Teaching with Technology

If you are anything like me, grading is sometimes so time-consuming. I love the idea of not hauling papers all around and giving feedback digitally, but at times found the comment tool cumbersome within Google Docs. So I end up printing papers home and handwriting comments which I'm pretty sure my students have a hard time deciphering my chicken scratches as I attempt to give feedback so quickly. I found a recent blog post about a teacher who set up shortcuts in their Google Docs preferences which made grading really slick. I love shortcuts so I tried it this past week and I'm a convert. I wanted to give feedback on a new skill for my students and obviously didn't want to print out all of their papers that were turned in via Google Classroom. I'm often giving feedback that tells a student to "be more specific", "go deeper", "support with evidence" or "circle back to show how your evidence proves your claim". If you are an EL...

Confession. I use the search bar in Google Drive to find most of my files. I knew I had an essay template for my World History class where they compare Christianity & Islam's impact on government and society. I didn't know the name of it, so I searched for it using the search bar on top. I was then alerted that I had a LOT of files with that title as I pushed out the assignment using Google Classroom. I was the owner of these files and they were all in my Drive. I soon realized it was because I wasn't returning work in Classroom. Google Classroom automatically changes the ownership of a document to the teacher when the student hands it in on Classroom. This gives the student no editing rights and allows the teacher to leave feedback and grade the assignment. I often grade work and leave feedback using the comment feature. My last tech tip discussed how to use the suggesting feature to leave targeted comments on the document. You can read more about that her...