Super easy PDF commenting for better collaborative reading and comprehension

In recent years lots of teachers would have spotted students developing the habit and tendency to skim read online and the shallow comprehension skills that follow. We constantly give students resources to read over to supporting their thinking and their understanding of case studies, yet many students will read too quickly and superficially without processing the information.

A lesson I did last week really changed my perspective on this, using a super simple PDF commenting trick in Google Drive. A colleague Sean McHugh spotted a few weeks ago that Google had added a comment function into any PDF you have stored in Google Drive. With a couple of quick clicks you can print an article off any website and save as a PDF and then save this into your Google Drive. You can then choose to share the PDF ‘with a the link’ and thus give the viewer the ability to comment on the document. You can click and see the explore the example below.

You can set this up as follows;

• Find your article online or find your saved PDF
• If you have an online article click to print but change destination to – Save as PDF
• Drag PDF into your Google Drive
• Click in the top right to share and then choose – Share so ‘Anyone with link can comment‘
• Then share this with your students, they can comment on individual words or top right to drag an area to comment.

At our school you can link directly from our Online Learning Platform ‘Teamie’ can it will sort the permissions for you. To save the craziness of an entire class commenting on one PDF best top copy and duplicate your file a couple of times and have smaller reading groups.

As an assessment trick, I asked them very specifically to look for definitions or examples of the concept we were studying in the article and to add a comment where they found them. I could scan the documents and see how they were going or add a comment to nudge them along.

EdPuzzle: video questions for formative assessment

Like all teachers, we see our face-to-face time with my classes as incredibly valuable and precious. I want to spend as much of this time as possible checking for understanding, exploring key questions and helping student grapple with complex ideas where I can coach, probe and support.

When introducing a new concept we often default to a mini lecture and some slides and ask a couple of questions to keep the students on track. With laptops and online tools such as EdPuzzle there are some really effective ways for students to work through a tutorial at their own pace and for you as a teacher to collate answers from all students.  Developing an online flipped instruction resource is a skill that teachers should have in their repertoire thereby being able to use the data to check for understanding and then plan how we might adapt our plans for the next lesson.

 

When other school activities, trips, or absences mean that weeks disrupted and we struggle to maintain the flow with our students an EdPuzzle can help you make the most of your precious time in class.

The following slides help you how to set up with EdPuzzle and how to add questions to a video. Signup with your Google Apps account here.

The essential steps are...

1. You can add any video from YouTube or other platforms
2. Just copy the URL and paste into the EdPuzzle search tool
3. Trim the video to highlight a certain passage of a longer clip
4. Click to add either open response, multiple choice questions or your comment on video
5. Save and publish to your students and then sharing the link via your online class.
6. Check your teacher dashboard to see summary of student responses, either by student or by question.

Notetaking with Evernote

Evernote is a great application for writing and collating notes and now it looks even better. Over the last month Evernote has had a refresh and remains one of the most effective note taking tools for school.

You can download Evernote from the App Store and signin to get started. The free account allows you to do everything you might need as a student.

If you are someone who saves school work in separate word documents, Evernote is the tool for you. Once you sign up for a free account your notes are saved both in the app and on the web. Your notes are also easily searchable by key words, tags and titles. Use the associated app Evernote Web Clipper to save websites and notes as you surf the web.

Some top tips to become an Evernote ninja

Master the Left Hand Sidebar

The sidebar has been updated to help you navigate through your notes more easily. The most recent notes show up, plus any Notebooks you drag to the shortcut section at the top. Try drag notebooks from each of your subjects into this shortcut bar.

Tags

Tags are a way that you can label notes so that you can search them later. Much like tagging a friend in a photo in Facebook, tagging should be part of your routine when taking notes and researching. The new tab icon in the lefthand sidebar help you see an overview of your tags and work.

Notetaking

Within each note there are lots of features to support your writing. Think about using the check list icons, bullet points, table and different colours. You can use these ideas to collate ideas or summarise viewpoints. Also try the record button to save some audio or the teachers talk into the note.

Saving from the Web

Evernote Webclipper is a Chrome Extension you can download from within Evernote Preferences. This allows you to grab snippets from a website and save this research back into your Evernote notebook. It is a brilliant way to keep track of your research.

The Fundamental Four!

The Fundamental 4

The Essential Tech Slide Deck: bit.ly/uwctechdeck

There are lots of aspects to digital organisation, but the four that are most essential, and that also happen to be synergetic, ie all four are codependent, are:

1. Get Connected

Open up the Chrome Browser, then click in the little icon in the top right corner and sign in to Chrome. Sign in with your account details and agree to Link data when prompted. 

This means that everything you do with account is continually synchronised with your Google 'cloud' online, so if you lose your laptop, and have to either use a loaner or start with a new one, as soon as you sign in a sync—voila—everything in your Google life will reappear in seconds. Note, this just synchronises your browser content, files on your hard drive will not be backed up, to do this you'll need Backup & Sync*.

2. Organise your Drive

Open up the Chrome Browser, and go to your Google Drive online. Make sure you have folders created for all subject areas. You might want to add a folder for your own personal files, but remember, your drive is a school space, not your personal space.

There should only be folders in your drive, no loose files. If you have files from previous years that are making a mess, just create a folder called Archive (if you haven't already) and drop them in.

3. Desktop (almost) Zero: Drive it or Dump it. 

Your desktop is not a good place to keep your files—it makes them handy, but once they build up it comes very difficult to find anything. Worse, if you have any problems, none of those files are safe, so make sure any files you do have their a strictly temporary. Like the desk in your classroom, at the end of the lesson, make a decision; drive it (move it to your drive) or dump it (move it to the bin). Now you have your Drive synchronized this is as easy as a drag and drop, or within the Finder. 

4. Bookmarks on the Browser Bar, Trim your Tabs

All of the websites you rely on to function effectively from day to day should be organised along the bookmark bar. Make sure you are signed in so these are all synchronised to your cloud account. That means that those bookmarks, stored in folders, are backed up, and accessible on any other device that you sign in to.

Too many Tabs 

Too many open tabs is a symptom of poor bookmark organisation, if you know you can easily find any page you need in you bookmarks, you don't need to have 50 tabs open 'just in case'. If the site matters, then bookmark it, if not then close it if you don't need it now; an easy to do this is just use command+w to close any tab you have open.

To quickly close loads of tabs, just control click on a tab and choose one of the options, like Close Other Tabs!

Less than 10 tabs is ideal

This many tabs is unmanageable, and bad for you! 

(While you're there why not quit the apps you're not using and close any open windows as well?)

bit.ly/fundamental4

There are more than four?

Yes, but don't panic, one a week will see you reach organisational nirvana within a few months, with fabulous habits for life! 

What kinds of things? Well simple but powerful tips like this one for example:

Using the slide deck below, all you need to do is commit 10 minutes a week, until you have the fundamental four covered.

Here's the tech slide deck, open it, drop it on your (nice and tidy) bookmark bar and check it out once a week!

Poetry - Made Multimodal!

This incredible, beautiful example inspired me to approach our English teachers to consider making their work with poetry multimodal; showing this to them was a pretty persuasive pitch.

One of the many great things about my job is that I get to work with teachers and students throughout the college, from Kindergarten to Grade 12. One of the fabulous aspects to this is how often the fundamentals that are introduced in the Primary School, are just as effective and just as powerful in the Middle and High Schools.

We have been making a concerted effort to ensure that when we talk about 'digital literacy' we back that with some fundamentals, specifically the expectation that as our students move through the college they move from introduction to consolidation to competence in the five core domains of video, image, text, audio, and data. What follows is one example this year of integrating three of these into students experiences with poetry, by making it multimodal.

Multimodal Poetry

This work began by focusing on our Grade 4 students, nearing the end of a Writing Workshop focus on poetry. Instead of leaving it as a text only celebration, we asked the students to reimagine one of their poems, adding imagery—be it still or moving image. Some students were more literal in their interpretation, others more abstract, but the best skilfully combined both. Then they added the power of sound, choosing music and even sound effects to complement their own narration.

What I find really exciting though, is that as why I was able to take these videos to our Grade 7 teachers, whose students were ending a focus on poetry, only in this case they had been analysing and exploring an anthology of poetry. So we asked them to choose one... and make it multimodal. 

Grade 4

Grade 7

Whether it was a grade 4 poem the students wrote themselves, or a poem chosen by a Grade 7 student from an anthology, the teachers consistently commented on how powerful and insightful it was to see each students understanding of poetry made visual, made audible; made multimodal. 

Resources

If you're keen to have a go, here's a link to the site page where I collated the resources—I used the same resources with both Primary and Middle School classes. 

http://findsounds.com/ 

http://bbcsfx.acropolis.org.uk/ 

These sites are fabulous for downloading music:

https://www.bensound.com/ 

http://freemusicarchive.org/

https://www.jamendo.com/ 

Spreadsheets for Everyone

Spreadsheets rock my world.

Spreadsheets are, at least in my experience, probably the least appreciated of the five core domains of ICT, unappreciated at least by people who have never used them. But, once you get a glimpse into the sheer mathematical beauty of the way these sheets of interconnecting cells, rows and grids can empower mere mortals to manipulate screeds of data like magnificent mathematical machines, well, you won't look back.  The ways that modern spreadsheets help people organise data from the miniscule to the massive, and free us to focus on the meaning of the numbers as opposed to the mere mechanics, is nothing short of transformational. 

5 core domains: Text, Image, Audio,  Video and Data - which ones are you weakest in?

And yet many, if not most educators languish in lethargic reticence; whether it's apathy or antipathy, who can say? What I do know is that the with the developments in terms of sheer processing power and refinement of control interfaces, the information and data management tools that used to be extremely complex operations, the purview of financial professionals only, are now suitable for anyone with or without a mathematical background. Spreadsheet applications like Numbers and Google Sheets have made it easier for the ordinary user, even kids as young as Grade 2 (Year 3) and below to manipulate, edit, and share the data stored in spreadsheets, using different functions and computations.

And no, it's not just about graphing. You can do that in a Word Processor or a Presentation tool. No. Spreadsheets are all about manipulating and managing data.

For examples of how I've used spreadsheets with kids as young as Grade 2, see this post. If you are a total spreadsheet noob and need to start from zero... read on.

So you feel like a novice when it comes to spreadsheets? Well it only takes 10 minutes to fix. Here is a labsite lesson I ran for our Grade 4 teachers, to get them from spreadsheet zeroes to spreadsheet heroes in one lesson. The whole thing is available below, in it's entirety (40 minutes) or in convenient bite sized attention deficit sized morsels below. You only need to know about 'Functions & Formulae' to get started.


The entire lesson took 40 minutes, here it is in sections:

Spreadsheet skill review:

Review cell address, and ranges of cells, eg: A1:B6

Functions & Formulae 

Review adding the contents of cells, by by using the SUM function and by writing a formula, eg A2+B3.

Critical to the 21st Century classroom model, is ensuring that you as the teacher are NOT a prerequisite for success. Students need to be empowered to resolve their own challenges. The sooner you establish this as 'normal' practice, the easier it will be.

The students should not 'need' you to learn.

This section is purely concerned with the appearance of the spreadsheet. No Maths required, resizing columns and rows, adding text,. and outlines.

Students build a framework within with they can insert relevant data.

Now that the framework is ready, this section guides students through 'telling' the spreadsheet what kind of data will be entered into certain cells.

IMPORTANT: In a spreadsheet you cannot just add a $ sign to indicate currency, symbols like these actually contain 'functionality' in a spreadsheet, so in short, nothing will work.

Instead if you writing dollar signs, let the spreadsheet do that FOR you, by telling it to format certain cells as currency.

This feature as other uses as well, for example making certain cells display percentages. You cannot do this by just adding a % sign.

Students enter specific data that need to be totalled using the SUM function.


As more information is entered, the total at the bottom of the sheet should automatically update, this allows students to begin 'modelling' 'What if?' scenarios:

What if we buy 15 of those?

Then students can write a subtraction formula to subtract the $20 that they were initially loaned from their overall total.

Student's that finish early, should be used as 'quality control' ie checking on their peers to make sure that they are finished properly, and that their sheets are working properly.

 

Challenger

This section is an 'extension' section.

This means that the spreadsheet will do what they need, but these features will make it even better... IN particular enabling more effective 'modelling'.

• Inserting additional columns to allow better management of multiple quantities.
• Refining the use of formulae to add and subtract
• Creating a 'ripple' effect whereby cells reference other cells
• Using conditional formatting to change the colour of a cell when the value changes.

Students will need time to 'play' with these interrelated features, in order to get to a point where the logical sequencing of calculations makes sense.

They may also use ways to get it working which are not the same as yours... it may even be better...

Google's Applied Digital Skills 

Google have created an entire curriculum devoted to skills acquisition, totally supported with video tutorials, that can lead you thorough lessons, step by step. The skills span the entire Google Apps Suite, but the Sheets focused lessons are particularly well designed. 

A great example is this lesson on budgeting to make better financial decisions: 

Junior School Sheet Activities

Our Maths Coach has created the following website to collate some of the core activities we use to integrate the effective use of spreadsheets into Junior School Maths lessons: 

PDFs, Pragmatism & WWPP

WWPP,  a pragmatic compromise: WP, WWW, PPT & PDFs

If there is one thing I've learned in my now almost a decade as a digital literacy coach (DLC), and from now over 20 years working with 'edtech' or the technology enhanced learning (TEL) in the classroom from K-12, it's that there is a fundamental shift, in terms of how opportunities to learn and to create with digital tools are experienced as students move though their school lives. There is a gradual progression. During their primary/elementary years, students at UWCSEA regularly (ie, at least once a year) work across all five of the domains that span what I what I would describe as true digital literacy, or perhaps a better word is competency; video, image, text, audio, data—or VITAD. Then as they progress through middle and then high school, there is a narrowing of focus as students become more specialised in their learning, and their range of learning experiences narrows, from VITAD, to something I call WWPP:

• Word Processing
• Websites & Web Search
• PowerPoint Slideshows (or similar)
• Printing, PDFs, Posters (yes I realise that's more than one P)

WWPP describes the fundamental domains that are the norm for most teachers in most subjects in terms of the tools they rely on to do their own work, and so, not surprisingly, represent the kinds of digital technology they are comfortable using with their students, and in (hopefully, but not necessarily) expecting their students to use. This means, whether you like it or not, this represents the actual reality in most secondary school classrooms, especially those that are organised around the premise of preparing students for high stakes examinations.

This doesn't mean that VITAD is non existent in secondary schools, it just means that it will be more isolated and consigned to certain subject areas, eg data handling in the Sciences, image in the Arts, audio in Music, video in Film et cetera. This doesn't mean these experiences aren't beneficial in other subject areas, the work they do in primary school clearly demonstrates that it is, it's just that, having worked on trying to facilitate this, I've had to concede that it just doesn't happen much, if at all, once students are taught by subject specialists. This observation is one I have observed both as a teacher and a parent for many years, and it is one that is borne out by the literature. I've already written a post about this phenomenon, that can be summed up by these quotes from two recent studies into the dominant use of digital technologies in secondary schools is in terms of their assumed and actual use: 

Laptops are typically purchased by schools and sometimes by parents, and they are largely used to write and revise papers, conduct Internet searches, and engage in personalized instruction and assessment using educational software or online tools. (Zheng et al, 2016, p2)

... schools revealed moderate use of many well-established digital technologies, such as word processing, presentation software, and quiz games. (Hughes et al, 2018, p1)

... students reported using word processing, spreadsheets, presentation tools, and web searches most frequently in class. (ibid, p2)

So the fact is that, like it or not, what studies repeatedly show as 'effective' use, is use that can be translated into evidence that is measured using a standardised test score. And if that is the only metric we are prepared (or able) to consider, then WWPP is the model that works, and WWPP is a model that works for preparing students for high stakes examinations; until those examinations change in terms of their expectations, then WWPP is here to stay. 

Now I'm not ecstatic about this, but I am pragmatic; by this I mean if we're going to accept that this narrowing of expectation exists, that the least we can do is teach these skills properly. The danger at the moment, is that in the same way that these skills reflect their teachers ICT skills, they also reflect their teachers competency, or as is more often the case in my experience, their teachers' gradually increasing competency. Now—don't get me wrong—I don't blame teachers for this, it's very powerful when a teacher can model for their students that they are also 'lifelong learners' and anyway, if they are anywhere near my age, they didn't actually own a computer until they were in their 20s, and even then they were never taught how to use them, they were just expected to figure it out themselves by trial and tribulation. I've written more on this skills issue in another post, but suffice it to say here, that at the very least, if we're going to narrow our focus, can we at least expect these skills to be taught properly? To be used in a skilful, or especially at high school level, a competent way? I think we can, and I think we should. The benefits to both teachers in terms of their ability to do their jobs more effectively, and to their students are clear. 

What does skilled WWPP look like?

It looks like the expectations for any adult who would be deemed to be digitally literate, any adult who wants, no, needs to function effectively in the vast majority of workplaces in the 21st century. Some suggestions below:  

Skilful Word Processing 

• Use and format tables: insert & delete rows, columns, & merge cells
• Use the tab key (also add new row to a table/indented bullets)
• Use commenting tools to give, receive & respond to feedback
• Paste text without formatting, or to match destination formatting
• Insert/format/manage page numbers
• Add/use headers/footers 
• Use, modify, and create templates
• Use document page breaks, section breaks & styles
• Use automatic features like table of contents (TOC), references, citations
• Reference source materials, ie MLA, APA et cetera
• Extend these same skills to the building of web resources/sites

Skilful Web Browsing/Searching

• Use History and bookmarks effectively instead of relying on excessive tabs
• Use multiple accounts with web browsers to manage private/professional practice
• Access and find information in an online database not just Google/Bing et al.
• Identify key words, names, & phrases for a search
• Appreciate the advantages & disadvantages of a variety of sources
• Use the find command to locate specific words on a page
• Upload & download files as appropriate, understand the associated file sizes. 
• Understand & carry out an (advanced) multiple field search
• Search using Boolean terms (site:, intitle:, —)

Skilful PowerPoints/Slide Shows

• Create well designed slideshows that rely on image, not text  
• Format & customise well designed themes 
• Create presentations that use multimedia effectively, eg video, sound &/or animation
• Format & edit master slides to manage the formatting of a presentation
• Use appropriate images, eg pixel width, proportion, illustration not just decoration
• Crop & enhance images to complement your slides 
• Select, trim and incorporate video clips/animations
• Visualise data effectively using charts and graphs 
• Understand the affordances of different tools, eg PowerPoint, Keynote, Google Slides... 
• Use slide aspect ratio intentionally (wide screen v 4:3)
• Use the slide sorter view to manage/organise your presentation 

Skilful use of PDFs & Posters

• Organised and synchronised online for ease of access/sharing
• Edit to isolate certain pages, extract specific content, reorder content
• Annotate, comment, and highlight 
• Convert (hard or soft) documents to/from PDF 

• Create well designed posters that balance the use of image with text  
• Format & customise pre-designed themes 
• Understand the differences between an infographic (screen) and a poster (print)

Pragmatism

I've been hesitant to concede these facts, but I console myself with the knowledge that if the students have been given the appropriate foundations and experiences what span VITAD in Primary and some extent, Middle School, their ongoing development in terms of digital literacy is now something they should be able to pursue independently throughout High School, and for the rest of their lives. This means that High School teachers have one focus, and one focus only, that is to enable their students to succeed in their examinations, in the same way they have for the past 50 years. Until the examinations change, there little point expecting teachers to change, Especially as the efficacy of their teaching practice is often based, either explicitly or implicitly, on their students’ grades. 

It’s obvious internationally that many if not most schools don’t understand this, or don’t care.  This is why Google Chromebooks and similar budget computers are thriving in comparison with iPads and MacBooks in schools. The former is fine all you want students to experience is WWPP, but if you want them to demonstrate true digital literacy with VITAD and all of the wonderful combinations and permutations between those domains, budget computers can’t and don’t deliver this. 

References

Hughes, Joan E. and Read, Michelle F. (2018) "Student experiences of technology integration in school subjects: A comparison across four middle schools," Middle Grades Review: Vol. 4 : Iss. 1 , Article 6.
Available at: https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/mgreview/vol4/iss1/6

Zheng, B., Warschauer, M., Lin, C. H., & Chang, C. (2016). Learning in One-to-One Laptop Environments A Meta-Analysis and Research Synthesis. Review of Educational Research, 0034654316628645.