PCS Tuesday Tech Talks

For younger students, Be Internet Awesome teaches digital citizenship through playing a game, and includes slides, handouts and lesson plans so that you can reinforce what the games have taught them. And this collection of picture books provides a variety of entry points for you to talk with students about digital citizenship throughout the school year.

For secondary teachers, if you feel comfortable bringing discussion of the current Israeli/Hamas conflict into your classroom, here is an example of how quickly misinformation can spread online, not only by trolls but also by verified media accounts. This thread is an ongoing collection of fake news, some even claiming that clips from a video game are actual videos of the recent attacks. Studying these real-world examples can help our students better understand how to read media with a critical eye, spot signs of misinformation and slow the spread of fake news.

Check out the EdTech Resource Hub for more resources to teach digital citizenship and media literacy.

-October 10, 2023

Academic Integrity, Effective Feedback and Original Thinking with TurnItIn

As of this Thursday, all PCS secondary teachers will have full access to TurnItIn, a site that aims to “support academic integrity, streamline grading and feedback, deter plagiarism, and improve student outcomes” (turnitin.com). You should

receive an invitation to sign in to your TurnItIn account with your petk12

email address. Teachers may create classrooms on TurnItIn and invite students to join with an invite code.

TurnItIn is probably best known for its ability to detect similarities between a student’s submitted writing and writing found elsewhere, either published online or previously submitted through TurnItIn. While this feature helps teachers know if students have copied their work, students can also use TurnItIn to check their own writing. That can help them see where they have neglected to paraphrase information or cite sources for their research.

TurnItIn also offers commenting tools and rubrics so that teachers can provide specific feedback that is tied to criteria. Similar to adding text comments in the margin of a Google Doc, you can click anywhere on a student’s document in TurnItIn to add a comment. The Feedback Studio gives you access to a library of Quick Marks, which you can drag and drop directly onto the text, making it easier for students to see the connection between your comment and their writing. You may also color code your feedback, add your own longer text comments and record voice feedback within the doc.

Your students will also have access to Draft Coach, a Google Doc extension that will check their writing for grammar errors, similarities to other writing, as well as citation errors. Unlike some sites that allow writers to simply click to accept a suggested correction, Draft Coach provides explanations of the errors and forces the students to decide on and make the corrections themselves.

You and your students may use Draft Coach without submitting to TurnItIn first. After completing a draft of writing in a Google Doc, just click on Extensions, then click TurnItIn Draft Coach, and TurnItIn Draft Coach again:

The first time you and your students use Draft Coach, you will need to agree to the terms and conditions, and then choose how you would like it to check your work. Students will see explanations of their errors (which will also be highlighted in their doc) along with suggestions for how to improve. Check out this video introduction to Draft Coach.

TurnItIn has also added AI detection, which is built into their similarity tool. While the accuracy of AI detection continues to fluctuate with the rapid development of AI sites, the TurnItIn AI detection “has been independently shown to have high effectiveness in correctly identifying AI-generated content, when compared to other commercially available detectors” (turnitin.com). More than simply catching students plagiarizing, TurnItIn aims to help us build a culture of academic honesty. Click the image below to learn more about it:

Our district license for TurnItIn includes training for staff, so keep an eye out for our first training date. In the meantime, check out this Instructor Resource Pack and playlist of TurnItIn tutorials.

-October 24, 2023

OctoStudio: New iPad Coding App

What better place to be on Halloween than coding games with 4th graders with a brand new app? Thanks to M.I.T.'s Lifelong Kindergarten (creators of Scratch), we now have a coding app designed for mobile devices, which is great for students who use iPads. Once students have downloaded the app, they are able to work with it offline. No internet or network data is needed.

This month every 4th grade class in our district is piloting the OctoStudio app. They are learning some basics of coding as they program Halloween games that include a scorekeeper (variable), locations (x and y axis) and sound effects (the fun part!) when points are scored. You can see students testing their games here:

If you would like to introduce your students to coding with OctoStudio, there is a growing library of resources available:

Have students download the OctoStudio app from Self Service
Learn more about OctoStudio here
See video tutorials here

Teaching 4th graders to code with OctoStudio reminds me how difficult it can be to teach a step-by-step technology-related lesson: some students pick it up right away and want to move ahead while other students get lost in the steps and fall behind. I find it much easier to give students access to resources so they can work at their own pace.

With Ideas to Try and Explore Sample Projects built into OctoStudio, you can let your students experiment with it on their own and work together when they get stuck.

OctoStudio Explorations: resources from OctoStudio and the Exploratorium for coding projects that support academic content areas:

Looking to go farther with coding? Coming up December 4-8 is the Hour of Code, where students of all grade levels (and with any device) can follow hour-long video tutorials on their own. There are also lesson plans and curriculum if you would like to teach the lessons yourself and go beyond just an hour.

-October 31, 2023

Multimedia Projects with Google Earth

Google Earth has changed significantly since its launch over 20 years ago when we had to download it to our computer and suffer the freezes, crashes and frustration of working with its massive database. Today’s Google Earth is fully online and offers engaging ways for students to explore geography, history, science and culture through professionally created tours. Even better, your students can be digital creators by designing their own multimedia Earth tours.

If you’re new to Google Earth and not sure how to use it in the classroom, you might want to start with Passport Warm-Ups. These standards-aligned prompts get your students thinking, writing and talking about geographical locations in the context of your academic content without taking a lot of time from your curriculum.

With the Google Earth Passport lessons, “teachers will use I’m Feeling Lucky and Street View in Google Earth to randomly select a location in the world and relate it to [academic] concepts. Teachers can also choose to preselect a location that lends itself well to relevant standards and objectives using Search.”

Below are links to directions, academic standards, standards-based questions and student handouts for Google Earth Passport Warm-Ups for 4th-8th grade:

To let Google Earth choose a random location for your warm-up, use the I’m Feeling Lucky option: click in the Google Earth Search box and then click I’m Feeling Lucky below it.

Ready to dig a little deeper into Google Earth projects? Check out these Google Earth Education Resources to connect Google Earth to storytelling, baseball, biodiversity in Costa Rica, wind energy, and more.

You could use Google Earth to create multimedia resources for teaching your content area. This video takes you through the steps for doing that, including how to add a Google Forms quiz at the end:

My preference, though, is to give students the opportunity to create their own digital presentations with Google Earth, like tours that identify and explain locations of historical events, track the timeline of a person’s life, create a fictional story, solve place-based math problems or plan a trip for their future.

More than simply pinning locations, a student’s Google Earth project could also include research and writing about each location, choosing images and videos for each location and citing their sources. Plus they can build their speaking skills by presenting their project to the class. Check out this video to see how students could collaborate on a Google Earth project:

Get started with Google Earth with these resources:

Creating with Google Earth (YouTube playlist)
Getting Started with Telling Stories with Google Earth
Best Practices in Google Earth

-November 7, 2023