Innovation Apps – Page 2 – Innovation Blog

Monitoring Student Progress in Real Time

Innovation has always developed in response to authentic, practical instructional needs of students and teachers. In retirement, I am enjoying teaching part-time remotely and this continues to inspire new apps and coding enhancement.

You know, Reader, if you take a good look at what you are using to teach in digital spaces, you may observe like I did that a lot of it is software originally designed for office workers. Word processors, spreadsheets, presentation software and the like: these were made for adults doing largely self-directed work in office work. We are so accustomed to these apps that we hardly realize that they don’t ever quite exactly fit for us in the classroom; that we are always creating modifications and work-arounds to make them work. And we get by…

21st century learning spaces, a paradigm often expounded here at this site, are virtual workspaces that really “fit” secondary instruction in ways that office productivity products do not. Let’s address monitoring student work.

One of my classes this year is an AP French class down in Texas. My objective was to teach them a new grammar point. During our in-class practice, I needed to be able to monitor their work while they were doing it.

Reader, you may already be familiar with Innovation’s grammar learning app. Students learning world languages benefit from practice transforming and generating utterances from prompts. The app meets this need by providing a digital learning space that is interactive. An algorithmic AI lets students know how close they are to the answer, for example, and the instructor can transform the content into a “live session” in which students participate in real time much like the famous Kahoot! game.

Adolescents can sometimes be distractible. In an in-person classroom, I have reasonable observational capacity to notice and redirect distracted students. In remote teaching, this requires some additional effort. What if I could see the student’s’ progress in real time as they worked?

Screenshot of a “live session”, an interactive space where the teacher can pose prompts and students respond in real time interactivity.

People learning new things can sometimes make mistakes. In an in-person classroom, I can wander the room and peer over students’ shoulders. I can try to catch mistakes as they make them and offer correction in a more immediate way. It’s a shame to have to wait a day or two before addressing writing errors. Immediate feedback is more effective so that the other practice examples go well and inculcate the correct syntax. What if I could peer over everybody’s virtual shoulders while they practiced their new writing skill?

The monitor app is now installed at Innovation’s short answer and world language composition tasks. It allows the instructor to view all of the students currently with any saved work on the task. Click the student name, and the instructor can see their work in real time (well, there’s a ten second lag for technical reasons). This work is refreshed every ten seconds. In the short answer monitor, the number after each name tells how many responses they have saved.

In situations where the teacher may wish to share the screen with the class, they can hide the student names and, for the short answer tasks, hide the correct answers.

The monitor, set up for a short answer task, showing students anonymously when needed.

The way I like to use this is as follows: I use two monitors. Monitor 2 is shared with students. I can set the names to “Anonymous” and share the monitor. I select students at random from time to time to check their progress. I may focus on someone who is behind. I may focus on someone I know needs more support (I can see the names before setting anonymous). In monitor 1, on the Zoom or Teams call, I can use the chat to message students corrections, suggestions, redirections if they appear off task, and so forth.

the monitor app, hiding the correct answers in short answer tasks when needed.

To activate the monitor, scroll to the activity in your dashboard course playlist. You’ll find “Monitor Class” in the task dropdown. Monitor is installed for short answer and composition tasks at present. While you are wandering around the site, why not visit our newly opening shops? You can purchase my own activities, PowerPoints, and DBQs for social studies.

Adjusting Assessment Scores: Why and How

When it comes to grading, scores are often reported on a simple 0-100 scale. But, in many cases, it’s better to adjust those scores to make sure they truly reflect how well a student has mastered the material. This adjustment process is often referred to as normalization, and one common way to do this is through a method called z-score standardization.

What is Z-Score Standardization?

Imagine a group of students who took the same test. Some students might have performed really well, while others might have struggled. If we simply average all the scores and compare them to a fixed passing threshold (like 70%), it wouldn’t be fair to those students who performed well beyond the average. Z-score standardization is a way of adjusting scores so that they fit a more accurate and fair scale.

How it works:

Z-Score Calculation: The z-score tells us how far a student’s score is from the average score, measured in terms of standard deviations (which is a fancy way of saying how spread out the scores are). A positive z-score means the student did better than average, and a negative z-score means the student did worse than average.

The formula for calculating a z-score is:

Adjusting Scores: Once we calculate each student’s z-score, we can adjust their scores to match a more standard scale. This is done by applying the z-score to the mean (average) and standard deviation of the group’s scores. The new score is calculated as:

This formula uses the student’s z-score to adjust the score based on how far it is from the group’s average.

Why Do This?

Fairer Grading: By adjusting for how scores are distributed (e.g., a test with a very easy or very hard question), the scores become fairer, especially when comparing students across different groups or assessments.
Removing Bias: Sometimes, individual test questions are biased or poorly written, affecting how students perform. Z-score standardization helps eliminate that bias by focusing on the overall performance of the group.
Outlier Handling: The method also takes into account “outliers” (e.g., one or two students who either do extremely well or very poorly). These outliers can skew results, so they’re filtered out to make the adjusted scores more reliable.

What Does This Look Like in Practice?

Let’s say a student scores a 90 on a test, but the average score for the class is 75, with a standard deviation of 10. To calculate the z-score for the student, we use the formula:

This means the student’s score is 1.5 standard deviations above the class average.

Next, we use the z-score to adjust the student’s score. If we want to bring the class to a higher standard (let’s say the target mean is 80), we use the formula for adjusting the score:

So, the student’s adjusted score is now 95, reflecting their performance in relation to the class and the new target.

Z-score standardization is often mistaken for “curving” scores, but they are fundamentally different. Curving typically involves adjusting all scores on a test so that the highest score becomes a perfect score, or the average score is raised to a certain target (like 70%). This method can unfairly benefit some students and disadvantage others. In contrast, z-score standardization adjusts individual scores based on how far they are from the class average, ensuring that each student’s performance is evaluated relative to the entire group, not a fixed threshold. By considering the spread of scores (standard deviation) and handling outliers, z-score standardization provides a more accurate reflection of a student’s performance, removing the arbitrary nature of curving and offering a fairer and more statistically sound approach to grading.

Innovation makes it incredibly easy for teachers to adjust and standardize assessment scores with our powerful, user-friendly tool. By using z-score standardization, our app helps teachers fairly align scores to a standard scale, taking into account the unique distribution of each class’s performance. With automatic outlier detection and score adjustments, teachers no longer need to worry about arbitrary curving or biased grading. It’s an efficient, data-driven solution that ensures every student’s performance is evaluated accurately and equitably, all with minimal effort on the teacher’s part.

Rediscovering the French Dictée

When I was in ninth grade, we had a large world language (then “foreign” language) department at my high school. My homeroom classmate had an older teacher for French I and I had her daughter for my teacher. For some reason, I recall a conversation about a dictation exercise, the dictée, that the older teacher (who was from France) regularly did. My teacher didn’t do dictées. My homeroom classmate was not too keen on them. That was the first time I heard of the dictée.

I couldn’t tell you why I remember that little homeroom conversation. But I never did have a dictée in any French class right up through my BA degree in French Language and Literature. The dictée had become old fashioned. Its emphasis on correct grammar and spelling were shoved aside as too rigid in the “notional-functional” approach that was growing in the early ’80s and which came to replace grammar-translation.

The dictée returned to my attention last fall when I read an article in FranceInfo about a dictée contest. In fact, such “concours” are pretty common now and the dictée, that classic French pedagogical tool, has enjoyed a resurgence of popularity.

Scroll ahead some months and I find myself teaching a student in French V for an online school. The student is brilliant and already fluent in French, so I am challenged to devise lessons for him when my usual stock of lessons fall within his mastery or when the grammatical studies in the syllabus provided by the school are things he easily tests out of. I asked him what he thought he needed to work on instead, and he said spelling. The dictée sprung to mind as a spelling activity.

Concurrently, I am teaching an AP French course through another company. It’s a small class of eight very bright students who are a pleasure to teach. Unfortunately, they have gotten into the habit of relying heavily on AI to generate their work. Even in improvised, spontaneous chat assignments, some of them repeatedly leave the page (the Innovation synchronous chat app tracks this) to no doubt consult the AI as to what to say. The work many of them submit is polished and perfect beyond their years. Language learning involves detecting common errors and refining the language. But if the students never reveal their errors or lack of knowledge, I cannot easily correct. It feels like an arms race to continually devise activities that are resistant to AI assistance. The dictée sprung to mind as a virtual classroom task that would be difficult to get AI help on.

Since I began teaching French (1990!), I have used composition assignments to look for errors to work on with students. These are assignments modeled on the New York State proficiency test and Regents exams of the era. They measure each clause by comprehensibility, appropriateness, and form. Students have a free error allowance (one for French III and up). These assignments were done in class under supervision with no references (although for classes needing extra support I could allow a certain number of questions). When I began teaching online, I wanted to use this assignment as I had. I coded a World Language App here at Innovation that provides a digital space for students with a proctor and an easy scoring page for teachers. A large percentage of my students use AI extensively to generate these even though I ask them not to. They present polished work that I know they could not have written themselves. One student I had actually created a few errors on purpose to cover the AI consultation. They were random and not the kind of natural “errors” that naturally occur. I don’t make a big deal. I rarely even let on that I know. Some students use AI less as the course goes on when they learn to feel comfortable. I contented myself with turning the perfect compositions into an exercise: I could ask students about what they wrote, the tense they chose, or just offer grammatical descriptions of the work. It was interesting watching them explain the presence of complex structures that they had not been taught yet! 🙂

The Dictée gives me important information about student proficiency and direction for lessons

I tried out a dictée with three students this week, French II, III, and V. I used the Innovation short answer digital learning space in two ways: I did one lesson “live” during our session and one was a recording I made for homework. I was pleased with the results. I learned a lot more about my students’ language abilities than from the weekly composition assignment.

My purpose is to discover student errors so we can correct them and polish them. The errors fall into two categories, lexical (spelling) and grammatical (conjugation and agreement, etc.). But I also learned that the dictée can reveal something about students’ vocabulary knowledge too. Words they do not know they are likely to skip or render phonetically. My guess is that native speakers would do a better job rendering unknown words spelled correctly because they are more familiar with the writing-phonology system of French.

I was happy enough with the results to modify the composition app to allow attaching an audio clip and a model answer. I worked with ChatGTP myself a little to code a function that would quickly assess the students’ spelling. This app is easy to use during synchronous sessions: I merely generate a link from the course playlist, the student saves their dictation, and then on submission I can display on a shared screen to debrief. I can also assign these for homework.

The student’s digital space for submitting dictée.

The scoring page where teachers can highlight errors with different colors for lexical errors and grammatical errors.

Valuable Information about Student Skill Levels

Since it is difficult and unlikely that students will have the time and opportunity to check this with an AI, I get valuable and authentic data about student skill levels. Namely, their lexical spelling, grammatical knowledge, and a good picture of their vocabulary. Research has shown that dictation can indirectly reflect a student’s vocabulary knowledge, since a richer vocabulary base enables more accurate transcription of spoken language. Currently, in remote teaching contexts it is difficult to get this information. Students at all levels are becoming adept at AI queries. They polish and submit work that defeats the purpose of assigning it!

The debriefing on the task is as important as getting the information about student skill levels. Reviewing the corrections and creating custom exercises to train students out of the errors or teach them the grammar structures and vocabulary they need: these are necessary to fully profit by the task.

The senior teacher in my high school, all those years ago, who maintained the tradition of the dictée would smile now, I suspect, to find that some of us are returning to that ancient practice. Keep an eye on the Innovation app that assesses dictés! I plan to refine it as I use the activity more and more.

Teaching Social Studies with Extended Primary Sources

One of my favorite lessons teaching any time period of social studies has always been working with extended length primary sources.

Students’ initial difficulty completing these tasks usually stemmed from habits I like to help them break. The first bad habit was to copy sections of the source text verbatim instead of paraphrasing. Another was the expectation that all the answers were in the source text. An important, if not vital, competency in studying primary sources is to be aware of the outside knowledge and possible biases that the reader them-self brings to the source. This task calls on students to bring prior knowledge to direct awareness.

My primary source analysis task is a short essay. The process is the same for every source no matter the time period or even the grade level. Students address the source type, purpose, and audience. They provide relevant historical context from their own knowledge. They summarize the source. They address reliability factors. For middle schoolers, these “essays” are really more like short compositions. My high schoolers came to compose more extended length essays. Here’s one you can have for nothing:

g9.1 Code of Hammurabi_FULL Download

Up to my retirement, I was teaching in a small, rural K-12 school where I had students for three or even four years. This was a great benefit for so many reasons, one of which was they became “skilled at the skills”. I integrated a lot of writing and reading in my courses.

The Important is Not Always in the Text Itself

Most elementary level reading comprehension tasks call on students to locate an answer in the text to prove they understand. Working with primary sources means understanding what was going on in the historical period that produced the document. Getting students to grasp this takes patience and perseverance. This task asks students to deduce how the audience was expected to react to the source, who the intended audience was, what was going on historically at the time, and factors affecting reliability of the source. None of this is in the document explicitly itself.

A Great Way to Teach Critical Thinking and Deduction

I cannot recommend this assignment strongly enough for my fellow social studies teachers out there. I assigned this right after I completed the content delivery in a unit. It lent itself to long-term retention of the historical content because students needed to apply this newly acquired knowledge to the text. It promotes reading comprehension. It stimulates discussion in class. Often, a student would have a question about the source or how to answer questions of bias and audience and reliability. It would make a great opportunity to pause and have a discussion about these things. These extended length primary sources offer much more to the learning process that the short 200-word snippets we find in textbooks and on state tests (think document-based essays and constructed-response tasks).

The Essay Prompt Assignment may be a Hard Sell to Teachers

I have not been very successful in promoting this method to many others. Very few of the essay versions sell at our TeachersPayTeachers store. I think I understand why. It takes time and consistency to teach reliability factors to students. Grading a hundred short essays every unit of study is a daunting proposition in light of everything else we have to do. More than one transfer student remarked that my social studies courses had a lot of writing. None regretted it. More than one said they learned to write in my class.

But I get it! So, I am developing an automated multiple-choice version of these assignments. Mind you, reader, I feel that doing this as a composition is a better practice, but I can also see how doing a multiple-choice version of this task can be very instructive. I invite you to download this free resource to try it out.

Primary Source Analysis: Code of Hammurabi, 1TK3-D3DC-A16143Z-437-JON [preview] — Use the passcode at our website here.

The Multiple-Choice Version

First of all, if you want to have your students write the essay version of this assignment, each prompt includes the same organizer to guide their writing.

I have carefully documented where I got the source using an easy-to-understand source citation system that I borrowed from genealogists. This citation is presented first and should prompt the student to consider factors affecting reliability.

The multiple-choice version is auto-corrected. You get a passcode that students use to access the online task at the Innovation website. Learn more about our passcodes from this short video:

The questions are categorized under “Observations” whose categories are intended audience, historical context, source summary, and reliability factors. The resource includes a text version of the questions in case you don’t feel the online auto-corrected version is best.

g9.1 QUESTIONS for Code of Hammurabi Download

Primary Source Analysis: Code of Hammurabi, 1TK3-D3DC-A16143Z-437-JON [preview] — Use the passcode at our website here.

Unlocking the Power of Our Passcodes

If you’ve purchased one of our products on TeachersPayTeachers, you may have received passcodes for online activities. These passcodes allow your students to access and complete exercises on our website, where their scores will be displayed. But there’s more you can do with these passcodes, especially if you’re a subscriber to our Innovation platform. Here’s how you can maximize their potential.

How to Use Your Passcodes

Distribute to Students: Give the passcode to your students. They will enter it on the TestDrive page of the Innovation website to access the exercise. The system will display their scores upon completion.
Import into Your Dashboard:
- Log into Your Dashboard: Navigate to the upper right-hand corner of the Innovation website.
- Enter the Passcode: Paste the code into the provided field. Ensure you’ve copied it correctly.
- Import the Activity: Click “Import,” select the class for the activity, and confirm. The system will notify you of a successful import.
- Organize Your Activities: The new activity will appear at the top of your list. You can rearrange it by using the “Actions” > “Reorder” button and drag and drop it as needed.

Benefits of Importing Activities

Enhanced Monitoring: By importing activities into your Innovation account, you can track student progress more effectively. You’ll see who completed what, when, and how long they spent on each task.

Customization Options:

Edit Questions: Tailor the questions to better suit your teaching style or add cue points for enhanced engagement.
Add Resources: Upload PDFs, audio files, or other materials to create a richer learning experience.
Create New Questions: Use our question bank to generate new activities. The imported questions are saved in your database, categorized for easy access.

Creating Tests and Tutors

Instant Tests: Use the question bank to quickly assemble multiple-choice tests. Select the desired questions, and voilà – you have a ready-to-go test.

Tutoring Features: Set up practice sessions so students can rehearse before tackling the main exercise. This helps reinforce learning and builds confidence.

By subscribing to our Innovation platform, you gain these powerful tools to enhance your teaching experience. Import your activities, monitor student engagement, and customize content to meet your needs. We hope you’ll join us and unlock the full potential of your teaching resources.

Teaching World Languages Remotely, Part 4: Developing Conversation

Upon retiring from full-time public school teaching in 2023, I took part-time working teaching French remotely. Teaching via video conferencing turns out to be a terrific method and a very satisfying work!

Being also a web developer for a platform designed for remote teaching and in-class 1:1 designs, I was inspired by this work to begin developing a set of applications specifically for teaching world languages remotely.

I always loved improv and when teaching social studies or French in my career, my students and I enjoyed role play as a learning tool that was fun and meaningful. My practice was to incorporate many exercises to develop conversational proficiency using improv or semi-improvised “scaffold” dialogues.

The improv app at Innovation is now well developed. This app is available to subscribers only right now from the Language Console of the dashboard.

The teacher shares the screen in a remote teaching situation (or in-person, displays the screen in class). The first thing is to select the proficiency level. I use the CEFR descriptors.

A notice appears in red in the center advising students not to use AI while participating. This was sometimes an issue for me with some remote students, who quickly consulted Google translate instead of improvising their own contributions to our conversation. Teachers can remove this notice by clicking in.

Once the difficulty level is chosen, the teacher can select from the available conversation themes. These correspond to typical topics taught in world language classes that employ thematic units as the method. The reader will notice in the graphic that a scorecard appears on the right. The scoring method is that used in speaking tasks on New York State world language assessments and instructions are available at the click of a button.

Once the teacher has selected the theme, a set of possible dialogues appears.

Upon selecting the prompt, the conversation can begin. As the dialogue proceeds, the teacher can track the attempts and utterances in the scorecard on the right. They can award 2 points for utterances which are comprehensible, appropriate, and make no surprising errors for level. the can award 1 point for utterances that are not quite right for that student’s expected proficiency. The app automatically calculates the grade.

Now what I like to do is to use the large textarea in the center to provide useful words or phrases that the student asked for or needed during the dialogue.

List the expressions with their meaning separated by an equal sign. Here’s why: the Innovation flashcards app has been integrated so that we can study the phrases! Scroll down just a wee bit and you will find a small button called “Cards”. This will extract those phrases and arrange them into flash cards for study!

My practice is then to give students a copy of that list via email or in their lesson notes. They can themselves use Innovation’s Quick Flashcards app to generate their own drills for later.

The development of the improv app at Innovation has been a particularly exciting work. By incorporating elements of improvisation and conversation scaffolding, I’ve aimed to make language learning both engaging and effective for students in remote teaching contexts as well as for in-person learning. The app’s integration with other features such as proficiency level selection, themed dialogues, and real-time scoring ensures a comprehensive learning experience.

Introducing a New App: Ordered Lists

After a long hiatus while teaching social studies, I began a return to teaching French in 2018. I am a bit of a digital pack rat and was glad to find most of the teaching resources for French that I had developed in the 1990s still on an old hard drive. One of these is a unit for teaching a graphic novel called Astérix chez les bretons.

I found in that trove of activities a reading comprehension task that I had forgotten about: the ordered list or chronology. After reading the text and doing the usual vocabulary and comprehension kinds of tasks, I presented students a set of sentences where the events were out of order. On the worksheet, they were to number them in correct order according to the text. This was a great way to reinforce not only the events in the story, but more importantly the vocabulary and reading skills I was working to support.

I am currently teaching French online and one of my classes has chosen this graphic novel for a unit of study. Since I am teaching remotely, I want digital 21st century learning spaces instead of PDF worksheets. And so out of necessity was born this new app at Innovation, the ordered list.

The ordered list is simple: students either drag and drop or use the buttons to arrange the text boxes in order. They can check their progress as they go and submit a score when done. I can see how this would have been very useful when I was teaching history!

This needed to be easy for the teacher to create. It’s a snap: the teacher merely pastes in the ordered list and clicks a button to generate the activity.

As added features, one can attach a PDF document, an audio file, and/or embed a video from YouTube or Vimeo. The student could be prompted to order the text boxes based on these sources.

The usual 21st century learning spaces features are integrated. Teachers will see in the audit when their students access the task and how long they spend on it. The proctor monitors access to the page and student attention. It’s easy to view the scores of grades are taken and to apply standardized scoring or any of the other Innovation features and functions.

Try it for yourself! Use this passcode to access a chronology task for the American Revolution at the Innovation TestDrive: 397Q-NMXL-A15625Z-9-JON

Teaching World Languages Remotely, Part 3: Vocabulary Building

The Importance of Interactivity

The key drawback to early efforts at distance learning was being kind of trapped behind that camera like a goldfish in a bowl. You could make all the signs and signals you wanted, but the world on the other side of the glass was beyond your ability to control.

Teaching remotely is not highly effective when it consists of essentially just holding up things to the camera for the student to experience. Activate the Zoom – Skype – Meet – Teams session, share your PDF, give verbal instructions… this is a weak instructional practice mainly because it is largely passive for the student.

If the teacher were in a real classroom, tutoring the student at an honest-to-goodness table, the learning materials could be manipulated in real life in ways that support the process. They can fold the paper to hide the answer, they can shuffle the flash cards, they can write and cross out and scribble and erase. The manipulation of the learning materials is important.

The apps at Innovation are designed to promote the kind of virtual interactivity that heightens the effectiveness of teaching remotely. To be a great learning experience, the remote session needs to be virtually interactive in the same effective way that in-person lessons are. This is a big part of what we mean by the “21st century learning space”.

Flashcards

Let’s take up the example of teaching vocabulary using flashcards. In real life, I would want to use a process whereby I selectively show the student a new word, rehearse the pronunciation in some meaningful way, then cue up the words to rehearse the meanings.

Using the passive approach, I could share a PDF through the video conference software and “go over” the list with the student.

Using the flashcard app at Innovation, I can interact so much more effectively. To begin, I can select the target vocabulary word to display.

I prompt the student to repeat the pronunciation, then click to reveal the meaning.

Once we are through the list, I can repeat the process, only this time I can save out those items the student forgot.

Now we are only drilling those items. We can talk about mnemonic devices, use the words in sentences, or just repeat and rehearse. Once the student has the words down pat for recognition, I click Reverse Cue-Response to prompt from English cue.

Integrated Flashcard App

The improvised conversation app and the scaffold dialogue app both have integrated flashcards. During an improvised conversation task, the student may need to ask me how to say some words as we run through the conversation the first time. I list them for them in the textarea below the prompt.

So long as I pair the new phrases with an equal sign and a meaning, the app can generate a flashcard system right underneath after our conversation.

We can rehearse now the new words and phrases before we perform the dialogue once again.

Interactivity is Key

Being able to interact virtually over remote teaching sessions in ways that are as effective as in-person is absolutely necessary to achieve a satisfying learning experience that maximizes our effective use of time. The flashcard app at Innovation facilitates this process of simple cue-response training that is so foundational in teaching language. It allows me to go beyond just sharing my screen to “go over” a PDF!

Managing Student Accounts at Innovation

In response to teacher requests over the years, there are a number of different ways to add student sub-accounts to your virtual classroom at Innovation.

Self-Registration

It’s best to just have students register themselves in your virtual classroom. There is a link provided on the Students tab in your teacher dashboard. The links are on the left.

One link is generic, allowing students to create sub-accounts using a password or using Google Sign-in.

One link is specific to Google Sign-in. Send this one if no one is using username-password. You can always switch later if you want.

Import Student Roster from Google Classroom

If you are integrating Innovation tasks into your Google Classroom, you can import the rosters.

Adding Students Manually

Teachers can just add students manually using the Add Student app. The app will create a unique username from the student’s first and last names. You can optionally assign students to a class. More about enrollment below…

Adding Students via Spreadsheet

Teachers can upload a spreadsheet of student data and let Innovation create the accounts from there. Teachers who do this must use the XLSX template provided.

class_roster_template Download

Expiration Dates on Student Accounts: Commercial Licenses versus Free Licenses

Teachers who have a commercial license to Innovation can manage expiration dates on student accounts. This is useful, for example, if you are working for a tutoring service and you are charging students to access your virtual classroom for a certain period of time.

Teachers with Free Licenses do not have expiration dates on student accounts and need to manage them manually.

When a new student is added for commercial accounts, it is by default created for two days at first. Teachers need to add time. Manage student account expiration dates in Students :: Student Account Expiry.

How Students Access Innovation

There are three ways students can log in to Innovation:

Google Sign-in
PIN + Virtual Room Number
Virtual room number + username + password

Google Sign-in

If you are using Google classroom and plan to integrate Innovation tasks into that platform, this is your best choice. Students will already have Google accounts and they can sign in without remembering an extra password.

Personal Identification Numbers (PINs) are for students under 13 because students must be 13 or older to use the Google Signin or username-password methods. But you can use this for any of your students. Teachers need to activate the PIN system and can optionally allow access this way only from certain IP addresses. For example, I have set this up so that my students could only use the PIN from my school.

Username + Password

The traditional way to log in also still exists at Innovation. Students need to know your virtual classroom number, their username assigned on account creation, and a password. The teacher controls the passwords.

The Quick Login Link

If a student cannot log in because they have forgotten their password, you cans end them a quick login link. This link will automatically log students in without a password, Google authentication, or PIN. It only works once and the link is only good for two hours.

Manage Course Enrollment

Teachers can now restrict access for students to certain courses in their virtual classroom at Innovation. By default, enrollment is “open”, meaning students can freely access any course.

For teachers who need to restrict access by students to a certain course, there is an app to manage enrollment. Access the app from Students :: Student Accounts Management :: Manage Course Enrollment. From here, follow instructions to restrict enrollment and then assign students to a class.

Commercial licensees will find this useful if they are charging for access to a course and need to prevent free access to courses for which students have not paid.

21st Century Learning Spaces: Asynchronous Discussion Forum

My first experience with asynchronous discussion forums came in courses I was taking myself online through Empire State College a number of years ago. Many readers will recognize the assignment: given a prompt, students are to post their response and then reply to the responses of a number of other students in the class. Typically, there was a deadline by which these discussions had to take place. I liked the exercise and I found it useful to address the course material.

I would invite the reader to read my earlier post on synchronous chat, which presents some of the research on online discussion and chat.

Promoters of asynchronous discussion forums point out rightly that this task brings greater participation than face-to-face class discussions do. Whereas in the latter situation, participation may be dominated by an extroverted few or limited in other ways, the online forum brings everybody in. Asynchronous discussion leave time for research and reflection that is not practical in the face-to-face class. There are some practical considerations for students at the middle and high school level that are not usually issues at the college level.

My Experience

I used asynchronous form discussions in my middle and high school social studies classes for a decade. This occurred in each unit of student. In my context, students were assigned a persuasive prompt to which they were expected to take a position and post two supporting reasons. Next, they were assigned to present the opposing view to another student (even if it did not match their actual personal views), and finally they were to defend their original position in reply to the student who was assigned to present the opposing view to themselves.

Seventh and eight graders needed training right off the bat, naturally. Accustomed to social media, their early contributions were vapid and full of emojis and “txt” language. It was important to remind them that this was a formal enterprise and that standard English conventions held. It was often difficult to get them to elaborate their ideas toward the 200-word goal set for their opening post.

I was working in a small, rural school where I would have the students from grades seven through ten, so I could see their work develop over the years.

By end of 9th grade, posts became more sophisticated

I found it to be a good practice to offer the highest marks to those who provided evidence and cited a source. I coded a citation generator right in the forum app to encourage this.

Grading the Posts

Scoring these can be labor intensive for no other reason than the layout of the forum itself. The page is designed for reading and responding, but this does not work well for scoring because there is too much scrolling and searching necessary to view posts and replies.

The scoring app makes it easy for the teacher to view the rubric, the student’s posts, and their replies to others in one place. Analysis tools lets the teacher see how many posts, when they were made, and even the readability level of the contributions.

Practical Issues

The main problem I encountered in this assignment was that students would forget to complete it at first. I resolved this by assigning it in class and giving time. For example, on the first day I would present the prompt and instruct students to post their positions that class period before continuing with the day’s other work. The following day, students would have time to post their replies and finally a third day they would post their defense.

Another issue that came up was getting everyone the needed number of replies. Some posts would attract more replies than others. Some students needed a reply so they could offer defense. The solution was to modify the assignment and declare that, once one has posted, one is obliged to offer the opposing view to the person above in the forum feed.

Interestingly, these assignments also led to face-to-face spontaneous class discussions, sometimes with me and sometimes with a group. Although this may have been somewhat distracting for students in the class working on other things, we found some compromise time to allow these spontaneous interactions to proceed without disrupting the other work much. These were golden opportunities, conversations of enormous educational benefit that are so hard to artificially initiate and encourage.

I came to regard the discussion each unit as a sort of group persuasive writing effort. I included training in grade eight in persuasive writing and logical fallacies. The discussion app here at Innovation has a feature which allows readers to flag posts as committing a logical fallacy.

The Innovation Discussion Forum App is a 21st Century Learning Space

Guardrails: The app lets the teacher monitor all conversations and to delete problematic ones.
Training Wheels: The teacher can attach a grading rubric and sample posts. I used to post first under a pseudonym to whom the first student could reply. Additionally, weaker students can peruse the posts of stronger students in an effort to get a clear picture of the kinds of opinions that can be had on the issue.
Debriefing: Debriefing is easily achieved by projecting the discussion screen on the from board. Students posts in this task are not anonymous.
Assessment and Feedback: The scoring app is very efficient and highly developed from years of use. The teacher can view all pf the student’s posts and replies without having to scroll across the entire platform. Analysis tools reveal the readability of the text, how much they wrote, how analytical it is.
Swiss Army Knife: The discussion app lends itself well to more in-depth persuasive writing assignments such as an essay.
Locus of Data Control: The student chat submissions are stored on a server licensed to the teacher’s control. Commercial apps such as FaceBook and Twitter may be less dedicated to the kinds of privacy and control exigencies of education.

Ideas in Closing

Asynchronous discussions are great – my students and I enjoyed these tasks. It is my view that higher level thinking demanded by persuasion and debate (Bloom’s evaluation level of the cognitive domain) really enhance long-term memory of the content. I cannot emphasize enough the value of these kinds of higher-order task. Working in a 21st century learning space promotes the participation of everybody.