InsertLearning

Back to School 2017

Wed, 13 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

New features for the 2017-18 School Year

Multi-color highlights, we heard you ELA teachers ;)
Help Center with lesson ideas built into the toolbar and dashboard.
Content search! Find relevant and engaging text with our educators curated search engine.
View question responses on the lesson page.
Toolbar hint text (thanks @MissSimonton and @CarolineResler for the suggestion).
Rename lessons from the toolbar.
Earn free months by referring others.
New, simpler school pricing.

If you have any questions or feedback about this update, send them to us via email or Twitter.

Q&A about the name change

Wed, 22 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

DocentEDU is now InsertLearning. Here’s what you need to know about the changes that come with it.

Q: Do I need to install a new extension?
A: No, your DocentEDU Chrome extension will automatically update to InsertLearning. You and your students may be asked to allow new permissions. If this happens you will need to allow the new permissions to use InsertLearning.

Q: Does my school tech department need to know about the change?
A: Possibly. Make sure that the website https://insertlearning.com is unblocked for teachers and students.

If you have any questions or feedback about this update, send them to us via email or Twitter.

DocentEDU is now InsertLearning

Wed, 22 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Big news!

DocentEDU is now changing our name to InsertLearning!

This new name (along with a new logo) has been designed with our company’s main mission in mind: to allow teachers and students to insert learning anywhere on the web, be that learning questions, annotations, discussions, or interactive elements from your favorite web 2.0 apps.

We want you to think of us, InsertLearning, as your “insert menu” that now follows you anywhere on the web. You now have the option, just as you do in word processors and slideshow creators among others, to click on the InsertLearning extension and insert almost anything when you are using your web browser.

This change will soon be visible across all of our sites and social media. We are excited for this new name and redesign and look forward to continuing our work of making the process of planning and delivering great, online lessons easier for teachers and students.

We look forward to allow you to insert learning moments on the web with you and your students for years to come!

Matt, Ben, and Karin

Free Range Docents

Tue, 22 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The holiday season is here and to celebrate we’re giving free trial users the ability to create, copy, and share unlimited docents through December 4th. Normally you can only create 5 docents at a time with the free trial. With all of the excitement, time off from school, extra stress, and a few absences we thought this would be a great way to say thank you to all of the hard working educators.

Make your life a little easier by putting instructions, video, and questions into a digital lesson you already use. Or, even easier, use one of these teacher made docents.

Ready to go Sub Lessons

Teens Try Life without Phones (NPR)
“Words We Live By” An analysis of the Constitution (Google Doc)
Would you upload your mind to live forever? (KQED)
“The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost (Google doc)
Many more here

What happens to my docents and student responses after this promotion?

All docents created during the promotion can still be used by the teacher and their students. Any student responses are still accessible as well. After this promotion has ended your account will revert back to a free trial unless you purchase a subscription. If you created more than 5 docents you will not be able create more unless you delete them or purchase a subscription.

Can I invite co-teachers during this promotion?

YES! Share with your colleagues and collaborate on new innovative lessons. DocentEDU is used by teachers in all subject areas and most grade levels.

DocentEDU is great, I want to keep creating more. How much does it cost?

DocentEDU is only $40 per teacher for a year. There is no limit on students, classes, or docents.

If you have any questions or feedback about this update, send them to us via email, Facebook, or Twitter.

New Feature: Submit Grades to Google Classroom

Fri, 14 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This wraps up our 3 part update to our Google Classroom integration.

To submit grades to Google Classroom, first go to the Grades section of the DocentEDU Dashboard. Then select a class and a docent from the drop-down menus. Once you do, a green button will appear at the top right of the screen:

Click that button and those grades will be sent to Google Classroom. That’s all there is to it!

Here’s what things look like in Google Classroom once the grades get submitted:

Note: those scores are percentages for the entire docent.

Students will also be able to see their grades without you having to take any other action in Google Classroom. Here’s what that looks like:

Nice!

If you have any questions or feedback about this update, send them to us via email, Facebook, or Twitter.

New Feature: Google Classroom Roster Sync

Thu, 29 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Part 2 of our Google Classroom update! It’s a bit weird calling this a new feature, since all the syncing happens in the background and there isn’t anything to see or do. However, this update will make your life easier, and isn’t that what features are really about?

Here’s how it works. Say you import a class from Google Classroom and share a docent to it. Then a new student joins your class on Google Classroom. After clicking the link to the DocentEDU assignment and signing in, she’ll be automatically enrolled in the proper class and the docent will load just as you would expect. And that’s all there is to it.

See you again in about 2 weeks when we release part three of our Classroom update, syncing grades.

New Feature: Improved Share to Google Classroom

Tue, 13 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Our Google Classroom integration has been very popular, and today we just launched a significant improvement to how you share docents to Google Classroom.

Here are a couple screenshots:

That looks pretty familiar. Let’s click that bottom button.

Woah, that’s different! What’s this mean?

First, as the image suggests, you can share to multiple classes (or sections) in Google Classroom at the same time. This was highly requested from teachers, so we’re happy to deliver.

Second, which is less apparent from the image, a lot of things “just work” now. Assign to classes first in DocentEDU and they’ll be pre-selected if you decide to share to Google Classroom. Or if you go the other way and share to Classroom right away, the docent will automatically be assigned to the proper classes in DocentEDU. Want to share to Classroom but haven’t imported the class yet? No problem! DocentEDU will prompt you to import it as soon as you select it.

This update is part one of three for our Google Classroom integration. The next two are syncing rosters and syncing grades. Our timeline for those updates is about two weeks for each part. In the meantime, let us know what you think about the improved Share to Google Classroom via email, Facebook, or Twitter.

Getting Rid of Those Textbooks: The Transition to Online Curriculum

Mon, 01 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Many of you may have found yourself in a slightly happy dilemma: your school has bought computers for every student, but you now are expected to (or want to) make content on those computers instead of using textbooks. This, as we said, can be an exciting dilemma. The internet is so endless and full of awesome real-life content that can make our students into the world citizens for the 21st century. However, it can feel overwhelming to feel like you’re starting from scratch on your curriculum materials. We all may be awesome teachers, but we don’t have endless amounts of time!

We here at DocentEDU understand your problem. Two of our cofounders found themselves in exactly the same place a few years ago, and in fact, that is why they cofounded the company. We would like to continue that tradition of making creating quality online curriculum easy by giving you lots of resources to find that quality online text.

(If you’d rather watch a webinar about all of this, go here and watch!)

If you’re interested in more of the thinking behind this philosophy of relying on internet-based resources instead of textbooks, head on over to the Ditchbook website where you can learn more from our friend, Matt Miller. In a nutshell, Ditchbook’s philosophy is, “teaching with less reliance on the textbook with an emphasis on using technology and creative teaching ideas.” In other words, using tech and not the textbook to be awesome. To follow this philosophy, here are some resources below to make it easier!

Text Sources with Texts at Different Reading Levels
These text sources focus on creating content that differentiate for reading level.

Tween Tribune (nonfiction current events)
Newsela (nonfiction current events, famous speeches)
Commonlit (English/language arts and social studies focused fiction and nonfiction texts with Common Core questions)

Tools to “Simply” Text
These tools will allow you to input a text, and then pop out the same text at an easier reading level.

Text Sources with Pre-Made Questions
These text sources have questions all ready for you to use with DocentEDU!

Dogonews (nonfiction current events)
Commonlit (English/language arts and social studies focused fiction and nonfiction texts with Common Core questions)
NYT Learning Blog (based on NYTimes content with pre-made lesson plans)
Tween Tribune (nonfiction current events)
Achieve the Core (English/language arts focused nonfiction and fiction texts with Common Core lessons plans)

Primary Sources
These resources have primary sources for you to use with your students.

Formative Assessment Made the Right Way

Tue, 26 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Since we are founded by two teachers, we take pedagogy seriously. In fact, we were founded by Matt and Karin since they took pedagogy and good teaching so seriously. They sensed an acute need to a technology product to allow them to formatively assess their students in an easy and quick way digitally. So, they created DocentEDU.

Over the past almost 2 years (wow!) we have become much more than a product you can use for formative assessment. That doesn’t mean, however, that we aren’t great for formative assessment. Let us tell you why.

Firstly, formative assessment should be two things: formative and something that assesses. That may seem straightforward, but let us explain a little more.

Most people understand what assessment means. The teacher should get to know as quickly as possible what his/her students understand or don’t understand. Hopefully, this goes the other way as well. Students should know as quickly as possible what they do or don’t understand.

The formative part of formative assessment is actually based on the creation of understanding. You see, formative assessment isn’t just a knowledge checker; no, it is a knowledge creator. Giving a student a worksheet with a paragraph and then a bunch of questions at the end isn’t formative assessment. Matt and Karin (as teachers) know that teaching is so stressful and time consuming, it seems like this is all we have time to make some mornings. But, we also know as professional educators that formative assessment should strive to have students form their own knowledge of a subject, think critically, and finally allow the students themselves as well as the teacher to quickly assess their critical thinking and knowledge formation. That is the ultimate formative assessment.

We here at DocentEDU know that you can use our extension/app to do just that: give formative assessments following best practice. DocentEDU allows you to do the following:

Have students create their own knowledge of a subject
Have students think critically
Students can quickly assess their own learning
Teachers can quickly assess their students’ learning

Check out this infographic comparing a DocentEDU lesson to a textbook lesson or a Google Doc lesson.

If you’d like more explanation, this chart shows you how to use DocentEDU to follow best practice. It has linked instructional videos.

Skill	DocentEDU Tool
Students creating own knowledge	Highlights and comments Live class discussions Embeds of other web 2.0 applications Students creating their own DocentEDU lessons Students using DocentEDU annotation tools
Critical thinking	Open-ended questions Multiple choice questions Live class discussions
Students assessing own learning	Multiple choice questions Highlights and comments Embeds of other web 2.0 applications
Teachers assessing student learning	Teachers see live student answers in their grade dashboard Teachers can change any lesson live while students work Teachers can look at students annotations live in the lesson

All in all, DocentEDU is the tool that you can use in any curriculum area to help with high-quality, best practice, formative assessment.

Students and Interactive Reading

Tue, 05 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I really believe (as I’m sure you do as well) that the more students read, the more successful they will be. However, one of the things I always struggle with is how to get tangible evidence of my students actually interacting and thinking about text while they are reading it, not just afterwards. We all know we can put a book or an article or a poem in front of a kid, and it can look like they are reading. Heck, maybe we even made sure it was at their reading level and in their area of interest. However, I’m sure you’ve been there when after they’ve read you ask them a question about the text and you get a deer in headlights look back.

In order to comprehend text, students must be thinking and analyzing the text during reading. There are many different active reading strategies-you should find one that’s right for you and your students. However, once you find one, how can you effectively integrate it with technology? My solution for that is DocentEDU.

DocentEDU allows teachers to include open-answer questions, multiple-choice questions, highlights, comments, their own text, videos, interactive vocabulary, and an ever-expanding list of awesome interactive tools into almost anything online. This includes articles from newspapers, short stories you might find, any website with primary source information, and even published Google Docs for those oldie but goodie PDFs you have lying around. Then, DocentEDU allows students to then read that text you’ve assigned and follow your active reading instructions. Students can annotate the text (once again, pretty much anything on the internet) by leaving highlights, comments on the highlights, emoji responses, longer texts of their own, and even embed their own interactive content which they make/find. What’s even more amazing is that the teacher can see what the students have annotated LIVE as the students do it.

DocentEDU is also very flexible, so you can adapt its usage to any type of curricular area or pedagogical reading concept that you may already know and use!

This is such a great tool that really allows my students to dive deep into whatever they are reading. I recommend you try it today. Below are a couple of videos that show the ins and outs of this web tool.