WRSD Digital Learning

  We have moved! If you're looking for more news and updates from the Technology Integration Specialists for the 23-24 school year and beyond, bookmark our new home on the web: www.wrsd.net/tech See you there, and thanks for reading! 💗

We've arrived...almost. Before the summer whisks us away, we wanted to repost some helpful information regarding Google Classroom housekeeping for those of you who use it. As you may have noticed in your own account, Google Classroom can get pretty hard to navigate after the classes and assignments pile up. Beyond the visual disarray, though, there are some other important reasons why we should properly close down our GC classes before signing off for the summer. We'll just point out two of these reasons here: Unlocking all of your former students' work for them, and Reducing cheating in future classes. Know that when you archive a GC class, you retain access to all of your materials in Drive, and you retain the ability to copy and reuse old posts and assignments from that archived class. Have a look at the infographic above. The steps are straightforward - the first four take care of the bulk of the work, and the last two are optional cleanup tasks that can help clean u

  Like the mighty Transformers, Chromebooks have "more than meets the eye" when it comes to features. One very important example of this is the array of built-in accessibility tools that Chromebooks contain out of the box. Believe it or not, many of the accessibility tools that you search for to meet student accommodations (and just generally allow more choices for students to learn) are already a few clicks away on a Chromebook - no browser extensions needed. Let's go and find them! In this overview video, the hosts scroll through an eye-popping number of features that students can enable on their Chromebooks. Better yet, those features follow a student's account if they switch shared devices or swap a malfunctioning device for a working one. It's truly set it and forget it. Here are just some of the things you can enable in the Chromebook Accessibility settings: Select-to-Speak (Text-to-Speech) Dictation (Speech-to-Text) Screen Magnifier On-screen Keyboard Cu

Busy times for all of us lately, and a lot of little updates and changes trickling in. Here's a quick roundup of some current digital learning developments: MCAS Proctors: Here's a Visual Step-by-Step For teachers proctoring MCAS sessions, we have updated a short slide deck that can be used as a full-color  visual supplement to your Test Administrator Manual (TAM) .  The deck walks through only the most essential steps that proctors take to start, manage, and end MCAS test sessions. Each visual slide is explained in the speaker notes. Feel free to check it out and have it open on test days. Google Updates the Look of Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides You may have noticed a change in the look of Google Drive, Docs, Slides, and Sheets. You can read more about it here , if you like. Google has updated these areas with cosmetic changes to text, toolbars, buttons, and search/select tools. If you have any trouble finding anything on these pages, just reach out to a TIS for help. Rega

  Happy New Year, WRSD! In this post, we want to talk about some recent technological advancements that impact the world of student academic writing. Local News: Google's Originality Reporting Improves As some of you have noticed, the Originality Reporting tool within Google Classroom has recently added a major new feature. Student-to-student matching, known more officially as school matches, will now be an option when you select Originality Reporting on a written assignment in Classroom.  Previously, Originality Reporting would only check the wider web for matching text in a student document. Now, when you select Check Plagiarism on a Classroom assignment, Google will check your students' work against  both  the wider web  and  past submissions within our school Google domain. Learn more about using Originality Reporting in Google Classroom in this article . World News: Learners Begin to Try Artificial Intelligence (AI) Writing Tools In recent weeks, AI language tools like C