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In this FTPL video I show you how simple it can be to insert images into a Google Slide deck, particularly using the inbuilt search function that highlights images labelled with permission to reuse with modification. For more FTPL videos click here.
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In this Flipped Teacher Professional Learning video, I demonstrate the import slides feature in GSlides. For more helpful FTPL videos, click here. In this Flipped Teacher Professional Learning video, I remind viewers of a feature that was quietly introduced to Google Classroom some time ago - the ability to group posts based on a topic tag. For more helpful FTPL videos, FTPL Videosclick here. In this Flipped Teacher Professional Learning video, I show you how to add columns in GSheets and then update your sum and average formulas. For more FTPL videos click here. In this Flipped Teacher Professional Learning video I show you one way of setting up your Google Form to e-mail the responses to designated e-mail addresses. For the full list of FTPL videos, please click here. In this form I explore how to set up branching in Google Forms. This function allows you to have different pathways and questions through a Form depending on the repondents answers to particular questions. If you have missed any of the videos in the FTPL series you can find them all here. In this Flipped Teacher Professional Learning video I show you how to access the add-on marketplace to find helpful tools for your GSuite apps. For the full list of FTPL videos, please click here. In this Flipped Teacher Professional Learning video I show you how to access the add-on marketplace to find helpful tools for your GSuite apps. For the full list of FTPL videos, please click here. A few weeks ago I was approached about delivering a presentation on flipped learning through a webinar to a school in Spain. Intrigued, I chatted over Skype with the school's Principal and agreed to provide a roughly thirty minute presentation outlining what flipped learning is, the research behind it, what it looks like in class and some ways of using it. There are a lot of areas I did not have time to go into during the presentation, and this has prompted me to put together some further resources covering those areas. For now, this week's Friday Freebie is the recording of the webinar. For the full list of Friday Freebies, click here.
Disclosure: My attendance at FutureSchools 2017 was through a media pass provided by the conference organisers.
After the lunch break, it was into the ClassTech conference stream to hear Blake Seuferten.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Education_Revolution talk about managing a large network and rolling out a school-wide Chromebook program. The number of schools that have implemented various laptop or tablet programs in a school-supplied, BYOD or BYOT context has increased significantly over the last decade as it has become more fashionable to do so, pushed in part by the drive for laptops through the Digital Education Revolution program. Blake spoke about his school's context, with a current enrollment of around 2100 students and 185 staff. Four years ago things at the school were going well with good NAPLAN and HSC results and so the decision was made that while things were great (echoes of Prakash's message) the next big change would be embarked upon, a school-wide roll-out Chromebooks,
Underpinning educational change management, from a teaching and learning perspective, should be pedagogy and the impact on students of the change. The schools had been using a particular model of laptop and had faced numerous reliability issues which resulted in significant downtime, negatively impacting students and after consideration of various options, Chromebooks were the option that was taken up and rolled out.
One of the considerations for the school was the ability for students to collaborate when using the laptop. For Blake, he clarified what he meant by saying "when I say collaborative I mean web ready because that's where most collaboration happens now."
Teacher self-efficacy is critical when it comes to gaining buy in for new learning tools or resources, especially when they are mandated from the school leadership. You can see from the above tweet that self-efficacy is fed in large part by the provision of professional development opportunities which need to include not only how to use the teaching and learning tool, but how to implement it pedagogically as they are two very different skills.
Blake spoke next about investing in something that will have an impact. For them, at that point, investing in the internet infrastructure in their school was, according to Blake, an easy decision to make as it would have a positive impact on the whole school. I have heard a number of schools indicate that part of the process of implementing any sort of school-wide laptop or device program has been investing in their internet infrastructure. It is important when looking at this to understand that coverage and density are two vastly different concepts. You can have fantastic coverage across a school network at any location with a device That is WiFi coverage. WiFi density, however, is the capability for a WiFi network to cope with a large number of users drawing upon its resources without a significant drop in performance. An example of this is the difference in the demands on the network before and after school when there are only staff onsite in comparison to during class time when you will have staff members as well as a large number of students drawing upon the network at the same time.
The Chromebooks are a prescribed item for students along with regular items like the school uniform. This keeps things consistent and reduces the pressures on the staff for managing devices and maintenance. it also reduces the pressure on staff who are still adapting to technology in their pedagogy. The device management license they have also allows them to hold operating system updates from pushing out to the fleet until the subsequent patch comes through that addresses any resultant instabilities or issues that may occur.
Prior to the decision being made to implement a Chromebook roll out, staff were surveyed about the types of teaching and learning activities that were being undertaken in classes. Blake said that when they looked at the data they could see that 99% of the tasks being completed in class either was already being achieved online, or could easily be achieved online. He did not give an indication as to what types of activities fell into the 1%, although I would not be surprised if practical tasks such as those found in PE, Science, TAS subjects, made up the bulk of that 1%. Another benefit in the school's view was that the Chromebooks were easily used offline. Any documents or emails sent while offline sync or send when the connection is re-established. It is worth nothing that you can change the settings within GDrive to make files available offline. This allows you to edit those files, which then re-sync when you are next connected Link available at the end of this article.
Blake brought up the topic of professional development again, speaking about the process they went through to ensure that teachers had the necessary skills to leverage the functionality of the Chromebooks in class. Part of that process entailed developing a list of basic skills that were seen as essential to using the laptops. Training resources were made available to staff and it was incumbent upon staff to access the learning that they needed to ensure they could do those tasks. Once they returned the document, signed off for each skill, the expectation was that they would then be able to complete those tasks and so I don't know how to do that was removed as an acceptable response when being asked to complete tasks.
To change the focus of the PD, the training resources spoke about the why of the skill, why you would need to be able to use it pedagogically, as much as the how of the skill. I believe this is an important issue and we should talk about the why more often when it comes to PD; not just the superficial why of accreditation or it's good for the students' learning, but the why of this is why you would want to use it in class as that in itself can create engagement with the learning task.
Blake's session was interesting and I particularly liked the focus on staff self-efficacy and providing professional development opportunities to improve that self-efficacy. For those who are interested, Blake has kindly made available the slide deck that he used for this presentation, which you can access here.
As always, thank you for reading. If you have missed any of the articles in the FutureSchools 2017 series, you can find them all here.
"We are constantly taking to each other about our students and moderating our grades because we plan together."
-Sally Wood and Simone Segat
Disclosure: My attendance at FutureSchools 2017 was under a media pass provided by the organisers.
After attending Melinda Cashen's presentation in the FutureLeaders stream, my original plan was to move to the ClassTech conference stream to hear Peter Tompkins speak about leveraging technology in mathematics and then the duo of Sally Wood and Simone Segat speak about team teaching and using ICT to enhance student learning. That was the plan, at any rate. Unfortunately, the timing on the day of talks between the FutureLeaders and ClassTech streams did not line up and I ended up missing all bar about five minutes of Peter Tompkins presentation. The little snippet that I did see, however, looked very interesting. One tweet stemming from Peter Tompkins' presentation
Sally and Simone began by talking about their close professional relationship and that although they do operate in a team-teaching context, they do still do a reasonable amount of teaching separately. I found this rather interesting as in my own team-teaching context, the only times we taught separately were when they were timetabled to be separate; firstly for their library session and secondly for the Relief from Face to Face (RFF, though I have heard it referred to as non-contact time in other states). Everything else we did essentially, as a single class group, which in our context with Stage One (Year One and Year Two combined) worked fantastically.
Sally and Simone began by speaking about growing up using Microsoft Word and Excel (I think that was actually anyone born prior to 2000?) and that the shift to cloud based systems, for them Google Suite, was a breath of fresh air because they no longer had to worry about picking up the correct USB, or wondering which version of a needed document they were about to open. I wholeheartedly agree. It was pointed out that there are other online platforms available, such as Office365 and OpenOffice, however, they have chosen to use GSuite. We next heard about the benefits of a cloud system for the students in terms of the ability for collaboration. There are, again, other platforms that allow this, but I do like the simplicity and ease of use of GDocs. There are a range of other benefits to a cloud-based system such as GSuite; autosave, retention of previous versions in the event of major issues, the ability to add multiple collaborators to a single doc and the fact that a document is always accessible. Sally and Simone said always accessible as long as you have internet access, however, you can access documents offline if you have set the document to be available offline in the settings. If you have never seen what a GDoc looks like when there are multiple people editing at the same time, watch the video below.
The audience were shown some videos that Sally and Simone had prepared demonstrating various aspects of GSuite that they utilise with their students, particularly around GClass. There are a number of ways to utilise GClass and we were told that they use it as a tool for disseminating learning content and tasks, an exit ticket system, and for setting reminders for students. There are so many other ways of using not only GClass but the rest of GSuite that they did not have time to go into. If you have not had much experience with GSuite I would recommend looking through the GSuite series on my FTPL Videos page.
Thank you for reading. If you have missed any of the articles in the FutureSchools 2017 series, you can find the other articles here. In this week's Friday Freebie, I offer a Google Form that you can utilise to allow Parents to request a meeting with their child's teacher. The question asking for the child's class can be modified to input the actual class names or teachers. This can then be utilised to generate e-mails to those teacher's automatically, or to the administration staff to forward on to the relevant teacher/s.
If you are not familiar with using GForms, or setting up e-mail notifications, please check the FTPL playlist dedicated to Google Suite by clicking here. For the full list of Friday Freebies, please click here. In this Flipped Teacher Professional Learning video, I show you how you can use Google Forms as a platform to allow parents to book in for Parent/Teacher Interviews, or for staff booking of breakout sessions during Professional Development sessions etc. There are of course many other uses, however, such as the booking of resources (school hall, playground space before or after school for sport team training for example), so this is not a definitive list. For more helpful FTPL videos, click here. In this Flipped Teacher Professional Learning video, I show how you can make files in GDrive available offline. This is great if you have shared resources with students who will need to access those resources at home or somewhere else that they may not have internet access. For the full list of FTPL videos, please click here. It has been a while since I have published an Flipped Teacher Professional Learning article. In today’s article, I demonstrate two ways of using Google Sheets to record and maintain student data for the purposes of comparison throughout the scholastic year. For the full list of FTPL videos, please click here. In this Flipped Teacher Professional Learning video, I show you how to access the responses from your GForms.
For the full list of FTPL videos please click here. In this episode of Flipped Teacher Professional Learning, I show you two ways to upload files to your GDrive account from your device. For the full list of FTPL articles, please click here. This video was captured during a Twitter chat that moved across to a GDoc and shows how it can be used by multiple people at once to collaboratively share ideas. For the full list of FTPL videos, please click here. “We need technology in every classroom and in every student and teacher’s hand, because it is the pen and paper of our time, and it is the lens through which we experience much of our world.” – Attributed to David Warlick This latest video takes you through the process of setting up Google Classroom on an iPad. Remember to watch, pause and rewind as much as you need to. “You are always a student, never a master. You have to keep moving forward.” – Attributed to Conrad Hall Today’s FTPL video is in response to a recent question from a colleague. She had finished watching the two videos on using GDocs in the classrooms (FTPL Five and Six) and wanted to know “how do I get the learning activities to my students from Google Docs?” If you have missed any of the previous videos in this series, please click here. “Once you stop learning, you start dying.” – Attributed to Alfred Einstein. This second session of FTPL demonstrates The primary method of accessing the suite of Google Apps for Education (GAFE) through the Department of Education Portal, as well as the secondary method, directly through Google Drive. For the full list of FTPL videos, please click here. “The best part of learning is sharing what you know.” – Attrbuted to Vaughn K. Lauer My regular readers would be aware that I am delivering profession development sessions to colleagues around the use of technology in the classroom. This afternoon will be the second session in this series, and will be focusing on developing a greater knowledge in using the Google Apps for Education (GAfE).
Last week, I introduced them to Google Apps for Education, and delivered the session via Google Classroom. This afternoon, I will be spending further time with them looking at ways that Google Drive can be used in conjunction with Google Docs, Google Sheets and Google Slides in the classroom, and as tools for collaboration. On that note, here are some ways that you can deploy Google Docs in the classroom.
Those are a few simple ways that Google Docs can be used. As always, thank you for reading, and I would like to hear from anyone with ideas on how you use Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Class or Drive in the classroom or for staff Professional Development. |
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