Collaborative Annotation of Digital Text with Edji

Edji: Edji is a free online tool that allows your students to independently or collaboratively annotate text or images. It's a great way to improve literacy, comprehension and digital reading engagement. Check out some highlights of this tool below.

Marking the Text: Students can independently or collaboratively annotate digital text, PDFs and images.

Differentiation: Students can add notes with emojis, text or audio.

Collaboration & Teacher Features: Teacher can turn on/off the collaboration feature. This means that students can mark text individually, and then the teacher can turn on the ability for students to see other comments and reply to them (This feature is called "Vision.").

Collaboration & Dialogue: Students can reply to other comments with emojis, text or audio.

Collaboration & Analysis: Turn on the "heatmap" to see which parts of the article were highlighted most often. The darker the color, the more frequently students have marked this section.

Easy Set-Up: Quickly upload a PDF, insert text or attach a picture. You can also embed questions for students to answer.

Easy Student Access:

• No student log-in is required. 
• Teachers may provide a direct link to an article or a article code for students to enter. 
• Students enter their name (or a nickname) to identify themselves.

Note: Teachers can have 3 active Edji documents for free at any given time. If they need more, they can deactivate an earlier one to create a new activity. Deactivated content is not lost, but editing is disabled.

Tools for Marking the Text on PDF Documents or Images

Students have been marking up their paper copies of text for years with pencils and highlighters. This is a great strategy for engaging with the reading content and increasing comprehension.

So what do we do when we want to annotate digital documents like PDFs, websites and digital images? Fortunately, there are some great online tools available that make marking the text a reality in a digital environment.

Check out the options below and decide which tool is best for your needs.

Kami

• PDF annotation tool (draw, add text, highlight, etc.).\
• Split and merge PDFs.
• Account required (login with Google).
• Freemium Chrome extension (Free basic. Upgrade to annotate images, etc.)

DocHub

• Sign and edit PDFs. Use text, draw, highlight, comment and more.
• Open PDF, DOC, PPT, XLS, TXT, DOCX, PPTX and more from your computer or Drive.
• Merge, reorder, append, rotation and delete pages. Fill in fields on PDF forms.
• Free Chrome extension.

Xodo

• Open, merge, insert, delete, reorder and rotate PDFs from your computer or Drive.
• Open and annotate pdf, docx, pptx, jpeg or png file types.
• Use touchscreens to write in ideas and answers on pdfs or images.
• Free website. No account required.

Print Friendly PDF

• Turn any website into a PDF.
• Eliminate ads or any other web content you don't want to have on your document.
• Once you've created a PDF, you can annotate with one of the previous tools.
• Free Chrome extension.

New Features Added to Google Suites

New Features Added to GSuites

There are some really nice new features being released in the Google programs.  Some have already rolled out; some are coming soon. 

Gmail Smart Compose

If you type your Message first, then go to the Subject Line, Gmail will offer you a suggested subject to use. 

Write now, send later with Schedule send in Gmail

You will soon now schedule your emails in Gmail to be sent at a later date and time.

Full release date: April 15

Enhance presentations in Slides with audio

You will soon be able to embed audio files from your Drive into Google Slides (under INSERT--> audio).

Full release date: April 18

Quickly find support resources in Gmail, Docs, Drive, Calendar and more

You will now see a ? icon in the programs to gain quick access to support resources.

Insert Images in Google Sheets

You can now insert images directly into cells in Google Sheets. You could add images to Sheets before, but those images were an overlay that sat on top of the Sheet.  With this new feature, you can insert the image directly into a cell, and it will move with the rest of the row when sorting. 

Classroom Integration Examples: 

• Students use a collaborative spreadsheet to collect data on different types of rocks and include images of the rocks that will sort with the other facts gathered. 
• Teachers add pictures of their students in their class roster spreadsheet. When a new student is added, you can still quickly resort the list alphabetically.

Note: If you don't see it yet, you will see it soon. They released it March 19th with complete rollout done within 15 days.  

INSERT --> IMAGE --> Image from Cell

Introducing Google's New Jamboard

Introducing Google's New Jamboard

Google has a new tool in it's suite of products called Jamboard. It's a digital whiteboard where you and your students can collaboratively add notes, images and drawings. Like other Google programs, you can share your creations, and they are saved in your Google Drive. 

You can access the basic version by opening the program from your Google Apps or Drive (see screenshots below). If you install the Jamboard App, you will have access to even more features like converting handwriting to text, auto draw tool, voice to text, and inserting resources from Drive (see iTunes for iPads or Google Play for touchscreen Chromebooks). 

To learn more about Jamboard, see video tutorial.

Option 1: Open from APPS Menu

Note: You will need to scroll down and click MORE Apps. You can then drag and drop the icon higher up on your list for quicker access.

         

Option 2: Open from DRIVE

Intelligent Search Coming to Google Suite

Google Suite is releasing an update this week that helps you better search your Drive. When you click in the Search Drive box, you will soon see the following options: 

• Search Terms: Click on a suggested term to search for it. 
• Top Collaborators: Click on a person to search for files that you’ve collaborated with them on. 
• File types: Click to show files that match the file type. 
• Advanced Search: Click to see more search filter options.

New in Schoology and Seesaw

NEW in Schoology & Seesaw

Both Seesaw and Schoology released recent updates that might interest you. Please see below for details. 

Note: The Schoology update is listed first. Please scroll down to see the Seesaw update.

Schoology: Course Assessment Reporting 

There is now a new tab in the blue puzzle Assessments called REPORTING that provides more detailed class data.

 

When there are at least 5 submissions, the class average is displayed along with a box and whisker plot. 

 

When there are fewer than 5 submissions, each individual students’ grades are displayed as plot points on the graph.

What results are shown in REPORTS tab?

1. Class Average - An average of all scores.
2. Class Median - The ‘middle’ score within the full range of scores.
3. Class Mode - The most common score.
4. Negative Outliers - Grades below the lowest quartile on the graph.
5. Positive Outliers - Grades above the highest quartile on the graph.
6. Last Updated - The time the last submission was added to the report.
7. Students Overall Results - List of all student scores.

Click here to see more details about this new feature in Assessments.

Seesaw: Skills View Update

You can now edit the Skills rating scale (3 to 6 stars) as well as the color theme.  

• Set Scale and Theme: See video
• Tagging Items and Activities with Skills: See video

You can adjust your SKILLS settings under the Course Settings: 

Using Skills View is a great way to collect evidence and review data on students' mastery of standards.

You can attach the Skills to the activities ahead of time so you can more quickly tag the students' work.