Manhattan College Instructional Technology Blog

Using Maps in Padlet

Padlet is an incredibly versatile tool for teaching. You can use it to create instructional materials for your students as well as assignments. It also offers robust collaboration features. This post will focus on a less-common padlet format: maps.

If you’ve never used Padlet before, take a look at our introductory video for Padlet.

Other padlet formats allow users to create posts anywhere on the background. With a map padlet, the background is from Google Maps. When you or a student first visits the padlet, a wide-angle map will be displayed. Posts can be added either by zooming in on the map and clicking, or using the menu to search for a specific location. Once a post’s location has been set, a wide variety of content can be added to it, just like with other padlet formats: text, pictures, sounds, videos, links … nearly any digital content. Users can also draw and label connections between posts, and comment on posts.

You also have the ability to change the appearance of the map – changing colors, satellite imagery, even a watercolor version.

Here are a few ideas of how to use the map format:

As an icebreaker, asking the students to post about where they’re from, where they consider home, or where they’d love to visit
As an instructional tool, placing posts indicating locations relevant to class material
As an assignment, asking students to locate examples of concepts covered in class, including digital media to provide more content for their responses.

Formative and Summative Assessments

Assessments are a part of every course: tests, quizzes, papers, reports, etc. But why do we give these assessments? What exactly is each assessment meant to accomplish? Probably the most common response is “to see how well the students have learned the material.” In this sense, an assessment can be a measuring tool. Assessments used to gauge students’ overall learning of the material are referred to as summative assessments. However, assessments can also be used as tools to help students in the process of learning, and are then referred to as formative assessments.

Formative assessments should be opportunities for students to work with the material in a low-stakes environment, where doing poorly is a chance to learn, rather than receive a bad grade. The idea is that students can make mistakes and get feedback as part of the learning process.

When using both formative and summative assessments in your courses:

Formative assessments should be low-stakes, and summative assessments should be high-stakes. Reflect this in the grading for the course: formative assessments should count much less than summative assessments. It’s tempting to have them not even count toward course grades, but even that little bit of credit should work to motivate students to complete them.
Align formative assessments with summative assessments so that the formative assessments also prepare the students for specific summative assessments. For example, students might write a draft of a paper or a report proposal for a formative assessment, and then write the full paper or report as a summative assessment.
When scheduling your assessments, leave enough time for you to give feedback to students. Your feedback is an essential part of formative assessment. For example, if they’re writing a draft of a paper or report proposal, they’ll need to have your feedback in time to do a good job on the corresponding summative assessment.

Because formative assessments shouldn’t count much toward students’ grades, and require a quick response from you, it’s best to have them be relatively short. But that smaller amount of time students will spend can make a big difference in their learning! Here are some possible examples of formative assessments:

Adding Edpuzzle questions to a YouTube video
Create an assignment in Moodle where the students only need to submit a few sentences. (Use the “Online text” option so you can see all the students’ responses on one page and grade them all at once to save time – see page 4 of this tutorial.)
Have all the students find examples online of a particular concept and post them to a shared class padlet. (As a summative assessment, maybe have them analyze the entire collection! Check out our video tutorial.)

Jamboard Basics

Google Jamboard is a virtual whiteboard tool that can be used in the classroom or in Google Meet. Like a physical whiteboard, you can draw on it, but you can also import images, paste or enter blocks of text, and add sticky notes. Not only can remote and in-person students view the jamboard, but you can also give them access to edit it as well. Because each jamboard can have multiple frames (like slides of a presentation), you can use it as a replacement for PowerPoint or Google Slides if you’d prefer your presentations to consist mostly of annotating.

Leading a fully-online class session?

Maybe you’re teaching an online course, or maybe you need to hold a single online class session due to weather or your travel schedule. This scenario presents the most straightforward use of Jamboard: Share the link with your remote students and they’ll be able to follow along as you use Jamboard just as you would the physical whiteboard in the classroom.

Teaching a course with in-person students as well as remote students?

Even typical classes may have some students participating remotely, perhaps due to quarantining. The remote students are harder to engage, especially if you’re using a whiteboard that’s difficult for them to see. By using Jamboard and projecting the board into the physical classroom, you’ll ensure that your in-person and remote students are seeing the same thing.

Teaching a face-to-face course?

Even if you have a physical whiteboard in your classroom and all your students are in-person, Jamboard can still be helpful. You can create a board in advance with material to annotate in class. Or give the students a link to the board and have them annotate it. When class is over, the entire board can be exported as a PDF so the students will have a copy of the information.

For more information on using Jamboard in the classroom, see this demonstration video.

Introduction to Edpuzzle

Posting videos on Moodle can be a great way to expose your students to more material for your course. However, doing so raises several challenges:

How do you know the students are actually watching the videos?
Even if students do watch the videos, how do you know if they’re engaged and paying attention?
How can you connect the content of the videos with classroom activities?

Edpuzzle offers a solution to all of these. With it, you can overlay questions on a video available online – including existing ones like those on YouTube, or ones you upload yourself to GoogleDrive. Currently, Edpuzzle offers multiple-choice, true-false, open-ended questions, and notes that students simply view rather than respond to. When the student comes to a point in the video where you’ve set up a question, the video will pause until the student responds. Responses are viewable on Edpuzzle’s website, and you can even have the students’ scores on the questions automatically appear in your Moodle gradebook.

Edpuzzle allows you address the challenges described above. For example, you can:

Establish accountability by asking several easy questions throughout the video.
Increase engagement by using questions as a low-stakes graded quiz to check for understanding as students watch the video.
Connect videos to the classroom by addressing the students’ responses in class. You could review material students did poorly with, or use open-ended questions to collect material and reactions to discuss in class.

If you’re interested in learning more about Edpuzzle, take a look at our video tutorial tutorial.

Accessible Syllabi in Moodle

When posting your syllabus online, think about how you can make it more accessible. One way to do this is to make it function better with screen reader software. Students who are blind or visually impaired may use this software to read your syllabus.

Simply uploading a PDF of your syllabus may be the least accessible option. While there are ways to make a PDF accessible, it is highly dependent on how the PDF is created. Word files stand a better chance of being accessible. However, their major disadvantage is that students may need to go through several steps to view your syllabus: downloading it, leaving Moodle to open Word, and finally opening your syllabus. At best, this is an inconvenience for the students. At worst, this may be impossible if a student doesn’t have access to Word; for example, a student may be viewing your course on a phone.

The most straightforward way to put an accessible copy of your syllabus on Moodle is to post it as an HTML file. If you already have your syllabus in Microsoft Word, we have a tutorial for converting it into an HTML file on Moodle that preserves the content while still being accessible. Or, you can create your syllabus from scratch in a Moodle page. If you do, be sure to use the menu in the text editor to differentiate your headers from your text:

Introduction to Backwards Course Design

If you'll be designing a new course this semester, or revamping an existing one, what method will you use to do this? Most instructors begin by choosing a list of topics they want to teach, then perhaps a textbook, before moving on to writing the lectures, and finally creating assignments. One problem with this approach is that you lose the ability to know if you've accomplished your goal of teaching the students what you want them to learn. Knowing that they’ve learned the material requires evidence, and in this case the evidence has to be something that the students do. So a better solution would be to consider what the students will learn to do (e.g., “calculate the area of a rectangle”) rather than a topic (“area”). If they are able to do what you want to teach them, then you know you succeeded.

This is where backwards course design starts: express what you want your students to learn to do: calculate the area of a rectangle, explain the difference between two theories, design a certain piece of technology, perform a procedure successfully, etc.

Next, consider what you would accept as evidence for their being able to do a learning goal you described in the first step: must they simply answer a quiz question about the area of a rectangle? Or are you more ambitious: should they take pictures of ten rectangles and calculate their areas? Create a presentation in which they explain the difference between two theories to someone outside the class? Create a schematic diagram working in groups? Keep a notebook documenting a procedure with explanations of each step?

Finally, consider what you need to do to prepare them to provide that evidence. Don’t just plan to lecture on the area of rectangles – plan to lecture on how rectangles are used in building and manufacturing, and why it’s important to know their areas. Don’t just suggest two videos on two different theories – also recommend a video on how to create explanatory presentations. Lecture on how to break down a project into smaller parts, so that each member of a group can make a meaningful contribution. Assign an article about cases in which accurate notebooks saved an experiment.

This is backwards design in a nutshell: first express what you want your students to learn in terms of what they will be able to do after learning the material, then decide what will count as evidence, and then choose learning experiences that will prepare them to produce that evidence. You'll express more clearly what you want your students to learn, will have evidence of success, and will make your course more student-focused also!

For more information on backwards course design, read the first chapter of Understanding by Design (Wiggins & McTighe, 1998).

Moodle Gradebook End of Semester Reminders

It is a good idea at the end of the semester to look over your Moodle gradebook to make sure it is calculating grades correctly.

Here are some tips for avoiding common pitfalls before submitting final grades:

Gradebook Calculations

Check that your gradebook setup is consistent with the grading scheme for your course. By default, the gradebook is set to "Mean of grades" and will simply average any grade items together. In nearly all cases, additional set up is required. For example, you may need to update the aggregation method and add categories to organize your gradebook items into groups.

See these tutorials for help setting up your gradebook:

Setting up a Moodle Gradebook: Weighted Categories

Setting up a Moodle Gradebook: Natural or "Sum" of Grades

The gradebook is complex and has many grade aggregation options. It is a good idea to spot-check one or two student grades to make sure they are calculating the way you expect them to. You can also view the same grade report that your students see by following the instructions in this tutorial:

Viewing Grades as a Student

Hidden Grades

You may have hidden grades in your course, such as a hidden assignment or a quiz whose scores you haven't shared. If so, by default Moodle will hide students' course grades also. Be sure to reveal any hidden grades or delete any unused hidden assignments if you want the course grades to be visible and accurate. Hidden grades can cause discrepancies between the calculated totals seen by you and those seen by the student.

Empty Grades

By default, Moodle will not use "empty" grades when calculating course grades—blank cells in the gradebook will be ignored. If students have not completed an assignment, and you expect a zero to be calculated in for that grade, you must enter zero for that item in the gradebook. Otherwise, the missing assignment will not affect the students' course grades.

Zeros can be entered directly into the Grader Report when editing is turned on in the gradebook. You can also update all empty grades for a single assignment at once by following these steps.

Go to the Grader Report and click on the pencil icon at the top of the column for the grade you want to update
At the top of the Override column, select All
Scroll down. At the bottom of the screen, click the checkbox to the left of Perform bulk insert. Empty grades and a value of 0 will be selected by default.
Click Save. The page will refresh and any previously empty grades will be updated to zeros.

Overrides

Some grade cells in your gradebook may be orange rather than the normal gray or white. This indicates that a grade has been "overridden". Normally, grades in the gradebook are pulled in from the activity itself (e.g. the Assignment grading interface). Override grades are entered directly in the gradebook, and replace the grade that would otherwise be there. This is common and not normally a cause for concern. For example, if a student receives a scores of zero for a discussion forum, the recommended solution is to enter the grade directly in the gradebook.

One place in the gradebook where an override can cause issues is when a grade category total is overridden. Grade categories are calculated based on the grading scheme of the category, and the grades that it contains. If you override the grade for a category total, Moodle will, from that point forward, keep that grade as you have entered it and not continue to recalculate the category total when items within the category are updated. In general, it is best to avoid this practice unless you have a specific reasons for preventing Moodle from calculating the category total from the items it contains.

Quiz Grades

Some quiz grade visibility settings are controlled within the quiz itself. If your students are not able to see a quiz or exam grade, take a look at the post "My students can't see their quiz grades. What should I do?".