Here is an abridged version of the district ClassWize training session. Please check out this incredibly focused 14 minute crash course on Classwize to supplement any other training.
Pro-tip from last years power users:
An occasional reapplication of Focus Sessions can ensure their consistent function
Remember or jot down that class code above. Then click the image to join the Byte Syze PD Google Classroom.
Byte Syze PD are self paced micro courses that you can complete to learn more about tools you need to know. I currently have two Google Classroom courses available. Both only take 15 minutes to complete.
Below is an overview of the two Google Classroom courses currently available.
Today I want to give you a quick introduction to what Class Companion is and how we will be using it.
Then I’ll walk you through the process of creating a custom rubric to generate the most helpful feedback that you can for your students.
Additionally we will take a quick dip into the feature for students to challenge the grade they receive from the AI.
After that I will give you some time to develop your first Class Companion assignment with your team and share those assignments.
Let’s get started with Class Companion like we have never messed with it before.
I’m logging in with Google
and choosing my school Google account. You should too.
Class Companion uses AI to review student written responses and provide excellent feedback as well as a very unreliable score.
It is a district directive to not use the Class Companion score system as a grade for your students. In our testing it gave different score numbers for the same responses on different student accounts.
We want to use the AI generated feedback from Class Companion. That provides very useful feedback for your students with out your worrying about it.
Class Companion allows students to resubmit an assignment up to 5 times. Let’s teach students to go to the feedback and then re-write their submission making sure to include all of the suggestions from the feedback.
We can customize the rubric to meet your needs or match your standardized assessment rubric.
Let’s make a custom rubric together so that we can get the experience. We need to go to Content Library and then My Rubrics.
On that tab we will click the +Add a rubric button and then lets try Import file
Click here to get the rubric file that we will work with
We’ll need to download it from our Google Drive to the Computer’s downloads folder. In the Google Doc go to File>Download> and as a .pdf
Select “upload a file” then Navigate to the file, click it to highlight it then click open.
Next click “Import and review”. It will do its thing for a minute. Then it looks good and done correctly to me.
It looks like our next step is to click “edit”, as I don’t see a save option here.
In here let’s click “Save and Preview”, Then Back
I had to log out of Class Companion and then back in to get the new rubric to show up in “My Rubrics”
Let’s click the “Actions” button that pops up when you hover your cursor over the new rubric notice that you have options to Share the rubric with your fellow teachers here. As well as Clone and Edit if it is a rubric you will use often with only small tweaks.
We have done it!
Now we will go back to the Class Companion Home Screen.
Then click the drop down arrow on the “Create a class” button. We will go ahead and import your classes from Google Classroom. If there are any there you can practice assigning the prompt (from the file) and selecting the correct custom rubric.
Now we will have a quick preview of the student perspective in Class Companion.
Teenagers love to argue ( I have two of them and that is all they do). Class Companion invites their argument so this could be a wonderful feature to take advantage of.
If they can so eloquently develop an endless list of reasons why they need more money for Robux or V-Bucks maybe they can develop a good argument to support their answer or even find their own logical fallacies by analyzing their answers so intently.
If you would like to experience this as a student the only way to do so is to use a different Gmail address and I can assign you to my class as a student.
This raises the technical difficulty level for the less experienced technology users. Would you like to try it? It could go smoothly or in ten minutes we regret it and move on.
Now let’s develop a custom assignment and rubric for your first in class writing assignments. You can make this by importing a file or creating a new one from scratch. Perhaps you want to split up the first few among your team. Barter how do you want to do this?
