I try new things.
I've always been what I would call a Trailblazing Pioneer. So, yeah..I combined two terms because I didn't fall neatly into one category or the other. For those of you that may not know what those terms refer to, I think the late Michael Armstrong explains these roles we assume in school transformation, and the "trail" to success, the best. Thankfully, someone captured this for posterity. (this explanation starts around 8:37 and ends around 13:30 - the video below should start at that spot..) As a result of being a trailblazing pioneer, I create directions for others. A LOT of directions. ...pardon me: tutorials. Back when I first began in an instructional technology role at the school level, I would often find the teachers who were not the early adopters, settlers if you watched that video above) to test my steps for clarity. Those early tutorials took the form of a document with arrows and pictures. So 2007. I've also made tutorial videos using various screencasting tools. I mean, they do the job, but they sometimes seem....flat. So recently, I helped a friend with some rubrics she created. She envisioned providing personalized feedback for students in her courses at Rutgers University. She also knew how much I loved the Google Add-on, Autocrat. So we teamed up to create a way to generate meaningful feedback for her students. When the semester was over, I was asked to make a tutorial for setting up Autocrat with this purpose: providing personalized feedback for students in order to share this process with other educators. As there are many layers to making this magic happen, I knew a simple screencast would not do this justice. I began to explore two other creation tools that would be useful for this type of task and found two: genial.ly and Iorad. Each of these creates a very different product, but I thought they complemented each other well. The first I used was genial.ly. I feel as though I have just sipped the genial.ly Kool-Aid as this tool can do waaaaay more than the Thinglink-esque image I created below to explain the importance of the tags needed for part of the feedback generation process. Hover over the green circled objects in the image below to see what I'm talking about. The other tool, iorad, makes more detailed step-by-step directions. The ones below are part of the feedback setup. Click on the start button and follow the prompts - be sure to read the text as well. As the viewer, you also have the option to view it as a step by step document. I created ONE tutorial that can be viewed in TWO different ways. And I must add that it can also READ THE TUTORIAL ALOUD!!!! Y'all, I am enamored with this tool. 6 STEPS 1 You've made your Rubric, Now let's make the spreadsheet where you will add your feedback for each student. 2 Double click in the title area to highlight the default text and Rename your spreadsheet. The name should match the rubric. 3 The first row will become your header row. Click in the first cell of the first row and begin adding the column headings that match the feedback items on your template. 4 Continue adding to your header row. 5 This NEXT header will NOT be an area on your rubric, but add it anyway... 6 That's it. You're done....almost. Here's an interactive tutorial for the visual learnersI am still working on the Autocrat set up directions for this specific task. But I can already say that iorad is a fast favorite - I've made other tutorials for scheduling tweets and looking up CEUs in our district staff portal...it is just super user friendly! Another beautiful thing is that these creations embed perfectly into Google Sites (and blogs). This means all of the tutorials can live together, in order, online. I'll share that website once it is done. There are still some pieces to assemble.
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AuthorJeannie Timken Archives
March 2023
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