I went to a decent one day training for Google Apps and I thought I would share my notes here. They are mostly tips and tricks that I think are clear enough to understand.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask.

My biggest let down was when the Fazoli's catering boxes for lunch held subs instead of pasta. =( Why does everyone think subs are the best idea ever for PD lunches? At least they didn't serve my most hated side dish...plain potato chips.

Gmail → bottom right corner ‘Details’ → sign out from all other places with one button

Gmail →Gear → Labs → experimental cool stuff like right side chat, may break or disappear

Google Docs → Tools → Research → Search the Internet in a box on the right → Drag and drop pictures into a document and it automatically cites the sub text at the bottom → Filter image results to see what images are free to use

Flubaroo lets you save grades and answer keys straight to student’s Drives. It’s also incorporated into Google Classroom.

Pictures in email → add to drive next to the download button → click organize to change folder

www.google.com → Settings (bottom right corner) → Advanced Search → teaches the ‘codes’ for advanced searches → minus sign to include

Search e-mail with operators → from: to: subject: AND OR - *

Search operators https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en
(you can even search hashtags)

Advanced Image Search → search by image size (big images shrunk down take up the original amount of data) → search by color (to match themes, pick transparent so you don’t get the white box around it) → search by type (clip art, animated, etc)

Chrome Web Store → Google Tone → Add Extension → broadcast URL to other computers around it with Google Tone, microphone, and sound enabled

Chrome Web Store → Share to Classroom → In Google Classroom, you can push a URL to your class that forces them to that age

Chrome Web Store → Alice Keeler Classroom Split → split screen in classroom so students can see directions and work at the same time

In Google Doc → Add-ons → Get add-ons → Orange Slice → imports rubrics for automatic grading, processes the score and highlights the categories in the rubric

Insert → Comments → pops up on the side → have to give permission to comment

Revision history → go back to earlier changes

Names/pictures show in google docs in the top right. Clicking on it takes you exactly where they are typing.

Administrators can set extensions to be assigned to each user name or to each device.

Idea- limit to registration pages only on a few chromebooks in the office

Go to calendar → Create new → Block off specific block → Change to appointment slots → Specify the time → Share to students to sign up for specific time slots

Snag It → steals image, selected area, entire page, scrolling, video with voice, annotate pictures with text and shapes, grab link to it, or download picture

Screencastify → recording the screen or just one tab

Your google account is a youtube channel → Video on your phone and upload to youtube

Flubaroo →  to allow for more than one correct answer to a fill-in question? Just put %or between correct answers when filling out your answer key

https://www.youtube.com/editor Slow motion, filters, add audio, stabilize

https://www.youtube.com/cards Video Manager → Videos → Edit (enhancements, annotations, cards, no comments)

viewpure.com → paste youtube link and it strips out clutter and pop-ups

youtubetime.com → Paste in URL link and choose a start time → Gives link to video clip

Slide Deck link https://goo.gl/hvghiy

Chapter 5: How to Reform Grading: Making Change Happen
Cathy Vatterott

Changes need not be grandiose to have a huge effect on student learning or to improve the accuracy and validity of student grades.

We must decide what we believe about the purpose of grading.

If they believe the purpose of grading is to accurately reflect achievement, then it becomes inconsistent to punish behaviors such as cheating, tardiness, or attendance with grades.

If an individual teacher believes the purpose of grading is to reflect academic achievement only, they could begin by removing nonacademic behaviors from the grade, by no longer grading practice work, and by giving more ungraded formative feedback.

When we agree on purpose, methods follow purpose.

Lesson learned:
One. Start small.
Two. Let it grow.
"Teachers need time to grieve the loss of what they thought was right."
Three. Include all stakeholders.
Four. Create a belief statement or guiding principles.
five. Have a comprehensive communication plan.
Six. Make students and teachers your allies.

When implementation is top-down with no teacher by-in, there's often a limited understanding of the changes and no commitment to the mission. Teachers notoriously find ways around policies they had nothing to do with creating.

Chapter 4: What, How, and When to Grade
Cathy Vatterott

Pre-tests set the stage, shave instruction for all, and guide individual learning. After the pre--testing process, formative assessment provides feedback to students while they are still learning; summative assessment shows the level of mastery at the end of the learning cycle.

Most teachers of you and formal feedback and formative assessment as two different things. It's easier to think of formative assessment as structured tasks designed by the teacher, results of which may be marked or documented in some fashion, so students and parents can have a record of the students progress toward the learning targets.

Feedback is a two-way recurring conversation between teacher and student.

For teachers to be able to give feedback to students, it is necessary to limit direct instruction enter create activity-based lessons.

All feedback does not have to come from the teacher; peer feedback can also be useful.

As we get targeted feedback to individual student and as they are empowered to learn in their own way, the differences in learners become smaller.

If, after repeated attempts, a student or group of students has failed to master a learning target we must take a fearless inventory of our instructional process and ask yourself these questions;
What's their level of learning properly diagnosed with pretesting?
What's the feedback about learning timely specific and helpful?
Did our differentiation move the student or group of students forward?

Using the result of a pre-test, feedback, or formative or summative assessment, teachers can identify patterns in the students work or clusters of student need. Students can then be organized into two or more groups for ungraded group learning the activities at each table are based on the errors that students made on the form of assessment.

In a purely standards-based grading system, only summative assessment counts in the final grade.

Typically formative assessments are evaluated and descriptive feedback is given to the learner, such as with practice tests.

Ungraded practice tests are especially beneficial to learn as they Activate "retrieval learning" and strengthen the connections in the brain.

One technique for practice test is called "find it and fix it." Rather than marking the answers that are incorrect, the teacher notes to the student, "five of these are incorrect; find them and fix them". This requires a student to reengage with the questions and precipitates a lot of learning.

Mastery checks: these assessments are written using three levels: green, yellow, and red. The green level questions are basic skill problems and didn't really require only one or two steps to solve. Yellow level questions require multiple steps and or multiple ideas to solve. The red level questions are generally questions of the students have never seen before, requiring them to go beyond knowledge they have obtained and\or apply the knowledge to a new situation. Students are expected to attend all three levels of questions. Their answers help the teacher to determine the students his level of mastery.

The current consensus is that homework should be formative assessment the checks for understanding or that helps prepare students for summative assessments. Therefore, and I truly standards-based system, homework should not be graded. Standards-based policies usually state that homework will be reviewed and feedback will be given, but not counted in the grade.

The final achievement of learning is more important than the steps it took to get there.

Formative assessment is assessment for learning and occurs when there is still time to improve. Summative assessments are assessment of learning that occur the end of a predetermined learning cycle, after learning has taken place.

How in assessment is used is what determines whether it is formative or summative.

Students who eventually achieve mastery should not be penalized for earlier struggles.

The most recent evidence of learning is the most accurate and grades should be replaced by the most recent evidence.

Student should never be allowed to retest without showing additional evidence that they have mastered the concept that caused him to do poorly on the original assessment.

Remember that our goal is to minimize the number of retakes a student needs to show mastery.

We want to hoops to result in additional learning, not just for students to complete missing work.

Feedback is free help-there is no grade or Mark associated with feedback.

Formative assessments give students multiple opportunities to improve, free from the threat of grades while they are still learning, and summative assessments verify and report their learning progress.

Chapter 3: What Grading Looks Like in the Standards-Based Classroom
Cathy Vatterott

The standard show us the results that we want students to achieve. We then work backwards from those results to create more specific learning targets. We synthesize or unpack the standards into learning targets, usually written as "I can" or "We can" statements.

But when we organize individual targets into lesson-sized tasks, keeps them separately, and assess them separately, students may fail to see the relevance and connection. A better method is to group targets together so that several targets may be addressed by the same activity.

Self assessment is formative assessment-it should always focus on improving the students progress toward the learning target, not I'm getting a better grade.

Learning is not so much instruction or a lesson to be taught, as an activity to be experienced.

I never heard of a student not doing *his* work; it's *our* work he's not doing.

If we want to encourage students to view mistakes as a necessary step in learning, we need to remove the threat of grading while they are learning.

Grades are not necessary for learning, but feedback is. In fact, feedback has been shown to be one of the most effective strategies to improve learning.

Chapter 2: Why We Need a New Grading Paradigm
Cathy Vatterott

Treating all students the same resulted in a certain percentage of students who failed.

Instead of teach, test, and MoveOn and one large group, learning is a series of mastery's for individual students-teach, check for understanding, apply learning, get feedback, revise learning, and get more feedback until mastery is achieved.

Unlike the old paradigm of one-shot learning, a feedback loop exist that makes learning dynamic-feedback to the students informed their learning and teachers change instruction as they see what individual students need.

Within the traditional grading paradigm, it's not safe to make mistakes. In a traditional paradigm, failure is a judgment and a validation of her students lack of ability.

Learning is hard and frustrating, but ultimately achievable and satisfying. Mistakes are a natural part of learning and mistakes or something you do, not something you are. Lack of understanding is a puzzle to be solved-not a validation of stupidity.

As grades are used to punish behaviors, they overshadow the grades students receive for learning.

In the traditional grading paradigm, when teachers grade everything, the grade means nothing.

When first attempts, including practice, are graded and went all grades are permanent, students are penalized while they are still learning. Mistakes are permanently recorded and there is no redemption.

If you have a bad week practicing, you don't show up on Friday night with -5 on the scoreboard. The only way to win the game is to get better at the learning.

Chapter 1: The Culture of Grading
Cathy Vatterott

But teachers intervene-they teach with the goal of having all students learn. "If the distribution of student learning after teaching resembles a normal bell-shaped curve, that, too, shows the degree to which our intervention failed. It made no difference."

Belief #1: Good Teachers Give Bad Grades
As teachers, we bought into the idea that a bell curve indicated rigor and misinterpreted it to be a rule to follow. We came to believe that of success were scarce and great spell into a bell curve then we were tough teachers.

Grade inflation is the arrive from the belief that rigor equals a scarcity of high grades and that the purpose of grading is to sort and rank.

Rigor and difficulty was often equated to the amount of work done by students rather than the complexity and challenge of the work.

Such practices reinforce the belief that some students could not learn and perpetuated a system that not only allowed four but actually expected failure. In many ways, sorting and ranking practices institutionalized failure and conveniently of dissolved teachers of the responsibility for student failure.

Belief #2: Not Everyone Deserves an A

Many people feel strongly that grades reflect more than learning. We review grades as a package deal; to succeed, seras must have it all-academic achievement and moral virtues.

Belief #3: Grades Motivate Learners

The first misconception is that learning is only a means to an end-to escape punishment or get a reward, the learning has no intrinsic value, and that students would not be interested in learning for its own sake.

The second misconception is that a single entity called motivation exists, the students either have it or don't have it, and it can be manipulated by external forces.

The third misconception is that the most effective method is the use of rewards and or punishment and that grades are in effect the reward and or punishment for all students.

Our believes have led to an abuse of grades.

Students have come to believe that effort however week, not learning, earns them the A.

And our relentless pursuit of the almighty A and the perfect GPA, something got lost-learning.

Reality Check #1: NCLB

This was a foreign concept to teachers-we had never been expected to ensure that all students were proficient. We didn't know how to do that. We were not even sure that it was possible.

NCL be exposed a dirty little secret-graves don't equate with performance on standardized test.

Accountability for learning demands grades that are reflective of learning.

Reality Check #2: Grades Are Misleading About Succeeding

A puzzling example is that good grades in high school and students cheaper car insurance. Why-because good students are safer drivers or because good grades mean you are an accomplished rule-follower who will follow the rules of the road?

We thought that we were rewarding the right thing-completion of tasks, compliance, promptness. But in that process if we devalued mastery of deep conceptual learning, we have hampered students his future success. Maybe the grading practices that we thought were preparing students for the future really weren't.

Reality Check #3: The Common Core State Standards Changed Everything

Although standards and standardized test has supposedly driven instruction for years, we now see that we have been focusing too much on low-level rote learning.

Too often, we have neither allowed nor expected students to think. We have filled her head with facts and formulas and reward them for restarting it. We have done the analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating instead of expecting our students to do it. We have done too much of the work of learning, perhaps because we didn't trust him to want to do the work, or perhaps because we weren't sure they were able to do the work.

To successfully navigate the standards, student grades will need to reflect mastery of skills, not memory of content.

Today we must prepare them for a world in which they must know how to take initiative, self-advocate, solve problems, be creative, and accomplish tasks without minute-to-minute supervision.

My Favorites
TMC 2015
Claremont, CA

Thursday

Diana Fesmire- doctoral research study survey on people who blog, read blogs, or comment on blogs. Take it!!
Bit.ly/15blogstudy

Judy Larsen
Bit.ly/judy15study- contact info agreeing to talk with Judy. Take it!

Jonathan Claydon
"Varsity Math"- became a things with t-shirts, stickers, a sidewalk star, and Saturday laser tag

Chris Shore
Neuron stickers on a giant brain to reward the process, not the answer
'Brain surgeon' is like the captain of the class and leads discussion and writes the 'wrinkle sprinkle' (what they learned that day) on the board.

Friday

Tina Palmer
Organizing personals whiteboards by using plastic sleeves from EAI, Velcro to close, teach etiquette for students to roll their marker inside an eraser cloth, and use automotive shop ticket holders from Amazon as a cheaper alternative.

Glenn Waddell
Greet students at the door with a high five! "You're walking in my classroom and that's awesome!" We teach people, not math! I'm committing to doing this also this year!

Heather Kohn
Use a 3d printer to print 3d versions of their culminating project of graphing equations and inequalities.

Chris Shore
Rally for Roatan, Honduras service trip to bring supplies, hygiene necessities, and fitness education. Mathprojects.com

Anna Blinstein
Google classroom-paperless assignments, searchable digital drive archive of work, integration with Google, available on any device

Eli Luberhoff
Desmos updates- activity builder at teacher.desmos.com/activitybuilder
Resources found at bit.ly/desmosbank

Saturday

Dan Anderson
Bit.ly/MyFavoriteMyFavorite Have students present their own 'My Favorite' math topic for two minutes at the beginning of class. Use math munch as a resource or post announcements in Google classroom.




Denis Sheeran
Google unanswerable questions. Screenshot half of a question and insert into cells in Google sheet. Unanswerable question chooser.

Brian Miller
Real World Math

#1TMCthing We will commit to making one change to our classroom and tweet it!

Bob Lochel
Egg Simulation
Is it better to go first or second? How does the probability change after each egg is chosen? Use movie and TV clips to teach probability, not just dice and cards.

Matt Baker
Bit.ly/firstlikethird A place to collect basic misconceptions that we say that confuses kids.
DeltaMath- problem bank with easy to use interface that keeps score or grades their progress, gives detailed student data, high score board, cheat detector, gives answers and example problems, also has a place for written assignments

Julie Reulbach
Kahoot Connections- spreadsheet of Kahoot users 

Karim Ani
New graphs on Mathalicious 

Sunday

Andy Pethan
Ultimate Frisbee stats simulation spreadsheet- http://goo.gl/GFcnKz
Stats concept on farmers and plots http://goo.gl/wFnCFn

Stephanie Bowyer
Algebra Art Project- draw a picture in demos using graphs



Matt Vaudrey
Music cues- you can save 23 hours a year in your classroom by using music cues for transitions. Music mandates wait time and gives an internal locus of control, it turns control over to the music. The song is now the a**hole! Start out with one song at a time until they have it and then add another. It's important to not talk over the song. mrvaudrey.com/music

Princess Choi (shout key links)
Student created videos- A boring lesson in person is also boring online. Only top students watch the teacher videos usually before or during tests. If students can just look up something on my test, it's not the devices fault, maybe I asked a dumb question. Have students create their own videos and comment on each other's work.

Amy Zimmer
Angle Sum Formulas for Sine and Cosine Or How I Got Eli Luberhoff to Do Burpees
Folding stuff (didn't understand this at all so just look at these pictures)














John Golden
Bit.ly/TMCtumblr Join Tumblr!

John Mahlstedt
Something About the Apocalypse

Here's a video of all the My Favorites from Sunday!

Saving the best for last....they rewrote the lyrics to Miley Cyrus's Party in the USA. It was sooo clever and well done, as always, and I heart it.

This is the first year of TMC that I felt like part of the crowd and not a fangirl on the sidelines.

I still had to push myself out of my default setting of wanting to be alone. I hugged a bunch of people, hung out with my virtual-Kansas-math-department, and asked a friend to lunch that I really wanted to get to know better. But as soon as it was lunch time, I literally had to stop myself from running to my car and going to eat alone. And when people talked to me, I asked questions instead of just answering theirs and walking away. It was a stretch.

I went to Huntington Beach with Amy and her Kansas people but the other nights I spent alone on purpose. I have to have alone time to recharge. Also I love to shop and haven't found anyone who can hang with me yet. And I like to eat bad food and stay up late so I'm kind of strange like that.






This is also the first year of TMC that I left feeling like I had a lot of practical, low-risk, high impact changes I could make right away that didn't involve redoing my entire curriculum (although I still feel that way).

So this year my TMC post is not touchy-feel-warm-fuzzy (although I experienced many of those moments) but practical.

Here are some of things I plan to do this year:

• High Fives- Glenn Waddell high-fived every student every day this past school year. He said it was one of the best years he's ever had and he attributed a lot of it to the high-fives; it built a culture of trust quickly by having fun and laughing together. How do you high-five someone and not smile? I need to work on my mood and attitude in the classroom and this is a great way to start.
• Music Cues- Matt Vaudrey claims you can save 23 hours a year by using music cues for transitions in the classroom. I hate to say type this aloud but I'm not all obsessed with music like a lot of people are. I mean I like it and I listen to it some but I never listen to it in the car, or well I don't know when I do. But music is incredibly important to teenagers and using it for cues can save me time and voice while also connecting better with the students.
• "Ask Me Questions!"- This comes from Rachel Kernodle and helps build the expectation that I WANT them to ask questions. Christopher Danielson had another suggestion of saying "What new questions can you ask?" Kate Nowak also used "Would you explain your knowledge of his/her solution?" All of these are replacements for the classic "Any questions?" which I vow to never utter again! Chris Shore also used brain stickers to reward students for good questions. Rachel challenged us to take note of two things: What's the best question *I* asked today and what's the best question a *student* asked today?
• "That's Not a Choice"- From my #fawncrush, this is a way to set and enforce boundaries and structure that both I and my students crave. It's also way better than just saying no and helps to refocus students to what the choices actually are.It keeps me focused on the things that are within my control so that I never give up on taking action.
• "Shut It Down!"- I just finished watching 30 Rock so this is a Liz Lemon classic that I have the perfect tone of voice and facial expression to deliver with enough fear to consider it a classroom management tool. (Along with 'What the what?', 'Blergh!', "High-fiving a million angels', 'I want to go to there', and 'Dealbreaker!')
• Show Your Thinking- Students are so used to hearing 'Show your work' that they just tune that right out. Asking them to show their thinking makes me feel like that opens up more room for students to express their thinking other than calculations. Inspired by this tweet:

  Instead of "show your work", change to "show your THINKING" to elicit generalizations from students. #NCTMInst pic.twitter.com/JBlScoR5Dd

  — Jessica Ivy (@jtaylorivy) July 21, 2015

• #onegoodthing blog- I'm challenging myself  to post one good thing every school day this year as another way to keep myself focused on positive things and being happy in the classroom. Last year a lot of weirdbadcrazy things happened and I'm attributing that to a "sixth year slump" and being proactive about making this year better.
• 180blog- Megan wrote a helpful blog post about automatically importing Instagram photos with a certain hashtag to a blog post. I'd like to also post a photo a day for this year too. I know, I know, I'm probably over-committing myself but the worst that can happen is that I don't do it. 
• Error Analysis- I am a big fan of Andrew Stadel and I used his estimation180.com once a week this whole year. He talked about presenting concepts by giving wrong answers (that are common misconceptions) and having students try to decide the correct answers. He used exponents as an example and it seemed so elegant. I'm really intrigued to try this with more concepts like multiplying polynomials, solving equations, and logarithms.
• Which One Doesn't Belong?- I'm using these as a warm-up one day a week this year. They are so simply complex and easy to extend- give three examples and have students create the fourth, have students create their own, have students write a justification for why each doesn't belong. So rich! 
• Showing Student Work- Now I can remember who I talked with about this (Sadie maybe?) but it never occurred to me to have students show their work to the class on the document camera. What a great skill- to present and defend your thinking. I just thought students would compare with people around them and that would be good enough. False! A simple change that I can easily implement.

Teacher Woman
Fawn Nguyen

TMC15
Saturday Keynote
Claremont, CA

The Five F's

Fast
Fair
Friendly
Firm
Funny

Building relationships trumps content, pedagogy, common core, testing

Rita Pierson Ted Talk- Every Kid Needs a Champion

Relationships with Administrators

• realize that administrators care the same but show it differently -Glenn Waddell
• respect the position
• put things in writing
• invite them in the classroom
• never bad mouth admin

Relationships with Colleagues

• be willing to share ALL the lessons
• imagine YOUR kid in their class
• take care of each other
• speak well of them to students

Relationships with Parents

• the parent is always right
• parents are sending us their best
• do not judge

Relationships with Students

• be honest with them
• guarantee a safe environment
• respect them and get to know them, laugh with them

Fawn's Sayings

• 'That makes me fart'
• 'Figure it out and make it happen'
• Be solution oriented
• Be a risk taker
• Be powerful
• 'Nobody cares'
• Focus on what matters
• Giving kids time to talk and do math is more important than the pacing guide
• Family time is more important than homework time
• Focus on the positives
• Focus on YOU, let's stop looking for affirmations
• 'That's not a choice' (for students)
• Defining boundaries
• Teaching respect and tolerance
• Empowering students
• 'That's not a choice' (for educators)
• Providing equal access
• Giving students our best

Math Mistakes and Error Analysis: Diamonds in the Rough
Andrew Stadel
Estimation180.com/tmc15

Thursday 2:45-3:45
TMC15
Claremont, CA

We need a large window into student thinking.

Turn problems into play by pointing out that making predictions means everyone will be wrong. Who's going to be the least wrong?

Imagine the anxiety you feel when the copier isn't working. How do we clear that jam with our students?

How can we make student mistakes drive instruction, curb student misconceptions, and strengthen formative assessments?

Polygraph by Desmos for teachers; use teacher dashboard to analyze student data. Why did it go well? Why did everyone miss this one? Give students a cheat sheet of vocab words to support them.

Andrew Stadel's Survey: Goo.gl/fOdZKQ

Start teaching exponents by giving eight problems that aren't incorrect and asking students what the answers should be.



Research shows that trying something and then learning about your mistakes increases retention.

We don't need textbooks to give us mistakes, we have students for that.

We can use WWDB to improve students ability to see things that are out of place.

Pause and predict- if we know we're looking for errors, pause and predict what 'should' come next so students aren't just passively watching a video.

What are some other concepts we can teach through error analysis?