State of the Union

The State of the Union is strong! We have had a great 1st quarter with Canvas and Chromebooks. I thought I would take this week to highlight some of the great features teachers have been using and absolutely love! Although we have a long way to go our level of buy-in at all levels is rather impressive and speaks to the level of professionalism of our HS faculty!

Rubrics are the newest in our arsenal. Teachers are loving the variety. Our English department is loving the option to use ranges since that is what the state standards require. Social Studies teachers are loving the free form rubrics where they can create custom comments for each assignment. We will be running a rubrics session at our November PD to allow them to share their rubric love as well as dive deeper as we continue to explore the enormous quiver that Canvas provides us.

SIS integration has been the number one item that all instructors love. Our Learning Support and Phys Ed departments will really love this feature since they tend to have multiple sections in the grade book. This will allow them to post one time and have it spray out into their 20+ sections in Skyward, saving them enormous amounts of time. On that note, we do have two known issues with our Skyward Sync. We have seen an unchecking of our Student and Parent Access. Once we reset our Skyward assignment display defaults to "always post" then the issue seemed to subside. The other issue is that for a small number the assignments seem to sync successfully, but somehow the assignment end up in the deleted area of Skyward requiring the teacher to 'restore' the assignment. So far though, we LOVE the sync to SIS option! It really has saved our instructors' time with grading.

Quizzes/Quizzes.Next has been another great find for our instructors. The ability to give warm ups and exit tickets has allowed teachers and students to get valuable feedback in a timely manner. I really believe the timely manner of it is what is extremely valuable for all involved. We need to use assessments for learning, so that we know what in fact students are learning. Some teachers, such an our online and hybrid teachers, have been using the quizzes as actual summative assessments. Our Chemistry teachers are even working on giving their final through Quizzes in Canvas! Our online Ecology teacher loves the ability to use Question groups so that no two tests are the same, allowing her to create equal but different questions. We are eager to have Quizzes.Next offer more functionality like partial grading for Categorization, Ranking, and Multiple answers. Also the ability to offer access codes has been helpful in preserving integrity for 504 and I.E.P. students who get extended time.

Kami has been another great tool teachers are using to make use less papers and waste less time photocopying. We are able annotate PDFs digitally. This will have benefits for note taking as well as worksheets and even professional documents. The functionality of the free version is limited, but effective. We need to spend time helping the students understand how to organize their Google Drive and how to make sure they save their annotations before their final submission, but Canvas + Kami integration is in the works so hopefully as more teachers use it we can think about asking for subscriptions to help alleviate the need for paper unnecessarily.

Our students were recently surveyed and they are so appreciative of their teachers really diving head first into make more interactive lessons with less paper. While not always doing things digitally is the answer; it is nice that we decrease paper when it makes sense. Technology is good in moderation and it will take us a bit to understand where it makes sense and where it is necessary to have paper. But for now it really has been amazing to see how our staff and students are really moving into the 21st century with all of this new technology. Eventually we will begin to look at models like ISTE and SAMR to help us augment learning in our classes!

Unique Uniformity

After almost a quarter of the school year under way, we are starting to see trends. The ability in Canvas to really do whatever you heart desires with your course is a blessing and a curse. With so much autonomy how do we develop best practices so that the students aren't confused and know what to expect while surfing our virtual classrooms. Well, one thing we teachers have in common is a syllabus; a course outline.

My suggestion has been to think about using the 'Syllabus' page as the course landing page rather than 'Modules'. It allows the teacher the ability to better control the environment by providing space to explain how he or she is using Canvas. One can provide links to important modules, pages, discussions or assignments. You can even embed videos for enrichment as well as to show off your personality just like how you might decorate you physical classroom with engaging photos and posters. You can also provide your contact info, a photo and even attach a file of your class expectations. Then along the bottom of the page will be running list of all assignments and events for the course that Canvas will auto-populate as the year goes on.

Pro Tip: If you have certain class expectations you can list them as well, but I think a useful alternative might be to divide up your class expectations into pages in a module and then make a syllabus quiz to end the module requiring that the students score 100% before they can move on to other course modules/content. 



There are so many options and each teacher should have the autonomy to do with their Canvas pages as they please, but we do need to have a little bit of order and uniformity so that our students know what to expect just like they know each classroom will have desks, chairs and whiteboard. They should be able to count on each virtual class having a syllabus page, modules and assignments. And although it is true that we don't teach the parents it might go a long way toward transparency if the parents,learning support teachers and guidance counselors, when they sign on to observe, also had a sense of how each teacher is using their page so they could better support their students.

So take a second to think about your Canvas courses and if a casual observer or new student were to sign onto your course, would they feel confident on how to navigate the course? It might save you time from having to write clarifying emails or have 1 on 1 discussions with confused students and parents. And the beauty of Canvas is that once you have a good template set; then it will be ready for each new year with the ability for any necessary tweaks you may need to make from year to year!

The Dog ate my Chromebook

As we continue to work with all this new technology, the number one priority will be to make sure our students come to class prepared. We obviously cannot pack their bags for them, but by having expectations with accountability we can avoid the phrases of "I left it at home" or "I forgot to charge it". We should not accept these types of responses. We cannot enable these students any longer. We need to demand better of them

I think it's important that if we plan on using Chromebooks in our classes regularly then we should think about have a system for participation points in place that may even require daily tracking. Maybe its something as simple as 2 points a day for having a Chromebook-1 point for having it and 1 point for not needing to plug it in or borrow a charger. Then you add a weekly 10 point assignment in the grade book that shows them and their parents of whether there is an issue that needs to be addressed. 

So this week when a kid tells you that they left it in their car or at home, maybe it's time to think about making a change to your class expectations and enacting a system that makes sense for you and your style, but we need to set the expectation and hold them accountable each and every day. It is not a lot to ask of them. They need to do better and we need to support them through this change. Otherwise they will do to us what they do to their parents...wear them down with excuses like their dog at their Chromebook until you just throw your hands up in the air exhausted from the verbal weapons of mass confusion. Students love to spread these excuses when they are avoiding doing something that they don't consider to be fun or perhaps because these phrases have worked for them in the past. Be firm, be resilient and model for them the steadfast nature that their future bosses will demand of them one day.