McGraw Hill ConnectED Deep Dive
Hello Teachers!
Join us as we take a closer look into McGraw Hill’s program, ConnectED. The team discusses the different programs available through McGraw Hill as well as the accessibility features available on the ConnectED platform, how to access the resources for both teachers and students, and more! Stay tuned to the end for the answer to the question of the month from our March ChatGPT webinar!
This month’s webinar addresses:
- Defining different McGraw Hill platforms
- Getting started with ConnectED
- Accessibility of ConnectED
- Overview of Teacher and Student Editions
- Conclusion
Read the transcript below:
Agustina:
Hi, and welcome to this month’s webinar. We’re going to be doing a ConnectED deep dive. As always, I’m Agustina Bosio. I am a relationship general manager at EdTech. I’m joined by two other relationship general managers at EdTech, who used to be former teachers as well. Angel and Jessica, thank you for joining me. We’re going to be going over ConnectED in McGraw Hill, how to access the different resources, the different accessibility features that it has, and how to look at the account as a teacher versus a student.
Notes To Remember
First things first, we’re going to give a little Notes to Remember for you as the teacher. Then, we’re going to talk about the differences between the McGraw Hill platforms, the teacher platform walkthrough. Then, we’ll do a student platform walkthrough. And then, we got some questions the last webinar that we did. So, we’ll be answering some of those.
ConnectED
You need a teacher account into ConnectED in order for you and your students to be able to access the platform’s resources. If you don’t buy a teacher seat into the platform, then your students can still see the text, but it essentially is just an E-text. You don’t get any of the roster, the assignments, the resources, or any of the other bells and whistles that normal platforms would have.
Angel:
What are the platforms that are available with McGraw Hill? We’re going to focus mostly on ConnectED today, which is our K-12 platform that we work with. The second is Open Learning. That is a little less familiar and something that we’ll go over later. The ConnectED version that we are going through today, this is the newer version. There is an older version of this platform, but we’ll only be covering what the new version is now, since they’re phasing out that old one. There’s also just the Connect platform, and that is for higher education or college level courses. Many of our schools will only be working with the actual ConnectED platform.
First, I’m going to go over how to access your connected ebook. If your school is participating in the single sign-on, then the access is already located directly from your Shelfit shelf. As a teacher, you would want to just go ahead and log into your Shelfit account and click on your My Shelf. Once that is logged in and loaded to the shelf, then you’ll see the book covers for the different platforms or even ebooks that you have available. With this platform, once you click on your book cover, it is going to automatically log you into your teacher account on ConnectED. Now, if you are not connected through the SSO, then you would need to log in using your username and password, which will be located on your shelf. This is the same for both the teacher edition or the student edition. You’ll just have the edition that is applicable to your type of an account.
Accessibility & Features
Jessica:
Now, we’re going to talk about the accessibility features that are in the ebook. For example, I’ll just start at the very top up here. Just really quick, some tools that you can use within. These three A’s right here, you’ll see that there’s a smaller one, a medium-sized one, a bigger one. All this does is just change the font size of the text, making it maybe easier to see if you get to the biggest one. The next thing you’ll see is this little headphone looking picture. What that does is it’s a read aloud feature that you can definitely now listen to the text being read to you.
This little printer image is to either print the current page or you can print all pages. So, you can print the pages out. Maybe if you are wanting the students to highlight, you can get those printed out. If you are okay with the students just highlighting within the text, there’s actually a highlighting button right here, this little pen and paper image. So then if you scroll down and highlight a section, it will highlight all of it with that certain yellow.
A way to go to different chapters within the text up here where you see that you’re on chapter 21, it’ll give you the title, the chapter number. If you click on that, it’ll actually give you all of the chapters that you can go ahead and just click one and go to the chapter you’re looking for, and it’ll take you right there. When you click on the chapter, it actually starts you in the chapter opener. The chapter opener is just opening up to the chapter, maybe a little bit what it’s going to be about or just starting the chapter. It will be where the essential questions are located. So, thinking about what they’re reading in that text.
The next thing that you will see is up here, you’ll actually see some other things that could be clicked on. So, place and time, lesson one, lesson two, lesson three, skill builder, primary sources, and assessment. Within this chapter, you can go ahead and click through these things. The place and time will give you really just the place and time of what you’re going to be reading about in this text, for example. This is a world history text. So, this might look different than maybe an English Arts text. But because this is a World History text, that place and time is important in this subject.
Then, you’ll go ahead and also you’ll see the different lessons within the text. Each lesson is going to have something different and it’s going to be focused on a different maybe guiding question or different comprehension ideas. And then within the lesson, you’ll see the reading and you’ll be able to go to the different page numbers. Down here, you’ll see the page numbers and you can go to the next page. Within some of the pages, there are some reading progress checks. So, some comprehension questions that could be answered.
At the very bottom of that, there’s a little “R” after all of the page numbers. The “R” takes you to some comprehension questions again. So, it may ask about vocabulary, using your notes, guiding questions, writing activity, and then the save button to save all of that. At the very bottom also, you’ll see that you can read this in Spanish as well. Once you click on this, it’ll actually open up the reading in the Spanish language that you can go ahead and read that page in Spanish. That is for all of the pages as well. On the right, you will see that there are lesson resources, and that’s going to be some videos, some images that just help understand what they’re reading a little bit better.
At the top, there is something that says vocabulary and reading strategies. The vocabulary is just pointing out what the vocabulary is within this chapter and what the vocabulary words are. It’s not going to define it for you. That’s something that the students can hopefully define on their own after reading the text, or there is a glossary feature up here. This glossary feature will show you the glossary of the whole book from A to Z. So, of all the words and their definitions. That’s another place that students can go to understand the vocabulary.
Next to the vocabulary, there is reading strategies. This reading strategies is just pointing out what comprehension skill or activity that they are working on for this chapter or this lesson. For example, this one is classifying. They would have some kind of graphic organizer that can be used to work on this comprehension skill. And then to open this in the new window, you would just need to click on the image and the students can write in it and take notes in it and use it for what it’s there for. All of these things are included in each of the lessons. So, lesson two would have maybe a different reading strategy, different vocabulary.
There’s also something that would show the state’s standards sometimes, and this would just show what standards are being used or are being taught in this chapter or in this lesson. There’s also the skill builder. The skill builder is just talking about what skill we’ll be working on for this chapter. Again, this skill builder would be analyzing historical evidence, and it would be different for each chapter. Maybe, some would be similar, but they probably would be different for each chapter. And then the primary sources, it looks like it’s just the vocabulary and primary sources that are used within the text.
The assessment, this would be an assessment after reading the chapter to show that they comprehended everything they’re reading, talk about vocabulary. Again, like a way to test if they really understood what they read. There is going to be multiple pages. So there’s, in this one, five pages. On each page, students would need to click save to save their answers. The last thing I’m going to talk about today, up here, there’s some other little features. Like I said, the glossary will take them to the vocabulary words and definitions.
This little part right here that says my notes, this is a way for students to take notes while they’re reading, jot down ideas, jot down some important information they got from the reading. This atlas, it’s just a place where they store a bunch of maps to help maybe understand, especially in this world history book. Again, this might not be in all eBooks because it might be different for an English Language Arts book than a world history book. You might not need the maps.
Teacher Edition Resources
Agustina Bosio:
Now, we’re going to be talking about all of the resources under the teacher edition in the teacher’s account of the platform. In order to reach the teacher edition of the platform, you go to where it says teacher edition. You can click on either the title or the actual image. In here, the first thing that I’m going to be talking about is the lesson plans. Once you click into lesson plans, you have all of the actual lesson plans broken down by chapter. You have them as standards. You have the chapter resources at a glance.
You have something called study smart, which I’ll talk about in a second. You have the different lessons. You have the chapter wrap up, anything for intervention and remediation, which we always need for some of our students, and then we always need the gifted and talented for some of our students as well, and then strategies for differentiated instruction. McGraw Hill actually has a lot of different teaching styles that you can incorporate just in their platform alone.
Now, to get back to the page that you just saw, you just have to click on the actual title. So, world history and geography in this case, and that’ll bring you back to the main page. Another thing that you get from this lesson plans page is the actual calendar of your activities. You can see anything that you’ve scheduled, any assignments due, that smart book again that we’ll talk about. You have pretty much everything in this first main page that you open up.
Now, to get into the teacher’s guide again, you can select the chapter and then you can select the actual resource that you’re looking for. So, if we go to, let’s say, chapter resources at a glance and you click open, it will bring you to essentially the page that we clicked on when we clicked lesson plans, but it’ll be just that first chapters, or in this case, the 21st chapter. It will give you all of those resources including your answer keys, and then for more resources, you can explore the resource library down here.
Now, under here, we are going to be talking about study smart. It’s also the smart book that you see over here. If you click into study smart, you will get, in this case, it’s the Florida edition of this text. You have the student edition and you have the teacher’s annotated edition. If you click on the teacher annotated edition, it will bring you to a PDF overview of the text. This will show you the entire book’s worth of study smart, and you have an option in the resource tab to go chapter by chapter.
Let’s pick a page at random. So, this will give you the annotated teacher’s edition. Anything on the student’s edition, that looks exactly like this, but these blue answers are obviously not going to be there on the student edition. So, you can assign this to students. And then you have your answer key right here. It’s got some graphic organizers for you and it has some benchmark note cards. In order for you to do some check for understanding, your students will also see this and they can make sure they know this information before they move forward.
Now, as I said, you have your answer keys available as a teacher. You have the study smart answer key available here in the annotated edition. You also have the answer key under the actual chapter if you are looking here. So, answer keys are included here for all chapter and level lessons, worksheets, and activities. You can also see the student responses to the guided questions that they answer in their textbook. You can see that in your student edition of the book. It’s just annotated on the side for you.
Now, moving on from lesson plans, we’re going to go to assess. Now, in the assessments, you have to create a test. This is where all of your online assessments are going to be. This is also where your grade book is going to be. If you have multiple classes, you have a dropdown menu here, and then you can click on it to get through your different classes. Here, you have your assigned tests and then you have your own test library.
In order to have the test items added from the test bank on McGraw Hill, which are available in Spanish as well for those ELL students, you do have to create a new test first. So, you create a test, then you add the test items from the test banks that you want. Now, one thing to note in the grade book and for these tests is that there are no grade weights available through ConnectED.
Angel:
Now, we’re going to go over the resources that are available with your teacher’s edition. You’ll want to click on this resources button and you have the ability to search through your lessons, either through your different chapters. It’s broken down in chunks by chapter, and then once you’ve brought up that chunk, then you would go into those chapters. It will have those resources on the right for you available, or you could go through keyword search and it has a list of resource tags that you can go through or your resource type. However, I know as a teacher, I would typically go through units and chapters. So, I personally would probably go through the lesson search just because it’s all organized in a viewable manner on your right.
With each of these, there are different tools that are available. You can favorite a resource. That’s going to be by clicking the star. You can take notes on the resource as well. So, jot that down in here and it would be available at a later time. Once you click okay, it’s going to be there every time that you go in. Next is the tools button. Once you click on the tools, it will open up into a menu. Once you click on tools and you click on open this resource, that will open in a new tab for you. You can also view details, the standards that are available or that it covers with that resource. You can assign the resource to the students by clicking assign this resource, and you can also share in Google Classroom if you are a Google Classroom school.
Next, we have the answer keys for the study smart information that Agustina had gone over. That will also open in a new window when you click on it. Once you click on it from this location, that is going to be based on the chapter that you are in and the resource that you clicked on. There are also printable study guides that when you click on that, will open in a new tab as well. It just gives resources that are available for your students to be able to organize their thoughts. This is a great resource for them and it’s already filled out. There are also hands-on activities. There are vocabulary worksheets as well. This is an example of the vocabulary activity for this chapter.
As before, there is a glossary that is also multilingual and available for students that will open in a new window when you click on it, and assessments that are available as well that are printable. An example of an assessment. Now, this is able to be done digitally or printed. Next, we’re going to go over the manage and assign. You can view any recently assigned courses here under the assignment name. It will give you the date that it was created as well as the due date and down below, it will tell you your student class list. There is a calendar that would have anything that is scheduled either for today’s class or as today’s due date, and you are able to send messages through to your students from this tab.
Finally, under smart book, you will be able to see any previously assigned assignments and the date that they were started and due and its current status. If there is anything that is not already past due and is open, it would say open or available. This is also where you would add an assignment by clicking add assignment. That would take you to a new tab and you can click on new assignment there. Select the chapter that you would like to create an assignment for. That will bring up lessons that are available. There are options underneath once you click in the lesson, and you can select for it to be over just portions of that lesson or certain concepts. That will give you an overview once you click on that.
You can see a sample question by clicking on preview or sample question. On the right, it would tell you if you did select all of these checked, how long it would approximate that your students would take to complete that. If you don’t have that much time and you do not want to individually select which ones you would like to test on, you can adjust the time setting. If you notice on the left, as I am reducing time, it’s reducing the concepts that it’s including in that. That’s going to vary based on the chapter and the concepts that are covered in the chapter.
Now, if you would like to, you can also click on the previous assignments. That will give you a student report, and if you click on the individual student, it will take you into that student, tell you how much time that student spent on the assignment. It gives them a confidence rating, based on the amount of time that it took them to answer a question, and it also goes over the concepts that were covered in that assignment. You can also go into a class report. That would give you a summary on the entire class. 22% of this were considered overconfident, 50% were knowledgeable, 24% uncertain. I mean, I think that that follows a pretty good bell curve.
Student Edition Resources
Jessica:
We are going to actually go ahead and now take a look at what it would look like in a student’s view and what their resources would include. Similar to how you saw the dashboard and the teacher’s edition view, you’ll see it’ll look very similar in the student’s edition view. Down here, you’ll also see this family help, this study smart, primary sources, reading essentials and this by the way.
First, this family help is a way to look up tutorials to navigate the platform. It just helps understand the platform, understand how to get to things, like what we’re doing right now. There’s going to be some videos that will show you how to use the features and the resources and the tools. And then, this study smart is the chapter by chapter overview to help with understanding and studying. Again, this was seen in the teacher edition. It’s that same kind of thing.
The teacher edition, though, they had the answers. In the student edition, it will just have the overview and they’ll be able to work within it. The primary sources, again, just the sources and probably some things with the vocabulary. There’s many resources here and there’s going to be several pages, and again, you can search by the chapter or you can search by the keyword that has all of these tags here. That would be helpful to find the things that you’re looking for.
There’s also this reading essentials, and these are PDFs for each lesson with essential questions, vocabulary, learning activities, and checking for understanding. So, it’s a lot of just comprehension working on their comprehension of what they’ve read. When you open that up, it will take you to a PDF and the students can work on answering all these questions, again, focusing on that comprehension skill that they’re focusing on for that chapter or for that lesson.
Over here on this dashboard, you’ll see a to-do list. As you can see right now, it is blank because there are no assignments coming up. But if the student has assignments that they need to start working on, it will come over here in this to-do list. So, they can very easily access their assignments here and they can see what due date is coming up, what they need to work on now and get done. This is just the student main page, the dashboard, whichever you’d like to call it.
Within this, again, you’ll see the student edition, which we have already gone through, and that just takes you right to the ebook. Then next to that student edition, you’ll see skills builder. The skills builder has a bunch of PDF resources to help you build skills in. So, academic skills like proofreading, evaluating, inciting sources, analyzing the character, et cetera, all of those comprehension skills or things you need to work on while reading all of that.
There’s also in this specific book geography skills. So, this would include some maps and PDFs to help them locate and get their geography skills really working and improving. There’s also research and writing skills, and this will include some PDFs or some work on outlining, identifying main ideas and details, and analyzing documents. These will just help a student understand how to do these things. So, this one would help a student how to use what you find on the internet.
The last thing is building projects and presentation skills. A lot of students don’t have a lot of opportunities to really work on projects or presentations and maybe it makes them nervous. So, this can maybe help them just get comfortable with it in how to make a good presentation, how to make a good project. The skills builder resource is really just helping them build the skills they need to be successful.
Next, we’re going to go into this test prep section. Within this test prep, there’s PDF lessons on test taking skills, again, skills they’re going to need to do well and to succeed on tests, and then there’s going to be just rubrics, PDFs that are of what is expected on the tests they’ll be taking. The next section is the resources section, and this is very similar to what you saw in the teacher edition in the view. So, I’m not going to go too much into it because it’s pretty much the same. The students can find the chapter within the lesson search. They can do the keyword search. Again, all tags and all these types help them navigate through it easier and find what they’re looking for.
Next tab that I’m going to go into is my assignments. This is not going to be seen in a teacher’s view because the teacher is going to be the one assigning. For the student, this is what they would see on their end. It’s just going to be their assignments that are coming up, their assignments that they’ve submitted, and any extra details. This is where they’re going to find their assignments, find what they’ve turned in, and continue working on them or be done with it.
The very last tab is assess. This, again, is going to be different from the teacher’s view because they don’t have what we see here in the student’s. It’s different because this is just where they find the assessments. They obviously can’t assign anything. They just see it. And so, this is where they’re going to find their assessments that they need to be working on. It will give the status, the due date, their score once they probably finish, and other options. That is all for the student edition’s side with all the resources and features within it.
Revisiting ChatGPT
Agustina Bosio:
That was our presentation on McGraw Hill’s ConnectED. Now, we’re going to move on to some questions that you guys had from the last webinar that we did on ChatGPT. If you want to go back and watch that, I will include the link in the next slide. The question that we had is from Patty Bowman at Prince of Peace Catholic School. The question was, “I just read through the ChatGPT presentation, but the fact that students must be 18 years or older did not come up. How would you address this?” That’s a really great point. ChatGPT, you do need to be 18 years or older to make an account on that website. There are a couple of ways that you can use ChatGPT with students who are under 18, and this may actually help you monitor the use of the software for any students that are over 18. So, just making sure that they’re using it responsibly and ethically.
In general, classrooms today either use Google programs, like Google Docs, or online programs that include a discussion or a forum section. Teachers could have students type their requests for ChatGPT into a Google Doc that is then shared with the teacher, or they can type their question into the online forum. When I was a teacher, we always used Google Docs. The students would type their essays in Google Docs, they would send it to me, I would revise and proofread. It was fifth grade. So, it was a little more hands-on. And then, I would send that essay back to the students. So, you can just do that for ChatGPT requests. The teacher can then paste that student’s request into ChatGPT and send back the response into the Google Doc or the forum or whatever you may use, so that the student can see what ChatGPT came up with.
This ensures that every student can use it, that they’re using it appropriately, and it prevents the teacher from having to collect a bunch of handwritten pieces of paper and then typing it up and still allows you to use that program. If you do have any students that are over 18, you can make them essentially the ChatGPT experts in your classroom and then have them help you with that process. So, they can also write in the forum those questions and answers to the students. I’m hoping that answers that question. It is a little bit of a workaround, but I think it would actually help make the use of the software a little bit more responsible in the classroom and you as the teacher gain more control over it.
As always, thank you for participating in our training. If you would like to view our other trainings or subscribe to future trainings, please visit our Teacher’s Corner. We now have a teacher corner email address. So, if you have any questions, comments, or feedback about this training, please email teachercorner@edtechsolutions.com, you can see it right here, and if you are comfortable with us sharing it in our next webinar, please include your name and your school’s name and let us know that you’re comfortable with it being answered in the next webinar and if not, we’ll just answer it directly through email back to you. Thank you so much, and we hope to see you for the next one.
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