We are working feverishly to integrate openAI into Innovation this month! It is so exciting to see how this enhances our work! It’s like having a professional teaching assistant!
The new Test app has many enhancements over the previous app. Among the improvements (besides AI support) are:
It can have a mix of short answer and multiple-choice questions.
Teachers can import questions from the test bank, from other tests, create brand new questions, or use our AI question generator.
Teachers can edit the questions right in the new editor app, including attaching audio clips and images if needed.
The student test area has a new, modern layout and user-friendly design, including full security, support for international characters, and a feature to mark questions for later review.
For short answer questions, the teachers can avail themselves of the AI grading assistant! While we have left the algorithmic AI installed, using generative AI saves you the trouble of pre-training the grading assistant.
Innovation is excited to announce that we are working diligently to integrate OpenAI artificial intelligence into all aspects of the Innovation platform! We are developing a virtual teaching assistant that will help teachers generate “just right” learning activities and assessments.
Look for the purple button throughout the site …
… or the ✨ emoji to signal where AI integrations have been installed.
AI integration has been a goal at Innovation since before the release of the generative AI models in the early 2020s. Since 2018, Innovation has sported a pretty nifty algorithmic AI that helps grade short written work submissions and proctor student online activity. Now with the integration of OpenAI’s generative AI models (3.5 and 4o), we can truly realize the dream of a highly productive and efficient virtual teaching assistant!
When Innovation started out under a different name some 25 years ago, it was mainly a test generator (thus, the name). Since the pandemic, it has been meeting the needs of remote instructors and in-person classrooms alike not only in assessment but in content delivery in a variety of subjects, including for world language instruction.
Innovation is a place to create. It’s a place where teacher-authors can generate “just right” learning activities and assessments for their teaching context instead of textbook company generics. But we understand that secondary school teachers are even more busy than ever, seeking to meet the growing diversity of need and ever changing objectives and curricula. With Innovation’s AI teaching assistant, teachers can redirect their creative energies to the big picture of student learning and measurement.
Check out this simple how-to, for example, which illustrates how you can use the AI teaching assistant to help you generate a test.
Check back with us as the spring unfolds! At this writing, we have already installed openAI teaching assistants in:
AI assistance and translators such as Deepl and Google Translate are very accurate and useful tools. When I assign my French students certain tasks, I expect they will use these tools to help them just as I would have expected students in-person thirty years ago to use a French-English dictionary to help with spelling and new words on certain tasks.
The problem is that the temptation to just have the AI generate the work is a strong one. It is important for remote instructors to place obstacles in the way of this practice, which not only undermines the student’s training but represents an ethical pitfall.
Imagine this scenario: an online AP Spanish class where major assessments are take-home tasks like essays and video-recordings of presentations. Using the traditional paradigm for this assignment, the student is given guidelines and due dates and a rubric with a graphic organizer. The instructor provides all that. Then the due date comes, all the work is in, and the instructor begins to review the work. What impressive vocabulary! What elegant grammar! And yet, reflecting on the spontaneous language generated by these same students in video-conference live sessions, it is hard to believe that this work could come from some of them.
All of my remote courses begin with a training film of sorts in which I explain the concept of academic integrity and ownership of one’s work submissions. I explain that it is expected that students will learn all of the new words they incorporate into their work submissions so as to maintain ownership of the task. I demonstrate using a translator properly and improperly.
A very useful strategy is one I have used since in-person days decades ago: simply ask the student the meanings of the words in their work that I suspect they do not know. In the remote learning context, this can be difficult to arrange, since there is no easy way to pull a student aside during class and conduct the interview about their work. That’s where Innovation comes in.
Sample student work that was too perfect for their demonstrated abilities.
It only takes a few minutes to select words and phrases from the student’s work submission that I believe they do not likely know. I select seven to ten words or phrases and I generate a short answer translation quiz using Innovation’s Quick Short Answer.
I enter a title, maybe set the category, and enter the words with English first, an equal sign, then the French.
Innovation’s app separates the word from its meaning by the equal signs. Once I have generated the quiz, I access the quiz Master app. I set the time limit to 1 minute for 7-10 words and I turn on the high security.
With the high security on, the assessment will submit and lock the student out if the student leaves the window to click on something else. Only the teacher can re-admit student to the quiz. The window resizes to full screen when the student starts the task and if they resize it smaller, the proctor records it. The proctor also records start time, how much time spent on the questions, whether text was pasted, and more.
As a final step, I lock the quiz up to only certain access codes. This allows control of how many times a student can restart the task. Simply select the Task dropdown from the playlist and then select Lock. Instructors can view the access codes from the Task dropdown or can generate one key by clicking the One Key button next to the title.
Sometimes, I will ask that the local facilitator proctor the student during the quiz so that they cannot look up the words on their own device.
So now what does one do with the results? When first introducing this strategy to students, I explain that it will not affect their grade “this time” and that it is a good reminder to make sure students have full “ownership” of their work. I may randomly select students for this verification, or if it’s a small class I may include it as a portion of their grade for a task and send one to everyone.
It’s not necessary for a student to get 100%. I usually take the quiz first to test it out; to see how many I can do in 1 minute. Even if they do not get 100%, I can learn a lot from their responses. For example, one student got 44% right of 8 and did so by skipping around. I interpret the skipped words as ones she forgot and intended to get back to later. Another student only got 33%. I interpret that as definitely being a sign that his work submission had too many looked-up words he did not know. I let him off with a warning this time and a reminder about academic integrity and ownership.
I once had the experience of taking over a class part way through the year. No structures had been in place to discourage inappropriate use of AI. The grades were all outrageously good. Some students were rarely in attendance and only handed in work that was graded. They did this work using AI, so it was no real effort. This really is a terribly corrupt system, especially given that there are students in nearby schools taking in-person classes who have to really do the work for their marks. There are honest students with good attendance who have lower grades for their honesty. It was an AP level course. Now, you might argue that the students would not possibly be ready for the AP exam if they took the course this way. One would think that would deter them from cheating. But upon reflection, it’s clear that having a 98 in an AP class on one’s transcript, even if one only scored 2 on the exam, could be valuable for college admissions considerations. So, no, it does not deter them.
Remote learning has enormous potential. I have great confidence in it. We instructors, we need to learn how to maintain the same standards as we had during in-person sessions. We cannot allow a situation to arise such that students in remote classes can just become pass-through vehicles for AI translators that do all their work. That situation would become a sort of scam. In part 2 of this topic, I will present a strategy for teaching composition in this new world of AI-assisted homework.
Those of us who are teaching remotely are starved for interactive apps that let us engage our students beyond screen sharing! Innovation is constantly adding apps and modifications to meet those needs.
Live Sessions
“Live sessions” are interactive sessions that student “join” through the Innovation platform.
Multiple-choice, short answer, and media activity types can all be transformed into live sessions! Just select Live Session from the Create dropdown by your activity in the course playlist. Click Live Link and copy the URL. Send to students in, for example, the Zoom or Teams chat.
Once they join, the teacher host can present one question at a time and await student responses.
Once students respond, teacher is notified and can debrief by displaying responses anonymously.
During the media live session, the teacher presents a slideshow and periodically opens the system for responses, poses a question, and awaits replies.
Activity Monitoring
During composition writing, grammar activities, short answer, and Etude tasks, the teacher can activate the Monitor app. This is found in the Task dropdown for the activity in the playlist. As students work on the task, instructors can view their progress with a minimal time delay. Read more here.
Teachers can hide the student names and the correct answers so they can share the screen with students as they work.
Innovation prides itself on the flexibility to plug in to any learning management system and to be easily integrated in video-conference remote lessons.
From the course playlist, you can send students a link to an activity by clicking the link icon on the right . Paste the link into the video conferencing chat window.
Send students a link to the assessment debriefing (the student’s assessment and correct answers to the task) using the icon below that.
From within the Live Sessions, the same functionality exists.
I don’t know what metaphor best describes testing online, “arms race” or “chess match”. The frog in the slowly boiling water is another metaphor for this, but I’ll get to that later.
My young friends across the nation in my remote classes are digital natives. They know the schtick. The know that most applications people use to teach were designed for office workers and that the kind of monitoring and controls that we expect when teaching high school are just not included nor generally welcome by the cubicle crowd.
In one school, I am to use Canvas. Student has an essay due at a certain time. They compose in Google Docs and paste a share link in the Canvas assignment submission application. This way, they have something in on time and won’t be penalized if they are still working on it after deadline because it’s a Google Doc still in their custody. Wow. That’s clever.
In one school, I am using Innovation plugged in to Canvas. When the security triggered and locked the student out of a test, he complained that he “just had a question for his teacher” and was guilty of nothing more than clicking on Zoom to ask. 🙄
I have inherited one AP French class from another instructor who did not maintain the kind of guardrails that I would have done. Students were basically able to paste in AI- or translator-generated responses to assignments. They had wonderful grades! All above 98! When I met them and asked for improvised conversation in French, they mixed up the words for 16 and 60… one asked his classmate to tell him what to say.
When I first start working with a remote class, I don’t activate all the security. Let’s face it, security online is necessary, but adds extra steps to things that are often annoying. Two-factor authentication, waiting for a confirmation email from a site to validate an email address, proving one is not a robot by clicking on all the pictures of bikes, using some third party app to authenticate us… I could go on. This stuff is annoying and time consuming. So to start, I don’t activate it on my remote assignments.
But then I may start seeing language proficiency well beyond the typical means of French class students. I see compositions that always end in “En conclusion…”. I see lots of “pasted text” records in the proctor logs. Now I turn up the heat.
The metaphor I might use here is the frog in the beaker of water in the science lab where they are turning up the bunsen burner so slowly that the frog doesn’t notice it. 😏
Using Innovation’s extensive student activity logging features, I can email the student to tell him he needs to use his second chance on the test because the proctor logs recorded he left the page 12 times and pasted text 3 times. 🙄
Using Innovation’s locking app, I can restrict access to the test after the due date to single-use codes that students must request in order to get in to use their second try privilege. Innovation’s locking app will allow me next month to restrict access from the start to single-use codes so that I micro-manage student access even more closely.
I can use Innovation’s high security setting to have the short answer test app close up and lock if the student leaves the task during the testing period (like to view another window). They’ll have to contact me to re-admit them.
I can follow closely exactly what a student is doing in the proctor’s notes for short answer and composition. Did they paste in text? Delete their answer completely? Leave the page?
Anecdote: I had a student back my last year teaching full-time before I retired. He was in my 9th grade Global Studies class. He wanted to take a test again because he said the app deleted all his work! I re-coded the app to record when a student deletes all their work. Next time, I caught him. He was just deleting it all and claiming a software error didn’t save his work.
Do you know what one of the biggest challenges of teaching adolescents is? It is to learn not to take these antics personally. Like most adults, it is in their interest to get as much as they can out of life with the least investment of energy. Sadly, this often leads to strategies that are in the long-term self-defeating and that violate ethical norms. I’m there: I still like my kids even though they can engage in what my grandmother would have called “diveltry”.
Pawn to queen 3… Knight to bishop 3… I have been teaching since my current students’ parents were in elementary school. I have all the tools I need to meet move for move as my digitally-native young friends try to take shortcuts. Innovation helps me do that!
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If you teach high school social studies just about anywhere, working with primary source documents is likely a central feature to your course. This has been a major shift in teaching social studies in the past thirty years and it is a good one!
Retired now, I taught high school social studies for 18 of my 35 years on the job. Over that time, I developed a large collection of document-based tasks and training lessons to teach students to use them properly to reconstruct the likely past.
Most of my document-based tasks followed the structure of the New York State Regents Examinations for social studies: the enduring issue essay and constructed-response question (CRQ) in grades nine and ten and the short essay and civic literacy essay in US History grade 11. But incorporating one lengthy primary source text in each unit was also important to me and having students respond in a standard essay format was key for my units. I invite the reader to read more about using extended primary source tasks here.
In the DBQ shop, you will find document-based tasks that I edited and created. They are arranged by category. The sources are cited and this is especially important because students are supposed to consider the sources carefully. If you are interested in lessons for teaching students about primary sources, you may find something you like in the PowerPoint shop!
You need to be a subscriber to make purchases from the Innovation shops. Download links for purchased items are stored in your dashboard. The resources are all in PDF format. Please review the terms and conditions.
This year, I am enjoying teaching French remotely, both one-on-one and in whole group configurations. In a whole group situation, encouraging engagement is important and synchronous chat is a great way to do this.
Most video conferencing apps like Zoom and Teams have chat features. But I don’t like using this for instruction for a variety of reasons. I need something that provides structured synchronous remote conversations in an environment that I can moderate, monitor, and record for possible later assessment. The Innovation synchronous chat is like a chat breakout room for education. Read more about the theoretical underpinnings of this app.
Permit me to describe how to use this handy educational app.
Step 1: Create a New Chat
First, the instructor creates a new chat. Select the course in which playlist you wish to post the chat. Click any of the green plus-sign buttons to add a new task. From the top, select “Chats”.
Now you can set up your new chat with a title and optional accessories. “Accessories” are additional elements that your assignment may need, such as a PDF document, a video, or just a simple description.
When you create the task, it places the link in the course playlist just like any other task. It will be listed as a “forum” type task and, while it can be viewed in form format, it will be a chat. Read more here about asynchronous discussion forums. When you are ready to use it, click on the link to start the host teacher session.
The Host Controls
Your teacher’s host controls are on the right. “Live Link” creates a URL that you can send to students so they can join the session. You can, for example, post this in the video conferencing app chat or in an email.
Another way students can join is by logging in to their Innovation dashboard, navigating to the course where the link is posted, and clicking on the link to the chat. Students cannot use the chat session if there is no teacher host. Teachers can hide links in the playlist for a course as needed.
There must be at least two students for the app to proceed.
My preference is to start up the chat and then copy the live link URL and paste it into the video conferencing chat so students can join easily without searching for a link.
As students join, their names appear in the participants list on the lower right.
Conducting a Chat
Once your students have joined, click on the “Assign Partners” button control. This will randomly and anonymously assign students to a chat partner (if there is an odd number of students, one group of 3 is created).
Now that partners have been assigned, you will see each team listed in the column to the right. Teams are nicknamed by world cities. You can click on these any time to view the current chat. You can share this screen so you can conduct instruction while chats are going on and share with the class anonymously what students are chatting about.
The chats need to be started. You can optionally set a timer to end the sessions after a certain number of minutes.
Students now have full functionality to conduct their assigned chat.
When the Session is Completed
Once the session is completed or is to be paused, you click the Disable Chat button. Now you can move to Debriefing Mode if you wish to display a shared screen with each teams chats and offer advice and commentary or discussion.
Other Features
Scoring Mode
Scoring mode is for the teacher. In scoring mode, you can assess students’ participation using a built-in rubric. Just click the team name to view the chat and the form for grading the chat. The rubric’s dimensions are quality, etiquette, appropriateness, and form. You can save the score. You can also just score it manually.
You may also find it useful to view the chat in a forum format. This is good for lengthier discussions with longer post sizes. You can grade the work here as well.
Viewing in forum mode lets you grade it based on other installed rubrics such as those for online discussion.
What if a student joins after we have started?
Students who join after the chat has been are automatically assigned to one of the other groups.
What if we want to resume the chats?
If the teacher enables chat again after a stop, the teams are the same and the chat picks up where it left off.
This app empowers teachers to foster meaningful interactions in a structured, remote environment while maintaining control and oversight. Its flexibility allows for dynamic group work, individual assessment, and real-time engagement—all tailored to the needs of modern educators and learners. By integrating tools like these, educators can enhance the depth and quality of online instruction, creating opportunities for collaboration that rival, and often surpass, traditional classroom experiences.
When I took up my first full-time job teaching at a small, rural school in 1991, I inherited a vast trove of teaching materials from the former instructor. A lot of it I pitched (some was dated from the 60s!) but some I kept and was grateful to have.
So, I’m retired. But what about all my stuff? Well, dear web-site-visitor, here is my stuff! I would like to invite you into my virtual classroom archives, kind of like a virtual garage sale. There are two shops here I hope you will browse to find many valuable purchases: one features online learning activities from my recent and current online courses (I continue to teach part-time in retirement) and the other shop features my old PowerPoint slide shows. Some of them date back 25 years, if you can believe it!
You need to be a subscriber to buy from either shop. The annual fee to subscribe to Innovation is extremely reasonable! Your purchases are saved to your account, your virtual classroom, in a course your students cannot see that is called “Purchases and Imports”.
Log in and shop across my recent and current courses for teaching world history, US history, and French levels I through AP French and even French V!
As you browse, you can preview items you might like. Click for pricing details to see what the activity contains (questions, images, audio, etc.). Checkout when you are ready and when you’re entering credit card data, don’t forget to enter a coupon or promo code you may have come across!
Upon transaction completion, the activities are copied from my class to yours in Innovation. You will find them in a class called Purchases and Imports.
Log in to make purchases here too. These are downloads of PPTX files of all different sizes and on many different themes. I have taught French all levels, social studies middle and high school, and even computer science courses. At this writing, the shop already has over 300 PowerPoints and I have not even uploaded them all yet!
Once your purchase is complete, you will get links to download each file you purchased. The links also are posted to your own virtual classroom here at Innovation, that class called Purchases and Imports.
