Social Bookmarks using a Google Form & Awesome Tables

Last January I had the pleasure of attending a Teacher’s College workshop hosted by Dr. Heidi Hayes Jacobs.  Dr. Jacobs reminded us that the process of evaluation, selection, and categorization is especially valuable in our information rich world. She encouraged us to help our students curate their own web experiences. Inspiration struck: I thought, “Why not create a social bookmarking tool for elementary students using a Google form?” I wanted to create a student-centered alternative to the static list of links that are often found on teacher sites. This post is the result of that inspiration.

Inspiration is not an individual endeavor.  If Heidi Hayes Jacobs helped me to think of the what, then +Baptiste Quin showed me the “how.” Baptiste generously shared an Awesome Table experiment, gorgeously modeled after Google Keep. He opened my eyes to the potential of using CSS with Awesome Tables and provided the perfect starting place for my project. So, a big thanks goes out to Baptiste.

My remix of Baptiste’s work edits out some of his features (which are very cool in their own right, but didn’t quite fit my project) and adds others. Each bookmark “card” has a title, a description, information tags, how many times the bookmark was shared, who submitted the site and when. Students share bookmarks using a Google Form. I tried to design the form to be as short as possible to make adding a bookmark easy.  The Google Sheet compares usernames (collected automatically from the form) against a list to determine the submitter's building and classroom. To further simplify the process, I’ve created a simple Chrome extension that will open the form and pre-fill the title and url of the current page. I’ll blog about this extension in another post.

I’m really excited about this system. The chrome extension makes it easy to add new sites on the fly and the Awesome Table can be embedded on any website. I’ve added the bookmark interface into our edublogs student template so that each student blog has ready access. This connects all of our students and becomes a vehicle to teach the new ISTE standard for Knowledge Curation. Feel free to copy the demo sheet and make it your own. I wrote a brief instruction page in the sheet for anyone who wants to give it a whirl, but I’ll be writing step by step directions in an upcoming post. Let me know in the comments if you use this idea, make it better, or find a bug - it would be much appreciated!

An Interactive e-Library of Student Work Using Google Apps

This post describes a Google powered system to showcase digital student work. It allows a school to collect and display published student pieces for the whole community or for each class. The process is centralized, so students only have to submit once to publish in both places.

Awesome Table

This is an Awesome Table build. For step by step information on using Awesome Tables, you can reference one of my recent posts or use the official support site. In this workflow, submissions from the form directly feed the Awesome Table. The table is formatted by an HTML template stored on the “Template” page. The questions not used in the template (Teacher, Genre, and Topic) filter and sort the table. The HTML template requires three variables: a link to the published document, the document title, and a link to an image representing the document. The published document can be anything with a web address. I used Flipshack to publish our Google Docs and copied the shared URL from there. The image representing the document is less intuitive.

Batch Process PDF to JPGs

When my older students self-publish, they’ll screen capture the covers to make an image file.  I prepared eBooks for two grade levels (2nd and 3rd) and using a screen capture for each one would have been a laborious option. Instead, I used a tool named PDF to JPG to easily batch processed the book covers into JPG images. Once the images were ready I uploaded them to a Google Site so that they had a static web address.

Creating Multiple Tables for Different Classes

The main form response sheet is used for our library website, creating a sortable Awesome Table for all submitted work. When work is submitted, the student’s teacher question is used by the spreadsheet to organize student work into class pages via a query. The query is easily customized by anyone using the sheet, simply add your teacher’s names to the formRanger variables sheet. Then, click cell B1 of each class page to select the appropriate teacher for that page. Simply copy the class page to add classes. Don't forget to add these names to the teacher question in the form, I recommend using the formRanger addon it keep it updated ;).

Future Plans

As it's currently designed, this system is meant for teacher submissions. I can foresee using some kind of moderation, like the FormMule powered process used in the Book Review Site, to make student submission possible. I’m also impressed by the expanding cards on this Awesome Table demo. I would love students to use this feature to introduce their work. Like everything, this is an ongoing project and I’m excited to see what the next iteration looks like. Let me know if you have any questions in the comments.

Open Thinking Pays Dividends

Last Wednesday I participated in a Google Educator Group Hangout with +James Peterson, +Jane Lofton and +Dan Imbimbo. It was meant to be an advanced sequel to the Google Edu on Air workshop about sheet powered Book Review Sites and it turned out to be much more. It was the kind of great conversation that keeps you up for a few nights while you work out what was discussed.

After the Hangout, James posted his hack of the advanced book review site and his thinking floored me. That evening I stayed up to 3 am incorporating his thinking into my own; I can truly say that the project is better and I am smarter as a result.

For background on the original book review site you can read this post or watch the Google Edu Hangout on Air. James took this site idea and brought it to another level:

• He used HTML in the Awesome Table list to include an average star rating next to each book title. which was such a smart way to provide feedback to users.
• He figured out a way to build a sheets function with “join” and “filter” to combine multiple reviews of the same book into an HTML snippet.
• He uncovered the templates feature of Awesome Tables which isn’t in the official documentation

James did a truly excellent job documenting these improvements on his blog.

James’ book review system is targeted to teachers, not students, and his design has different requirements as a result. I needed to incorporate his improvements into my system where posts are moderated and submission notifications are sent to teachers and librarians. My system also asks slightly more of the submitter, including a plot summary. In the near future I’ll write an explicit post about how I incorporated James’ system, but you are welcome to copy the demo sheet to pull it apart now. Full disclosure - there are a couple of clunky things I’d like to streamline, but it still works as advertised.

I’m so thankful for my PLN who is a daily source of inspiration and support. Every once in a while I’m shown how powerfully good this network can be. This was one of those times.

Finally, Google Docs Speech Recognition

I’ve been looking for a free speech recognition tool to use with Google Docs since the unveiling of Chrome extensions. The time has finally come with the Docs Add-on “Speech Recognition.” I’ve used the tool with several 8 and 9 year old students and have found it easy to operate and remarkably accurate.

Speech Recognition appears in the Add-on menu after being installed from the Gallery.  Once started, a speech recognition sidebar opens that allows the user to specify the language being spoken. In addition to handling English well, I’ve heard from my World Language colleagues that the Spanish recognition is quite good. The Add-on begins to work with the click of a start button and stops by using the same button. Punctuation is included when the user verbally declares where it should be (edit: some folks have reported that punctuation is a weakness, see the comments...)

Accuracy has often been a challenge for speech recognition tools that aren’t trained to understand the speaker, such as the capable Dragon Naturally Speaking. Accuracy is also a challenge when the speaker has a young voice or doesn’t project well. I found neither to be the case with this add-on.  One soft-spoken young lady was having trouble typing the non-fiction book that she was working on. She was able to clear through three chapters after using “Speech Recognition.”

Students often do not verbalize the punctuation, so it is necessary for them to reread and make edits where necessary. Mumbling can also be misunderstood. I actually consider both of these deficits a feature and enjoyed watching our young writers reread their work and revise.

At the risk of being hyper-critical, I would love to see this add-on utilize keyboard shortcuts. I do not know what kind of technical challenge that presents, but it would be highly beneficial for users who have trouble manipulating a mouse. So far, this is my only criticism of this capable and user-friendly tool.

This has been cross-posted at the Chrome Toolbox.