Insert Learning From Your Dreams Into Your Classroom

It is amazing how the universe has a tendency of putting you in the exact place you are supposed to be right at the exact time. That happened to me yesterday when I ran into Hilton High School's own Jason Cring and he was gracious enough to share with me an amazing new tool he discovered.

If you have been looking for a way to make websites interactive for your students, the same way you might with videos (using EdPuzzle), then Insert Learning will make all your dreams come true. Insert Learning is a chrome extension that allows you to take any article, website, or published google doc and allows you to add questions, prompts, additional comments, youtube videos or a self-recorded video. Insert Learning then integrated with google classroom and students can answer your questions, and complete the assignment, then it is a piece of cake for you to grade.

Once you have added your own prompts, assign to students by simply clicking "assign" and a link is created to your new assignment that you can put up on Google Classroom with one click! The first time, it will ask you to create classes, but all you have to do is select your Google Classroom classes.


What can the students do besides answer questions and discussions? If you expect students to annotate articles, it does that too! On the student side, they can highlight, add comments, and add sticky notes. When you go to the article, there is an icon in the upper left corner (a group of three people) and by clicking on that icon you can choose a student to view their own annotations.

Grading is pretty easy, as well. You can go to the article, click view all comments and grade directly from the list of comments, or you can grade from your IL homepage. Each teacher account has a dashboard where you can see all your assignments and do your grading. Just click on grading and select the assignment and you can grade right in the dashboard then export them to google classroom. 

You might find it easier to grade those assignments through Insert Learning because you do not have to close out of one student's work to get to the next student's work. This feature might help you to create a more efficient workflow too! Since it works with Google Docs, you might find it easier to grade in Insert Learning in some situations.

Ideas, Ideas, Ideas:

- Have a class discussion on several topics throughout an article.

- Supplement a primary source with your own recorded explanation of it.

- Give a quiz with reading-based prompts.

- Take an article and add youtube clips to enhance the learning.

- Add video recordings of the article to help students who may need it based on their IEPs, or just to create a fragmented read aloud.
- Teaching students to annotate articles online? It does that too!

NOTE: You only get five assignments at a time, so if you plan to do more than five you would need to delete old ones.