 Hello, I am Bo Grzeski. Today we'll be exploring Verso Learning. It's an app and a website that can be used for inquiry and providing student anonymity. Before we get started, don't forget to subscribe and hit that bell and enable notifications for our channel by clicking our logo during the video. Also, leave us a comment or check out our related videos by clicking the pop-up cards in the upper right hand corner. Without further ado, we have a very special guest star, Ms. Jeanie Daly for this episode, the Middle High School Learning Specialist for Social Studies, showing us how she uses Verso Learning. Let's check out what Jeanie has to say about Verso. Good morning everyone. If you are listening to this screencast, you have expressed some sort of interest or curiosity about Verso. And Verso is one of my favorite tools for engaging kids in a conversation about an academic topic that the teacher feels it's important to assign. So anyway, I'm going to take you on a quick tour of Verso. Talk a little bit about the features. My name is Jeanie Daly. In case you don't know me, I am the Social Studies Learning Specialist for the district. And we have used Verso in the middle school and social studies for a number of years now. And it's just a great tool for collaboration. So I am going to log in. If you are interested in using Verso, I can do a separate screencast that will show you exactly how to sign up and add some of the information that will tie you to the greatest number of people and resources inside Verso. So anyway, I'm going to log in. And this is what you'll see is the home screen. And all of your options reside off of this left-hand side. I'm going to share with you some of the some of the things that you'll be using. You'll want to create a class. And I'm not sure. Oh, there you go. You click on that button and you create a class. If you want to join a class, then you will use the code that's generated when you create a class. You'll simply have students put that code in and in their part of the class. And so that's the very first thing that you do is create that class. But I'll just share with you these are the classes that I've created. And so if I want to put a lesson in these classes, let's say I want to share with the learning specialist, a lesson that I think is really cool, then I can add it to that class. But mostly I'm going to play around, probably mostly I'm going to play around with what's already in the library. And if you join us in the Verso community, you'll see that there's a tremendous amount of material already there. And so one of the first things that I would do is just see what's out there before I made a decision to create my own activity. So let's just, you know, you can take a look at, you know, some of the topics that are available in this library. This is not just a social studies tool, it is a tool for thinking. And that's one of the things I want to encourage you to explore is the opportunity that we have through Verso to really exchange ideas, particularly students who may not be willing to share in a class because they're afraid of making a mistake or they're uncertain about a topic or, you know, whatever is keeping them from finding their voice. And so this tool allows them to talk to each other in a fashion that I think helps promote their thinking and their growth. So I'm just going to click on US history because at heart I am a US history teacher. And I see all the lessons that are available to me. This is their global library. These are all lessons that are available to me right here. And Verso has taken all of the lessons or most of the lessons from reading like a historian out of the Stanford education group and place them in here. So if I am, if I want to work on periodization with my students, here's a lesson right here that might be useful for me as a classroom teacher. And so let me just click on one just as an example. Here's one that focuses on contextualization. And these are imperialization. And this is the lesson that has been created. And when you create your lesson, you'll receive a template that will take you through these. You'll identify what your learning objective is. You'll identify how you want students to respond. And then what parameters will be in place when students actually do engage in answering that question. And then what we've tried to do in the middle school, and I suggest high school students can use sentence starters or model responses just as much as middle school students can. What we've created are some ways in which you can get students to start the conversation and answer the prompt in an academic way and in a correct way too. And then there's a place in the template that you can identify the contextual vocabulary, the tier three vocabulary that students should have in a response. And then some of the academic vocabulary that students should include in the response. We always recommend, you know, that particularly with the academic vocabulary that, you know, they focus on, if they're not a skilled writer, they focus on, you know, use of four or five of the academic terms that are listed there. That would be great. And then you copy the activity. And then you place that activity in one of your classes. You know, I'm going to place this activity in high school. Learning specialists, you know, you would have, if you have four classes, three classes, you would give those classes a name. And you would place that in that class. And so students will have joined your class because you gave them that unique code. And once they access that class, they will have that activity right there. And so I copy it. And you see right over here the activity is copied. Um, I am going to attempt to show you what response.