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Being an Ed Tech nerd, there are not many new apps, online tools, platforms that I haven’t had a crack at. I always enjoy trying out the new shiny things. However what seems to be the pattern is that I dive deep in the the tool and then realise that while it is great for a few particular tasks, it won’t be a tool that regularly comes out of my tool box.

I came across Parlay a few months ago via Twitter and as usual dove straight in. But it has stuck with me and I think it is one of those rare bits of gold dust in the Ed tech landscape that will grow and grow because it is just so good! So what is it? Basically it is an online, class based, discussion forum. Not too excited yet are you – seen heaps of those before aye. But Parlay is different, so let me explain why.

When I began my teaching career almost 20 years ago we had a great teacher who was starting philosophy classes with students. The philosophy for children movement was gaining traction in New Zealand and the old sage convinced me to invest some time going up to a weekend workshop. The basic premise with this approach was to get students tap into their natural curiosity through a philosophical inquiry with a main activity being the Socratic seminar. Basically, learners discuss with each other a particular issue, agreeing and disagreeing, building on and breaking down various points of view and gaining a richer understanding of the issue.

So I came back all keen and motivated to incorporate these discussion based activities in my health classes. Now, when it works it is awesome but it is a challenge in creating that class culture where every voice matters, where students will listen respectfully to each other, and the discussion isn’t dominated but a few voices. So throughout my teaching career, including a period teaching the IB Theory of Knowledge course (the best course I have ever taught), I would always try a few socratic seminars but didn’t use them consistently due to the struggle with management and trying to get all students to contribute.

Then along comes Parlay. Parlay solves many of these pain points of managing a meaningful class discussion and in the short time I’ve been using it has lead to some great ‘aha’ moments amongst learners and generate awesome reflective writing. So how does it work?

First you start with a discussion prompt. This can be more than a question and include image, audio of video resources. Students then respond to this prompt (I mostly use the anonymous setting for this as it definitely improves students honesty and depth of response). You can help scaffold this response by providing sentence stems or sentence starters. Thirdly, students can then comment and respond to other responses. Again the teacher can structure this peer feedback with sentence stems or prompts. You can then bring the online discussion offline and into a live discussion. Once completed, Parlay provides a rich data analytics interface where you can easily see how many students responded, the quantity of their response (average word length, number of responses to other students etc) . Finally, Parlay has built in an easily customisable set of assessment tools so you can efficiently give feedback to students.

Parlay plays nicely with Google and Microsoft accounts so your students won’t need to forget another set of log in details. There is also 1 click sharing to Google Classroom. The killer feature is the Parlay Universe. This is where busy teachers can grab curated content on a wide range (and ever expanding….) of topics categorised into different curriculum areas. It is so good to see their approach to sharing user created content – I don’t know how many lost hours I’ve spent trawling through the 1000 Kahoots on Space science to find just the right one. Parlay has the quality right at your fingertips.

The support from the Parlay team is awesome! I signed up to an online webinar (almost a must do as you don’t get the full scope of how you could use it in your classroom by just playing with the app) and was followed up with further support from the awesome Anna Lisa and Cynthia. Plus, they have a detailed Google Drive resource folder you can dive into at any time!

I’m just starting to explore some wider uses. For example I started a science lesson on bottle rocket cars with a Parlay discussion on Newton’s 3 laws of Motion and the question:

Just a great way to spark some curiosity before diving into the investigation. I also used another Parlay discussion for students to give each other feedback on their draft fertile questions before started an independent inquiry. Each student posted their fertile questions and then had to comment on three others with some research questions that would help answer the fertile question.

In conclusion, I can see Parlay sitting at the top of my teaching tool box for some time to come. I encourage you to have a crack.

I have found myself in the daily routine of checking the numbers on COVID19. The go to is usually the Johns Hopkins COVID 19 data dashboard, and the Spin Off’s daily update for NZ data (pity it isn’t live data and you need to keep going to a new page each day) but also this Interactive graph of the logarithmic scale of COVID 19 cases has been intriguing.

But I got to thinking about the effect on population density and COVID19 spread. Surely in a more dense country with people living closer together would have higher number of cases. Could I find a quick answer to this query? No, so using a few recently gained Sheet and Data Studio skills I DIY’d!

Step 1: pull live data using the =IMPORTHTML function from Worldmeter COVID 19 data set and population & land area data from Wikipedia.

Step 2: Combine these two data sets using the MATCH and INDEX function (heaps better than a VLOOKUP). See this tutorial by my Innovator project mentor – Richard Poth.

Step 3: Use Google Data studio to play with the data! Shout out to Chris Smith and the Data Chat webinar he hosted.

Link to my Data Studio COVID19 Data Wall

So some insights from the data so far. Europe is being affected most – Belgium has been particularly hard hit with a high rate of deaths per million in a relatively dense population. Great using the interactivity of Data Studio to just play with the data.

With a shift to widespread online learning in place, I thought I’d summarise my recommended tools for different teaching strategies.

🏫Classroom management – Google Classroom

This is the hub of my online class. Sharing resources in the Stream such as web site links, videos and documents. Asking for students comments, submitting work in the Classwork section with Assignments – this tool does it all.

• First day of Google Classroom from the Google Teacher centre
• Getting started with Classroom at the Google Teacher centre
• A pretty comprehensive How to use Google Classroom video series from Eric Curts

👨🏽‍🏫Asynchronous Demonstration or Instruction – Screencastify

This awesome add on to Google Chrome gives you up to 5 mins (on the free version) of screen recording. You can even insert web cam footage of you explaining a particular task or demonstrating a skill. Record the video then share with your students via Classroom or YouTube. I’ve even used it to give feedback on a student’s assignment – just post the link to the video in the comments.

• One page overview by Edtech team
• Screencastify for remote teaching by Eric Curts

👩‍💻Video Conferencing – Google Hangouts Meet

This is a web based platform that doesn’t require any additional downloads/extension (like Zoom). However, not the best for whole class instructions as students have the ability to unmute themselves. You might also want to consider using a Slide Q&A during a presentation to get some interactivity.

• Hangouts Meet cheats sheet
• Meet Quick start guide – remixed from Jen Giffen
• Adding Hangout Meet chats to Google Classroom
• Video Series: How to Use Google Hangouts Meet. Five videos from Eric Curts on using Meet

👨‍👩‍👦‍👦Discussion – Flipgrid

Post a question for students to respond to. Allows asynchronous contributions and student love to add bling to their videos with stickers and filters.

Another tool I have been trialling for this is Google +. While this appears to be heading for the graveyard I’ve been using it to interact with students just on how they are going. Simple things like ‘post of photo of you wearing a silly hat’ have been a great way to keep connected. Only works with accounts within your school domain and because it’s social networking, students must be 13 or older (or they get locked out of their school account!)

• Flipgrid Quick start guide for educators

❓Quizzes – Google Forms

While there are a heap of well known tools like Kahoot!, Quizlet and Quizizz, Google Forms allows you not only to make self marking quizes that will automatically import the result into Google Classroom’s markbook, but also make them formative by using the Adding answer feedback. For example if they get a question wrong, you can add a link to a tutorial or website in the answer feedback section.

• Create and grade quizzes with Google Forms

📺Watching Video – EdPuzzle

Students have many different places where they can watch videos, some are even educational! But how do you know if they have watched a video that you have set them? Using EdPuzzle solves this. You can also add in questions part way through the videos to check for understanding. Even better, there are a number of videos with questions added that other teachers have shared that you can use!

• Get started with EdPuzzle online course

Well, that’s just some of the tools I’ll be using – what about you? Comment here or ping me on Twitter with what works for you.

No, not a Bette Midler song – but a collection of tips and tricks I’ve sourced from around the socials on best practice of distance learning. With COVID 19 on its way, we might be joining our colleagues from other countries in teaching our students remotely. Already we seen some of the different approaches that schools are taking. Check out the plans from Albany Senior School, Wellington High School, and my own school – Tauranga Boys’ College. Each has their strengths and weaknesses and over the coming weeks I am sure we will see development.

Maslow before Bloom

It’s not the first time educators have discussed the importance of meeting a students basic needs first before looking at Blooms taxonomy (just see the large number of search results!). With schools being closed and the lack of physical presence of students this is perhaps even more important. So think of some ways you can make student still feel like they belong and are respected. Maybe a class chatroom, Flipgrid response, or the opportunity to connect with you via email, messaging or video conferencing.

Asynchronous vs synchronous delivery

You need to consider the demands for synchronous (be online at the same time) versus asynchronous (assigned online tasks to be completed when student wants) learning. I think it is unrealistic to think that we will simply just replicate the classroom experience via video conferencing and my approach will be do set mostly asynchronous activities with the opportunity for students to get help from me in real time.

Heutagogy (hew ta wat gy??)

So now we can’t be the ‘sage on the stage’ because something removed our stage (shot COVID 19…), being a guide to student’s learning becomes more important. But what if students need to motivation of being in a physical class with a teacher to get tasks done? What if we could provide resources for self directed learning that is motivating and engaging for students? I think we need to tap into the large body of research on gamification of learning. You just need to look at the learning design of popular apps and platforms such as Yousician (to teach you an instrument), Codecademy (to teach you coding), Udemy and Coursera (to teach you almost anything!)

Online lesson delivery

Having consider all the above, there is a plethora of resources to support teachers in these uncharted waters. Perhaps there are too many and it is overwhelming to choose what suits your students.

There will be for some teachers a steep learning curve if they are forced to deliver learning more online. There are a number of resources that will support teachers up skilling in this area:

• Teach from Home is a just in time resource from Google pulling together a number of their great resources targetted at teachers coping with delivering lessons from home.
• A great one is Google’s Applied Digital Skills. They have just added a couple of collections targeted at up skilling.
• Here’s a template for the structure of an online lesson. Great tip to make sure you close the Meet/Zoom when you leave!
• 10 Great tips from Tom Mullaney that includes recommended free apps (e.g Edpuzzle and Thinglink)
• Curated resources: as we know there is an over whelming number of excellent resources on the web for education. In response to the pandemic, Google curated this Youtube Learning collection in a Youtube channel.
• First Aid kit for Remote Teaching – a crowd sourced Slide deck with a number of useful tools and tips.
• The Google Teacher Center has a great set of resources/lessons for teachers to go through to develop skills in delivering distance learning.
• Resources for Teaching online due to school closures – a great summary with tips and strategies by Kathleen Morris

Great to see a number of #SYD19 Google Innovator Academy coaches and participants in the above webinar sharing some ideas and strategies around online learning.

Lastly, here’s my short contribution with a quick 5 minute intro to online learning considerations taken from a webinar I recorded this week.

Most of the projects I assign students are assessed with rubrics. I love a good rubric and it gives students really detailed feedback on the criteria for a piece of work while being efficient for a teacher to give this feedback. So when Doctopus and Goobric formed a dynamic duo, the workflow of marking Google Docs with rubrics became much easier. Now Google Classroom has rubrics has meant that I no longer have to transfer the final grade into the Classroom mark book (a couple of click less per student). Awesome!

But, getting the rubrics into Classroom was initially tiresome having to copy and paste each descriptor from an existing Google Sheet. Great that we can now reuse rubrics in Classroom but greater still, as I found out today, that you can import a rubric from a Google Sheet. Took me some time to figure out the correct format so I made this short how to video to help out any other interested educators:

Feel free to grab the Google Sheet template I made at bit.ly/GCRUBRIC