Anyway, onto what I wanted to write about, FLUBAROO. It is awesome. I was introduced to this from the folks I follow that were at edcampwi. They showed off the website youpd.org which is a phenomenal resources with tons of tutorials and all kinds of educational stuff. But a couple guys mentioned flubaroo and so I thought I'd check it out as it was mentioned as a cool way to grade work on Google forms. I was already planning on using Google forms this semester, as a better way that I can track student understanding at the end of each week. These are just short little quizzes, formative assessments really so I can see what all I need to go back over before our Common Formative Assessments or unit tests. But grading and going through 6 classes worth each Friday was going to be a nightmare. Thankfully, flubaroo does it for me. You have to download Google Scripts first, and it can be somewhat tedious having to add the flubaroo script each time you want to use. But once it is set up, all you have to do is answer your questions on the form, and when you run the script, it will use your answers as the key and automatically grades it all. You get your data in seconds. It is such a time saver and now I'm able to view this data, sometimes before class is even over. I'm excited about what I'll be able to do with this now going forward, I think I may move the quiz up a day to Thursday so I can use Fridays to help those that need it. Point is, flubaroo is great, I link my Google forms to my webpage and the students can easily access them and I can get them graded rather quickly, so I can focus on other things. Here is the link to flubaroo and it's pretty simple instructions to follow from there.
Week 2 with genius hour was been better. I showed them to Joy Kirr's blog that I mentioned last posting and I think a lot of kids opened their eyes up to what we're trying to do with the time. The next two days, we went to the library for the students to check out books or online resources and on Wednesday they updated me where they were on a Google Form, telling me what they were doing and what, if anything, they needed from me. I was out on Thursday due to our twins 6 month check-up so that was where we stopped things for the week. I'm hoping that this week, we will be able to do a little bit more work, and more importantly, poll the students as to how they will eventually want to share their experiences and start to set that aspect of this up. I'm thinking about potentially getting with other classes through skype or something else so that we can see how other students are using genius hour and if we can learn anything from it and share our ideas as well.
Our debates went really well last week, the kids did way better than I thought, some really got into it, using their best cop voice and everything. A lot were still shy and didn't say much, but I think it'll get better as we do these more often. I also posted pictures of our tweets on the Great Depression. Had some really good ones that I'd share but I need to find a way to black out the students' names. But I was really pleased and the kids again enjoyed this activity too. We're going to try grudgeball on Monday to review for our Common Formative Assessment, and both my 7th and 8th graders are making PSA's on personal finance. They all were excited about the project, and I'm looking forward to hearing about their ideas and scripts Monday and video shoots on Tuesday. Should be a fun week as we will get into Social Change, slavery and the Civil Rights movement, which is always an interesting and great unit for us.
As always, thanks for reading, let me know what you think here or on twitter
No comments:
Post a Comment