Submitting Digital Assignments with Google Forms & Screenshots

Google recently updated its Forms to allow embedding of images and videos opens the door for great possibilities with surveys/quizzes/etc. It's especially helpful in one area: using Google Forms to submit student work. (Credit to +Greg Kulowiec for opening my eyes to this!)

My 7th graders completed timelines on major events of the Civil War using the program Timeglider. In order to share them with me, they would need to change the sharing settings and find an obscure link to their timeline. Knowing the confusion caused by this from past experience, I created a simple form where they would only enter two pieces of information:

1. Their name
2. The link to their timeline

In order to get this information, I now used screenshots to show them exactly how to share it correctly. Since the screenshots can be embedded in the survey, it simplifies the process for the students.

The result? Zero questions. Nearly 100% of links correctly submitted within 4 minutes of the start of class. (Realized I was missing one step that through off a few students... always learning!)

To create the images, I simply used my Mac's built-in screenshot feature (command + shift + 3), then cropped and annotated the image using Mac's built-in pdf viewer, Preview.

Since Google Drive also allows for embedding of videos, this would be an easy to way to incorporate screencast video tutorials for the same reason. I use these often to show students how to use the various online tools we utilize in class.

Ukraine: Teaching Perspective through Current Events

As a history teacher, relating the past to the present is integral to my success. If the name of this blog - and it's origin, Faulkner's quote - fail to acknowledge this point, perhaps the project below will.

For our (extremely short) unit on Europe, we will focus our attention on the ever-changing situation in Ukraine. There are a number of reasons for choosing Ukraine besides its relevance to the news, including its connections to the USSR, World Wars, and Russo-European relations, as well as protest movements, imperialism, and democracy in general. For our sake, however, the unraveling crisis/unrest/protest (whatever you prefer to call it) in Ukraine also provides an important opportunity to analyze perspective.

Our project is outlined below. We began by having our 8th graders read background articles on the conflict, as well as articles from sources chosen to intentionally reveal bias. Our students have been assigned groups based on three perspectives - pro-Russian Ukraine, pro-EU Ukraine, and international. Within those groups, they will create content that will ultimately become a website representing the conflict from their group's perspective. Within each group, there will be seven different assignments. While wee are assigning the groups, we are not assigning the specific assignments. This is purposeful so as to allow students to asset map and identify strengths and weaknesses within themselves and the group. The final product will be a digital website created by each group sharing their work - a kind of digital magazine from their perspective.

So what do you think? What are we missing? How would you change it? How could we do it better?

Our hope is that this project can be recycled and tweaked for years to come in order to analyze perspectives around whatever current protest movement is occurring - wherever that may be...