on a topic, text, Youtube video, or any uploaded content. You can even export the information into Google Slides.

There are just four sections you need to fill out: grade level, number of slides, what you want it to be about, and any other additional information. It’s important to be specific. For example, you might add things like, “Create a learning check game on the last slide,” or “Make sure that each slide includes a question for students to answer about the topic.” In first grade, we learn all the different digraphs. This is something that students in the past have struggled with. Using this tool, I can prompt it to teach students about the digraphs found in English words and include learning checks along the way for students to answer. 

Then, the website will generate the information for me. I've included the example for you to see. Remember, it is important to review all the of the output that was generated to make sure that it is correct. Reprompt as necessary to get as close to what you need. After this, click on "Export Slides" and a draft will get added to your Drive. From there, you can add/change/remove anything you need, as well as make the deck more interesting for students. The draft it creates will just use white slides with the default text. 

This tool can be used to grade levels from PK to 12th grade! It even has an option for university level content and Professional Staff. Give this tool a try next time you need a little boost in creating some content for your students!

Thinking about using AI in your classroom? Remember to check out ASD's guidelines for more information and resources. 

AI Expectations in Class

To cultivate good digital literacy skills with students, teachers should be using a common language to set expectations around AI in class.  To help you, the ASD AI Working Group developed a "traffic light" system to indicate the level of AI use in a lesson or assignment.

You can make a copy of this slide template to add to your lessons or post in your Google Classroom.  Also, please use the traffic lights on assignments as reminders to students.  By being consistent, we can build good habits with this new technology.

As a reminder, staff and HS students can access Securly Chat - a filtered version of ChatGPT built especially for schools.

Thinking about using AI in your classroom? Remember to check out ASD's guidelines for more information and resources.