#EarthDay2016

Many moons ago I worked with a woman whom I absolutely adored, and it just so happened that she adored Earth Day. Each year we would stop whatever we were doing and observe Earth Day in our AP English Language and Composition classes and have some sort of an Earth Day celebration. This year I decided my kids needed a break from all of the "AP testing" pressures, so we had ourselves a little Earth Day assignment.

My course focuses on rhetoric and the study of persuasion, so we spend the whole year discussing how to persuade effectively based on the rhetorical situation. We work hard to find "real world" situations for the learners to both analyze other's persuasion and to create persuasive pieces of their own.

With those things in mind, we kept the activity simple. We simply asked them to create a product (in my class that is the code word for "anything") that would encourage and/or inspire the same ideas and principles intended by Earth Day. The kids had one partner and one class period (52 minutes) to come up with an idea, make that idea happen, and post their completed product to social media. For fun, we created a little competition to see which post had the furthest reach. I'll talk more about how I did this later.

First, I want to show you a few things my kids came up with. I had everything a little bit of everything: infographics; lots of pic collages; lots of girls who jumped at the chance to use construction paper, glue, scissors, and markers; and even a few video submissions. The kids got a nice break from the rat race of test prep and all night study sessions, and I got to see a bit more of their creative side. It was fun, and I hope, at least a little bit "purposeful."

As a part of the assignment, I required my learners to use #CHSAPLAC on their social media post if they wanted to be considered for the furthest reach contest. On the Tuesday following Earth Day, I created a TweetBeam to showcase all of the #EarthDay products, so their work would be on display in the room. We had a real quick lesson on how to run analytics on Twitter for your own account, which most the kids already knew how to do. Then, I ran analytics on the #CHSAPLAC hashtag to see the total number of impressions, retweets, etc for those kiddos who used Twitter. There are a lot of different tools out there that can do this, but I used TweetReach. The only downside here was that it will only run analytics on the last 100 Tweets with a given hashtag and within the last 7 days. Might not work in all situations, but it was enough to do what I needed it do. 

While I forgot to take a screen shot of my analytics, I was impressed to find that my learners last 100 tweets had a total number of impressions of more than 25,000 within 4 days. This was not ALL of their posts because some used other social media accounts. The maker of TweetReach has analytics features for Instagram, Tumblr, and other social media accounts as well. This was a nice reminder for my kids that their posts go a lot further than they might realize! A win/win in my book :-)

Lessons Learned: Doctopus and Goobric

So, I was SOO very excited after working with @dlcoachbrooke the last few weeks to get Doctopus and Goobric set up and running. We went through the process of kids drafting inside the templates I created, and it went off without a hitch. We had a few kids who didn't get email notifications, but we were able to work around it with a quick search for the term "Doctopus" in their Google drive. Worked like a charm every time. Setup was a little slow, but fairly simple and reliable.

THEN, came the lessons learned. The instructions for kids to provide feedback are MUCH different than the instructions for teachers. It requires the Goobric for Students extension, and it was a bit of a pain in the rear to work out the exact instructions because no one seemed to have them written down with any kind of detail. So, I had to create my own. Here is the gist:

1. On a computer, kids must use Chrome and log into Chrome using the same account as their Google account. This seemed to help prevent some of the glitches.
2. Go to the Chrome store and load the Goobric for Students extension.
3. Theoretically, they should be able to close the Chrome store and navigate to Google Drive. The Goobric "eye" icon should appear on their URL bar.  For anyone that this does not work, they could usually make it appear by closing and quitting Chrome and coming back into the browser. This took some troubleshooting with a few kids, but we got there eventually.
4. Once the "eye" is working, they needed to go to their template and authorize Goobric to work.
5. Once it was all authorized and ready to go, I had to find a way to share links to their peer's work for evaluation purposes. We had 300+ essays for one assignment, so we took the Doctopus spreadsheet and color coded. We created one color chunk of about 6-7 kiddos. We shared this spreadsheet with a tinyurl to expedite the process. Spreadsheet will look something like this:



6. Each learner was responsible for opening the spreadsheet and providing feedback to every kid who was in their color block.
7. They fill out the rubric by clicking in a square and provide feedback in the written comments section. The student view DOES NOT look like the teacher view, but it does almost the same thing. Almost.

Here is the Google Slideshow I used in class to get the kids set up for evaluations:




After a peer review day or two, we spent another day for the kids to see their peer feedback and to self assess. Here is how you go through this process:

1. Using Chrome the learners open up their document. They should see a red dot in the upper right hand corner near the "Comments" and "Share" buttons. They click on the red button to open a pop-up window which shows them ALL of the rubrics sent to them. Below are a few notes:
--Goobric for students does NOT send emails with rubric info like it would if a teacher completed the rubric.
--Each time a student hits submit it is saved as a new rubric. So advise your kids to complete the entire rubric and then hit submit.
--Goobric is apparently pretty finicky about the internet connection. In the morning hours we were experiencing some wireless issues and the red dot would not appear for some or would appear and then disappear or would not load the pop-up window, etc. Bottom line, you need a strong connection to get to your feedback.
2. After reviewing their feedback, learners clicked on their own "Assess this Document" button and completed their own rubric and wrote a reflection in the comments box.

So, the process was not flawless. And I did feel like I was going to pull my hair out more than once. BUT, in the end we made it work. I think it was a valuable activity--the kids got feedback from 5 different people from various classes and ability levels. So, that meant more to think about and reflect on. I am not 100% sold as to whether or not I will use this method again, but in the end, it did what I needed it to do, it was just a lot of work to get it done.

Peer Evaluation Using Google Add-ons: Doctopus and Goobric

Last year I posted all of my excitement about the Blackboard peer and self evaluation features. It wasn't perfect, but it allowed me to run a peer and self evaluation feature across 300+ learners with a simple click of some buttons rather than shuffling and sorting papers for two or three days. Unfortunately, my district moved away from Blackboard as our LMS and moved to Schoology. While I don't have major complaints about Schoology, my biggest complaint is that there is NO options for peer or self evaluation. So, I recently sought out the help of our campus DLCs, Brooke and Kelly, to try and come up with some way to recreate what Blackboard was doing for us.

After meeting and going over a few options, we are going to give Doctopus and Goobric a whirl. Theoretically, the kids would type their essays onto templates which I create and use Doctopus to share with all of the kids. By creating a roster and running this roster and template through Doctopus, every kid will automatically have a document with the correct shared settings and their links will be populated in a Google spreadsheet as well as copied into my Drive if I choose. This means no turn in or ownership issues, etc.

As a part of this process, I want my kids to be able to self and peer assess. The Goobric extension allows us to attach a rubric to the template I am sharing with the kiddos. When the document is viewed with the Goobric for Students extension loaded, we see a nifty little button that says "Assess this Doc." When we use this button, we have the option of filling in the rubric and providing written feedback.  Bada-Bing, Bada-Boom, we have peer and self assessment!

For the instructions for loading Doctopus, creating rosters, sharing documents, and attaching rubrics, please click here.

I feel like I should warn you that as far as I have gotten in this process is the set up. I have not tested beyond these instructions. I ran the documents with this setup, and it worked just fine. HOWEVER, we created 1 roster with over 300 kiddos on it, and it was VERY slow. In the future, I will probably break them into smaller groups OR I will start earlier. Look for a future blog post on my progress later!