Here we are, at the end of Assessment Week, and this blog series is almost finished! Instruction starts next week, and I'll provide an optimistic and forward-looking close to the series.
Today, I'm posing a question and I'm sharing one tip that didn't seem to fit well into the other topics.
Question
For a virtual class, how will you take attendance? Will you take attendance at all? Do you normally, but just not for a virtual class?
This question came up this summer in a faculty professional development course I was leading, in the context of managing large Zoom meetings. One participant asked, and then we ran through a list of options, subsequently ruling them all out:
- take screen shots of the participants list as you scroll through it? (No: students entering and leaving the session cause the order of attendees to jump around as you're working through this process that is eating up your valuable class time)
- copy the participants list? (No: the participants list isn't formatted as text…plus, what if some participants have signed in using their initials or a nickname?)
- ask every participant to type their name into the chat, which can be saved? (Maybe, but: how will you efficiently process a text file of the chat to extract the student names?)
I suppose the answer to the question could be Socratic: what is the purpose of taking attendance? Now, normally (i.e. in face-to-face instruction), I would take attendance to provide a point incentive for attending class. As I age (and gain experience as an educator), it becomes more clear to me that a well-designed class should provide its own incentive…assuming that paying for one's own education isn't itself enough incentive: to take advantage of the resources you're buying, like the opportunity to learn from the professor.
Further, if your class is a virtual and mostly asynchronous course (we're having optional synchronous meetings), then there may not be much of a point in recording attendance. However, it is still important to keep track of student progress and to be intrusive in helping support students who seem to be lagging. So, "attendance" in my course comprises regular and low-stakes assignments that will be evenly distributed throughout the course, so that I have a way to monitor student engagement.
If you do want to take attendance in Zoom, there are lots more options to consider, all of which all have downsides, just like the above list. For example, you could develop a Google Form (or any other sort of survey) and provide the link to the survey in the Zoom chat, and then the students who are in the Zoom meeting can take that survey during class. Of course, they can also share the link with friends that are not in your Zoom meeting, so it isn't a perfect method of recording attendance. You could also develop a Zoom poll…but remember that only multiple-choice questions are allowed in Zoom, so you can't ask a free-response question like "Enter your name" and collect that via Zoom. You could have a multiple-choice question where all of the response are "I am in the Zoom room," and that would be collected by the Zoom poll…but I'm still not clear how Zoom saves the poll data. I know it does, and that you can download a report of the poll responses, but I don't know if the users are anonymous or if it associates the screen name of the respondent with their responses (which would be the only way a Poll would be useful for taking attendance or for any other summative assessment). Playing with this is on my long to-do list, and it is going to take me a while to get around to it!
Assessment Tip
For many reasons, I really like to develop class exercises/assignments in Google Docs and Google Sheets (and Google Slides, too, but less frequently). I'm at a university that is a Google campus, so we all have access to the entire G Suite of apps, unlimited storage, campus gmail addresses, etc., so most of the students are at least somewhat familiar with Google usage and workflows. Beyond that, though, I like the ability to share and collaboratively edit (including in real time) those documents. Plus, particularly for student assessment, the version history feature is nice, because you can easily see which users contributed in what ways during the development of the document.
However, unless you use Google Classroom to manage your class documents (which is really powerful and awesome, but I'll have to write about that some other time), sharing Google files with all of the students in your class can be cumbersome. First, you want to keep your version pristine, probably, and just distribute copies, one to each student. So, you could duplicate your "template" version, but then you're keeping track of more files on your Google Drive…and you still have to enter in all of the student gmail addresses to share the copy with them all…and then you have to remind each of them to make their own copy of that template. Otherwise, they all just have access to your initial duplicate, and they'll all start working together within that single document…so let's take a quick tangent into managing collaborative documents, and then we'll return to the original point!
Collaboration in shared Google docs
There might be some times you want all of your students to work at the same time in a single Google file. For example, you could do this to take attendance! You could create a Google Doc for each day, and have each student access that file and type their name into the doc to record their presence. However, this can be awkward in Google Docs, because it is just one long piece of digital paper, and students can work anywhere - it is difficult to provide structure to them.
Because of the structure of Google Sheets and Google Slides, there is a reasonable solution. In Google Sheets, if you want to share a single document and have students work within the same document in their own defined spaces, you could type each student's name into their own column and ask them only to work in that column. You can ask students to do that, but they're not restricted to where in the document they can work. I've used a shared Google Sheet to create a class calendar to facilitate students signing up for class presentation dates. I ask them not to enter their name in a cell on the sheet that another student has already signed up in…but of course that instruction isn't always heeded!
Another thing that is nice about using a spreadsheet is that you can restrict access to particular cells. If you develop a template (like a course calendar) and you don't want students to be able accidentally to delete or edit that template, you can "lock" the cells you've edited and then only leave certain parts of the sheet editable by others.
A slightly more labor-intensive Google Sheet approach is to make each student their own worksheet (make one per student, and name each worksheet in the workbook accordingly).
The same approach works for Google Slides, with the same caveats. You can create a new slide for each student, share the Slides file with the class, and instruct each student to pick one slide (either blank or one you've pre-populated with a template) to edit. Students can still edit each others' work, even if you don't want them to.
Now, back to the original point about sending students copies of your template Google Doc/Sheet/Slide assignment. When you don't want group-editing, and you just want each student to receive their own copy of your file to work with, here's the best approach I've seen so far.
Create your Google file and appropriately set the Sharing permissions (blue "Share" button at the upper right):
The subsequent steps may look different to you, depending on your Google settings, but what I do is get an "Anyone with the link" setting and then change the permissions to "Editor," so I see something like this:
Now, of course this isn't what we actually want: we don't want anybody we give that link to be able to come edit the instructor template file! Fortunately, that's not what's going to happen (except read the caveat at the bottom of this post). See what we do next:
1. "Copy link" selects that huge long URL for you, and here it is in full:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RP-_ppsH5G4HHYbuVtm4ZqExxKKKdmAqKVrZdQmWBfs/edit?usp=sharing
At the end of each URL that Google generates for a shared doc is: "/edit?usp=sharing"
2. Change "edit" to "copy" so that your URL looks like:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RP-_ppsH5G4HHYbuVtm4ZqExxKKKdmAqKVrZdQmWBfs/copy?usp=sharing
3. Now, when you distribute that edited URL to all of your students (say, in an e-mail, or LMS announcement, or discussion board post, or in a Zoom chat window), when they select that link, they'll be taken to their web browser and see this:
When they select "Make a copy," Google adds a copy of your template document to the student's Google Drive, where they can edit their copy of your document.
If you want to practice this, feel free to view the two URLs above and see what the difference is from the user (your) perspective.
To me, this is the most efficient way to share copies of Google documents (again, outside of using Google Classroom). However, there is one big caveat: if students know how you did this, then they can manually edit the URL you share from "copy" back to "edit," and then they'll be able to edit your original doc instead of being asked to make a copy. Of course, this is unlikely to happen, unless you have a particularly malicious student - and if that is the case, you probably have bigger things to worry about anyway. This is just an easy process for pushing docs to students. It isn't foolproof, but if you do this a lot, this will be a time-saver!
One last thought about this process: if you are going to have students edit their copy and then share their work on that copied document back with you, it is fantastic idea to ask them to rename their copy of the document by adding their name to the end of the document name.
I hope these tips come in useful!
No comments:
Post a Comment