Kiddom and Google: Better Together
Part 1 of 3: Helping Students Track and Act on Progress
Are you using Google Classroom, but spending an inordinate amount of time grading and helping students understand their progress? This is where a tool like Kiddom can come to your rescue! Over the course of the next few weeks, we’ll be sharing pro tips for power users seeking to take their use of education technology to the next level.
Pro Tip #1: Helping Students Track and Act on Progress
You might be using Google Classroom and wondering, “Why would I want to transfer my assignments into Kiddom?” To make sense of this, consider the following questions:
- Do I have access to a gradebook in Google Classroom?
- Can I track individual student progress on standards in Google Classroom?
- Do students have access to progress reports in Google Classroom?
Your answers to these three questions are probably no.
While Google Classroom provides a great way for students to receive content, it doesn’t (yet) provide a way for students to measure their progress and therefore, take some ownership over their learning experience.
By using Kiddom’s Google Drive integration, you can take everything you’ve set up in Google Classroom and transfer it to Kiddom’s Planner; doing this provides you and your students access to progress reports that they wouldn’t otherwise have in Google Classroom.
Unlike using Google Drive and Classroom, with Kiddom you don’t have to download multiple third-party apps in order for it to give you the classroom intelligence and reporting that you and your students need. It’s all housed within the Kiddom K-12 operating system.
Giving Google Drive a Standards-Based Boost
Does your school or state require your assessments be standards-aligned? You probably noticed there is no standards tracking in Google Classroom or Drive. That’s again where Kiddom comes in: you can attach your Drive assessments to Kiddom assignments, attach relevant standards, and voila: you’re now tracking student progress while using all the material you already created in Drive. The best part? It’s all in one place!
How do you attach and grade standards with your Drive assignments? Check out these three easy steps below:
Step 1: Create an assignment in Kiddom and attach the Drive document you want to assign to your students.
Step 2: Click on “attach standards” in the assignment options.
Step 3: Search and add (check) the standards you want to attach to the drive assignment, and click save.
If you want to make it really easy to attach standards to your assignments, visit your class settings and add standards to be tracked in your class. Now, when you go to attach standards in an assignment, the standards that you are tracking in your class settings will appear for you. One less step towards analyzing student performance… nice, right?
Kiddom’s intelligence reports also create easy to interpret, beautiful graphs and progress reports for each student in your class, including their progress on each standard you’ve assigned with your assignments. Using Google Drive, you’d have to manually track those standards, but if you use Kiddom and Google together, it’s a match made in heaven!
What can super-charging Google Drive assignments with Kiddom intelligence reports do for your students? Here are a couple of ideas:
- Offer students a voice during conferences: Whether it’s student-teacher conferences or parent-teacher conferences, your students will be able to lead the conversations and talk about their academic growth and areas in need of improvement. Kiddom’s reports make it easy for students to track their progress by allowing them access to it 24/7.
- Offer students ownership: If you have students doing independent, inquiry-driven work in your classroom, you know that it’s hard to keep up with the timely feedback and conferences required to keep students excelling. That’s where Kiddom reports come in: they can follow their progress with each benchmark assignments submitted/evaluated as soon as you grade the assignment. With the ability to track their progress toward certain skill sets (Standards Based Grading), students will know what they need to focus on, day after day and week after week.
Ready for more tips? Check out the next post in this series, Transforming Drive Folders Into Organized Curriculum.
P.S. Want more resources for the upcoming school year? Check out Kiddom’s K-12 Library to access to thousands of standards-aligned resources from popular publishers.
