Timeline Maker 3, Beautiful Timelines Through a Google Form

I promised the good folks who attended my session at ISTE (thanks for coming!) that I would update the Timeline Maker system for the newest version of Timeline JS. I wanted this version to be as accessible as possible so I built in a control panel to guide teachers through the setup process. This system uses a Google Form to create a beautiful interactive and embeddable timeline.

Timeline JS is a beautiful tool that transforms a Google Sheet into an interactive multimedia timeline. This system streamlines the process by using a Google Form to create the timeline. It also uses the incredible sheetSpider script, programmed by Andrew Stillman from New Visions for Public Schools. SheetSpider will create multiple timelines from the same form, making the system function for group work or individual students.

Set Up

First make a copy of the Timeline Maker. This was built for schools and assumes that you are copying it into an Edu Domain. As such, it has been developed to work with recorded usernames. This can be used outside of a domain, but will require some minor tinkering.

I really want to make this system as easy to use as possible. The sheetSpider script is powerful, but I think it can be confusing, especially if you want to control how it works. I created a “Set Up” sheet that takes teachers through the process step by step. Via this sheet, the system can be set up to create one timeline for the class, for small groups, or for each student. The “Set Up” sheet also allows teachers to turn on moderation, allowing submissions to be vetted before they get to the timeline. I’ve linked to two example sheets below, one set-up for small groups and another set up for a whole class. The data came from the good folks who attended my ISTE presentation.

Whole Class Timeline From Example

What’s next?

I didn’t involve any scripts or add-on beyond sheetSpider in the effort to keep this as simple as possible. In future iterations I hope to do the following:

• Install formMule and record the edit form link
• Have the system email the student if something needs editing (via formMule)
• Have formRanger update a Student Name question with each submission
• Tie it into the Twitter Google Form system so that exit tweets are recorded in a timeline.

The time was right for this revision. The goal was to build a system for teachers who might not be Google Sheet ninjas yet, but still want Timeline JS goodness powered by a Google Form. This is the first time I’ve tried to approach a system this way, please let me know if it works for you!

Edit: Giant thanks to Dan Crowley and Kelly Kermode for their help chasing down some bugs. If you experience any trouble, please let me know in the comments. (7/28/2015)

Edit 2: Fixing old bugs made new bugs! Thanks to the help of Stephanie Schroeder I was able to debug them. Once again - if something doesn't seem right, leave a comment and let me know. Thanks! (7/30/2015)

The Finished Book Igloo

Here is our finished book igloo! Our Stop motion video is posted below. I'm really proud of how the students at Quaker Ridge rallied to build the platform, prototype the igloo, and eventually put it together.  We've dedicated the igloo to Robyn Lane, our principal, who has retired after leading us for ten years. It will be a favorite book nook in our library for years to come! You can read more about the process here.

The Up! Mini 3D Printer Prints Well, Has Lousy Documentation

The 3D printer farm at Georgia Tech's Invention Studio

I learned about the Up! 3D printer at the Georgia Tech Invention Studio, where it was the printer of choice in their printer farm. If you are ever in Atlanta, I recommend calling the Studio and asking for a tour; it’s an inspiring space run by even more inspiring students. The University Lab Instructors were really positive about the Up! and we decided to give it a shot. We got ours a few days ago and this is my first reaction to the printer.

Set Up

Students unboxing the Up! printer

The Up! comes nearly set up, which is welcome. A test print is waiting for you on the printing plate indicating that the printer had gone through some quality assurance before being shipped. Unfortunately, the quick start manual that comes with the box is really lackluster. It seems to have been poorly translated (TierTime Technology is a Chinese company) and there’s quite a bit that you have to figure out for yourself. Thankfully, the two students who were in charge of the set up are swift. I highly recommend going to the Up! support page to download the full manual straight away. Interestingly, the quick start manual does not mention the existence of the online manual or the need to download the software from the website. Once downloaded, the software installed easily on our iMac, but I’ve heard people have had problems on PCs.

The First Print

Feeding the filament into the extruder is simply done, I’d say it’s easier than our MakerBot. The extruder heats up quickly and starts to push out ABS filament in the same color of the test print that was on the plate. You initialize the printer by holding done the power button, causing some loud beeps to indicate the process is underway. It's so loud, in fact, that I flinched in our library, casting guilty glances at our librarian who was in the middle of a lesson. Calibrating the nozzle has been more difficult than it needed to be. The steep learning curve is a direct result of the lousy documentation. The quick start guide provides no direction and the manual doesn’t help much either. It is recommended to calibrate the nozzle 2mm from the plate but a visual reference would go a long way. If the nozzle is too far from the plate the model will not adhere well to the perforated plate. This will cause edge curling and the ultimate print failure on larger jobs. Through much trial and error, I’ve found that the nozzle has to be really tight to the plate - just a little more than the thickness of paper.

The plate is supposed to heat to help the model adhere. This is a great idea but it seems like the mechanism is not powerful enough to do this adequately. It often requires long preheat times (up to an hour) and even then it’s lacking. Users familiar with the printer often replace the stock heat switch with a more powerful one. I don’t want to wait an hour to print and I’m not sure that I want to upgrade the switch either. For now, I’ve found that Cube Glue works great to keep the models on the plate while printing.

Accessories

The Up! comes with a great set of tools to remove and clean finished prints. I really appreciated the quality gloves, scraper and exacto knife. Up! also provides Allen Keys and Nozzle Wrenches to help you repair or modify the printer. This sends the right message: take control of this printer - fix it, improve it, take it apart and put it back together again. I especially appreciate the downloadable spare parts library allowing users to print their own replacement parts.

Quality

The Up! does a nice job with it’s prints, producing smooth models with decent detail. The print area is on the small side, at 4.7 inches cubed. I like that the printer can use both ABS and PLA filament. Mechanically speaking, the printer is great. The nozzle seems to be maintenance free so far and the extruder heats quickly.  The filament feeds easily. The plate heater is disappointing but at least there is a solution.

Conclusion

The Up! 3D printer is a good deal at $600 but there are some things to consider. Model curl and print failure can easily happen if you don’t have the nozzle calibrated correctly, which has a steep learning curve because of the documentation. You should also heat the plate or use 3D glue to keep the print from curling. If you don’t want to deal with the calibration you might want to look at the Up! Plus 2 because it levels and calibrates automatically. The Plus 2 costs twice as much at $1299.

Building a Book Igloo

Miler Lagos' work "Home" and our inspiration

Our school’s library was in need of book weeding. There were encyclopedias that were twenty years old, books that hadn’t been checked out in thirty years, and some that were just plain falling apart. In fact, there were hundreds of books like this and it just didn’t seem right to throw them out.  It all became clear after our school librarian, Kate Byrnes, discovered this installation by Colombian artist Miler Lagos. This what we needed to do. We needed to mobilize our Young Maker’s club and build a book igloo.

Book Igloo prototype

Having never built such an igloo before, it was important to build a prototype. The Makers Club adeptly stacked books over the course of two afternoons (informed by lots of Minecraft practice) until the igloo began to show signs of structural failure. They did a great job and the prototyping process was really informative. When we started we focused on the width and length of the books. Our test made it clear that it was the thickness that was truly important: each row needed to be built with similarly thick books.

Maker Club building the igloo platform

Then the kids helped me build a platform for the igloo. We want the igloo to be movable in order to keep the library space flexible and for more practical reasons, like cleaning the rug. I was especially proud of one of our middle school helpers who figured out how to build a brace for the casters.

Students answering the question, "What does reading mean to me?"

Once the platform was ready we had students use sharpie markers to answer the question “What does reading mean to me?” Their answers are amazing and they add a warmth and personal feeling to the project. Our book igloo is becoming an art installation like Miler Lagos’ work. Unlike Lagos’ igloo, ours will be permanent. Each book will be glued into place by construction adhesive creating a book nook where students can enjoy reading. The igloo will be a centerpiece of the library next year and I’m looking forward to blogging about the finished project as soon as it’s done.

A Google Slides Student Museum

Back in March I had the good fortune of sitting in on +Caren Macconnell’s Google Summit workshop on Choose Your Own Adventure Using Google. Caren did a great job and really got my wheels turning - you can do a lot with this kind of interactivity and it shines in the classroom.

In the past I've used a wiki to create interactive stories like this. It worked pretty well but graphics were more complicated than they needed to be and students couldn’t work on the same page at the same time. Google Slides is a much more flexible and user-friendly tool.

Creating non-linear links or buttons in a Slides presentation is a snap. Just select the text or shape that you want to link to another slide, click the link button, then select the destination slide. This process is even easier if you title the slides beforehand.

This came in handy recently after a local artist visited one of our second grade classrooms. Caren shared a museum template during her Summit workshop that becomes a great showcase for student work and reflections. This was the inspiration for the Museum at QR Slide deck embedded in this post.

Like Google Drawing, slides is an under appreciated tool. I think Slides is sometimes mistaken as limited because it’s easy to use. Don’t fall for this trap, nothing is further from the truth.

Student Articulation Lessons Learned

We are halfway through our student articulation meetings using the new articulator sheet that uses imported data from the STAR RTI screener. Some elements are going well. Being able to change the data visualizations using drop down menus has been amazing. The graphs and charts are hugely useful. The new system is less subjective, more visual, and has cut our articulation meetings down by a third. There are also several things that need to be made better for next year. This post will serve as a reflection that will hopefully inform (remind) my 2016 revision.

Behavior

Behavior is a subjective measure, but one that is crucial to consider for creating balanced classes. The system currently uses one metric for behavior. As we discuss students it is clear that this isn’t dimensional enough. Next year the system will include a metric for Social Skills and another for Attention to Task. These are both under the umbrella of behavior but mean something different for the chemistry of a classroom.

Link ALL Data to Student ID

Student information (Name, Birthday, gender, ethnicity, ect.) is currently pulled from the STAR reading data. The thinking behind this was ease of use: only two data imports were necessary (math and reading) to articulate the whole school and vertical lookups handle data using the student ID number after that. My method is flawed. Teachers use the “Data Beta” sheet to perform the initial placement and to add subjective scores like behavior and notes. The teacher added information is purely positional to the STAR data. In other words, student X is on row 4, and the teacher added data is also on row 4. The teacher added information will no longer match up to the right students if anything happens to the sort or row placement on the reading sheet. In the next iteration I need to have teachers add their information directly to the STAR reading sheet or a third data sheet that is only student demographics. The teacher added information needs to be anchored to the student ID number. This was lazy thinking on my part. It hasn’t been an issue (except for the next paragraph) because I’ve been careful, but it makes me nervous and is just sloppy.

Cross-Browser Inconsistency

I've discovered that the sheet sorts differently when teachers use a different browser. This was quite a surprise. The all of the data is brought to the “Data Beta” sheet via Queries. I have to test this more and haven’t realized the exact reason, but it is clear that the students sort differently when the sheet is accessed with Firefox or Safari. This is an issue because of the previous paragraph. I've told my teachers to only use Chrome when working with the articulation sheet which avoids any trouble. If I effectively anchor everything using the Student ID this won’t be an issue at all.

The process has been going really well and the sheet has been working. A few things have made the process clunkier than I’d like. Ironically, the biggest issue (not hard linking the teacher added information to Student IDs) was intended to make the setup easier. It was a “penny-wise and pound-foolish” decision. Even so, placement is going better than ever and the issues I've discussed here are fixable. The next iteration will be even better.

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.