If you would like to know more, speak to any of the successful graduates of the program, Catherine Wooller, Raewyn Donnell, Sheela Shankar., Brigita Biondic, or Susana Tomaz,
Is upskilling on the agenda this year? It's not too late - the November intake for the Mindlab Post Graduate Certificate in Applied Practice (Digital and Collaborative Learning) is now taking applications. Here's everything you need to know: https://applynow.unitec.ac.nz/
If you would like to know more, speak to any of the successful graduates of the program, Catherine Wooller, Raewyn Donnell, Sheela Shankar., Brigita Biondic, or Susana Tomaz,
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This is a very interesting read about the governments newest announcement of the Communities of Online Learning. Don't forget to log this as PD in your appraisal document.
So one of the recent google classroom updates is the ability to invite parents to see what their daughters are doing on google classroom. It enables them to see daily and weekly summaries of what their child has accomplished, and view any class announcements. Below is an example of the summary a parent would receive. It shows work that is incomplete and what work is coming up that has already been set by a teacher. It also shows what work has been completed for each class during the week.
So here's the thing, do we want to go down this road? I'm a little conflicted on this one. On one hand I believe students need to learn to be responsible for completing their work, for which there are natural consequences if they don't. In other words, they won't understand concepts they need to and this could of course affect them come test/exam/assignment time. However on the flip side it might be useful for parents to see what their daughters are doing and support them in making good time management choices. And of course it could pre-empt those discussions during parent teacher interviews of parents saying that their daughters never seem to have any homework (which is often not actually the case!!!) It would obviously give parents an insight into how education has changed and how students now have a variety of tools at their disposal to help them. In addition to showing them just how much work NCEA requires students to do!! In many ways our NZ Curriculum and indeed the Ministry of Education want us to create strong school to home communication and relationships. Would this feature enable us to do this better? Then begs the question would parents even want it? Would every teacher want to do it? Or should we only do it for parents whose daughers are struggling? Lots of unanswered questions! So I thought it time to get you all involved in thinking about and commenting on this. I encourage you to reply to this post with your thoughts on this matter. Should we think about using this feature or not? Please get involved in the conversation, a collaborative discussion on this ethical decision is quite important. This excellent post by Richard shares great tips on tools available for helping to achieve this task. Creating 'Book Trailers' can also be used for sharing a variety of other knowledge in many subjects. Summarising a topic, or subject, or even just a chapter in a book (perhaps significant chapters in a book, movie etc that they have read), summarising events in history, or even describing the significance of a place (geography, outdoor education etc).
This is often best set up as a collaborative group task, to enable students to pool their knowledge of the topic and also of tech tools they can use to accomplish the task. A task such as this also provides excellent opportunities for students to develop their creativity and communication skills. Students are very well schooled on movies, TV programs and the like (outside of school as well as in) and so creating a movie trailer provides great links between prior knowledge they have of what looks good on screen and new knowledge that they may need to develop in order to make that occur in their own movies. On a slightly different tangent but just as important, tasks like this are a fantastic way for teachers to highlight the importance of copyright free images and music etc. By providing some links to students of where they can access free to use images and music, we support them in making good decisions on digital literacy. As an added bonus, student created movies can later be used by teachers to teach future students! Sometimes what the students create is well beyond what we thought they were capable of. Tools mentioned in his post are: PhotosforClass.com - for images with Creative Commons license (free) Pixabay - for images with Creative Commons license (free) Stupeflix, Adobe Spark, WeVideo, and iMovie - Audio recordings Free Music Archive - Free music archive FMA- Free music archive Sound Bible - free sound clips, sound effects, and sound bites. Adobe Spark and Stupeflix - Video editing software Please see Richards posts for instructional videos on how to use some of these tools, or for more information on how to create Book Trailers. It is also handy to provide links to some of these videos to your students when they are completing this task so that they have some resources to visit to help them out. If you have done a task like this or do one in the future, please let me know as I would love to share student work (with their permission of course.)
Sometimes you just don't want the hassle of going into Kamar to find out a students email address, this can be a long process if you don't have Kamar open already. I find using my school gmail a quick and easy way to communicate with my students. Of course if you have the students in your google classrooms, you can use the Students tab to send them emails as well. This method is quicker than that still, so it is what I now do when needed.
This will be an absolute game changer in our teaching programs. Google's latest update will soon allow students and teachers using the google apps on a MOBILE DEVICE (Ipad and Android tablet apps) to annotate, highlight, and draw freehand into a google doc. So what does this actually mean? Well, basically students can draw diagrams freehand into a google doc. Teachers will also be able to write and draw freehand on those student docs (exactly in the same way as you would on a piece of work on paper.)
The inability to draw diagrams and pictures that can't easily be created through adding shapes has held google apps back for some subjects. This change will allow students to not just create diagrams, complete brainstorms and in general take hand written notes if they chose but it may also help those subjects like Science and Maths that use subscripts and superscripts in equations. Students will also be able to show their workings for mathematical and science equations. This is a very similar type of software that will most likely be seen in some external digital examinations in coming years (starting for some subjects in 2018 - majority by 2020). So it is great for our students to be able to become familiar with this style of working prior to digital examinations. While at this stage it is only available to those on mobile devices and not laptops, I am sure google will be working hard on rolling it out on laptops as well. The gif (animated image) below shows this in action through a google classroom assignment. |
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AuthorPlease be aware these are links to other people's work. Most blog entries are written by me unless stated otherwise. I am happy to share all my ideas. |