Turn it in to TurnItIn in Moodle

Nothing makes me happier at work than a teacher getting more excited than me about something in technology. Last Thursday was a really happy day for me.

After a few weeks of silly errors and issues, I finally had our new TurnItIn Moodle Direct integration ready to deploy and was playing around with a TurnItIn rubric when a teacher looked over my shoulder and asked if she could watch what I was doing. This prompted me to explain my latest project - encouraging more people to use our TurnItIn subscription by letting them use TurnItIn from within Moodle. And her response was my favorite kind. Excited about this new prospect, she went directly back to her desk and not only created her own first TurnItIn assignment in Moodle, complete with grading form, but also told the rest of her PLC right away. And got THEM excited for it.

I thought I was going to have to beg people to try this. Apparently not.

So why do this? 

The reasons to use TurnItIn are numerous. Paperless assignments, originality checking, online grading, digital portfolios, and data collection are a few. Since I started using TurnItIn ten years ago, I have seen vast improvements to the GradeMark program, especially the new Grade Anything platform that allows teachers to grade any kind of file, presentation, performance, etc within GradeMark. The iPad app is something I would have loved eight years ago when I was lamenting my decision to collect essays only via TurnItIn, but was headed for a twelve hour car ride with no internet connection - with the iPad app, you don't need an internet connection once you sync a set of assignments. Easy. Lovely.

Now it's even easier to use here at CJ. No need for teachers or students to log into another account to use the main features of TurnItIn. For everyday use, they can simply create and upload assignments via Moodle... which is an essential part of almost every class here. Logging into TurnItIn will still be useful to gather data from GradeMark Reports, but it isn't necessary every day, nor is it needed by the students. 

From the reaction I've gotten from just a few teachers, I'm thinking this will be a good thing.

Resources:

• TurnItIn's Moodle Direct page containing...
• Instructor Manual
• Student Manual
• Training Videos
• FAQ
• TurnItIn Product Demonstration Videos

Small victories with Google Sites

I spent the spring and summer creating a website that would be home base for a technology professional development program at CJ. I created it using Google Sites, partially because I was modeling it after a program that had been done on Google Sites and partially because I just wanted to explore yet another of Google's products.

I'm a little obsessed now.

I know that my work isn't the most complex when it comes to  web design. I still haven't learned HTML code (when I asked a friend who works in web publishing for a big newspaper about recommended font and font size for a text heavy website, his response that his paper's "tags are 1.4em on a line height of 1.6em" left me dumbfounded). And I still don't understand a lot of what goes on in the background of websites regarding analytics and search engines. But for designing a site that is really only meant for internal use at work, it was an excellent tool for this amateur.

The Tech Charge Challenge website is staying private right now, so I made a copy of the website (small victory when I discovered how!) to make public and removed any personal data from teachers. That's what I've linked here. It isn't perfect (still needs a few tweaks and tutorials), but I'm pretty proud.

A few weeks ago, I decided to make another, much simpler, website as a home for any and all technology-related professional development resources and opportunities at CJ. Small victories all over the place as I set up this page. I created links using images to represent my main websites. I embedded a Google calendar on an "announcement" page. I even figured out how to give only teachers at CJ permission to edit a "list" page (and only that page) so they can add web tools to the list. Now I'm ready to put tools into the list and find a reason to use other templates.

Sometimes on a Monday, we just need to celebrate those small victories.


For more info about Google Sites, check out...

• Beginner's Guide to Creating a Site from Google Site's Help Center
• Mary Fran's Getting Started with Google Sites (a Google Site from a Google Certified Teacher)
• 47 Page Guide to Google Sites for Teachers from Richard Byrne of Free Technology for Teachers

Curious how you can use Google Sites in the classroom? Check out...

• How to Manage Classroom Digital Portfolios by Using Page-level Permissions in Google Sites from Richard Byrne of Free Technology for Teachers
• 5 Ways to Use Google Sites in Schools from Richard Byrne
• Google Sites for Teacher Web Pages and Student Projects from Flipped Education - this page contains links to many example pages and resources

I love Edutopia: Sharing a blog post about tech in the classroom

Quick share, then I promise I'll get back to my "real" work for today. While researching just now, I visited Edutopia.org, which is one of my favorite ed tech websites. In my former life as an English teacher, I loved receiving the print copies of Edutopia in my mailbox and was bummed when I read that it would be discontinued in 2010. Published by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, it was a free magazine full of articles and ideas (and ads for amazing technology!) that inspired me to try new things with technology in the classroom.

I have come to terms with the loss of those colorful pages in hand as I have personally rethought the way I publish resources for my colleagues (formerly in an emailed newsletter formatted in Publisher, now here in this blog and via various email updates... hopefully linking them to this blog) and have discontinued my personal newspaper subscription because I just wasn't getting around to reading it, instead getting the highlights from social media. But I still miss the magazine and my newspaper. They just aren't always the most logical options these days.

I digress. Edutopia.org. The top headline today was a blog post titled "The Digital Lives of Teens: 'If You Don't Have a Plan for Them, They Will Have a Plan for You'". Well, of course that caught my attention. Blogger Matt Levinson, a school administrator and author of From Fear to Facebook: One School's Journey, begins with a story from a TV show to get his point across - we have to meet the students where they are with technology. It's a challenge to do so, but so essential today.

I just want to leave that link for you. A quick read, entertaining, and good to keep in mind as we turn the corner on the July 4th holiday, which to me has always signaled the turning point of summer - after this, it's the down slope headed back to another school year...