[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Emma,

Thank you for your post and sharing your SETT plan with us. The SETT plan allows you to be really specific and think critically about what exactly you will need for a particular child. You have been able to identify a specific learning focus – to construct a sentence asking for something, using the digital device. This learning focus takes the child’s specific needs, as well as the classroom environment that they are learning in. It is fantastic that the course content and discussion forums have highlighted some additional tools which you may find useful.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Emma,

Welcome to the course! We hope that you will be able to take away some useful nuggets to use in your teaching over the coming year. I love the way you have placed an increased emphasis on the use of digital technologies, and how it is being used to forge really strong links between school and home. Given the setting you teach in, it is clear that you have a great deal of knowledge and experience with assistive technologies. However, as you have said, the lack of training can be extremely frustrating. As educators, you find yourself trialling different apps and programmes with little guidance, meaning the experience of children will vary considerably from school to school.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Myriam,

Thank you for your post. An online LMS works so well in larger schools, where there are multiple classes at each stream. Teachers can share resources and collaborate with one another in real time. If all classes are doing this, there will be a considerable bank of resources for teachers to inherit when they move class levels. The challenge you have outlined is one that we have also had some experience with – to get around this, all classes were set up by a school administrator with the name of the teacher included in the name line. This ensured that there was no confusion when assignments were being sent from third-party sites such as WordWall and EdPuzzle.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Katie,

Welcome to the course! Applied Digital Skills is a real hidden gem within the Google Workspace toolkit. I like the particular lesson you have chosen, as it highlights another use of Google Drawings. I have used Drawings so much over the past year to create classroom posters, drag and drop activities, labelling activities and much more. It’s a tool that has huge scope for creating more interactive content for children to engage with. Drawings allows children to showcase creativity – one activity I assigned this year was to create a poster to advertise the novel ‘Holes’, and it really is amazing to see what the children are capable of coming up with.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Elaine,

Thank you for your post and for sharing your notebook with us. It is such a powerful tool and is so useful for teachers. It is especially useful for classroom teachers, as a notebook can be reused each year (with minor revisions). It may be slightly more difficult in SET if you are working with different children, but many of the same principles will apply. As you have mentioned, it really is an infinite canvas, with revisions and improvements coming each year. The ability to add audio feedback onto a child’s notebook is another noteworthy feature.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Myriam,

Welcome to the course and thanks for sharing your Sway with us. I really like the multi-modal approach that you used. The incorporation of video, images and text affords more opportunities for children to access the content. It is such a useful tool for creating engaging and interactive content. Children can really show their creative side when they are making their own Sway’s. However, I have found that it’s important that clear guidance is provided on the content that is expected in the Sway (as time can often be spent trying to experiment with different features rather than getting down to the core of the task).

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Melissa,

Thank you for your post and for contributing your Sway and Form. Your Form showcases mastery of the common skills needed to make a self-correcting Form, with point values assigned and questions marked as compulsory. Sway is an excellent classroom tool, and it can afford students the opportunity to demonstrate their creativity, once a basic level of computer literacy has been developed. I really like the potential uses of Forms you have outlined – exit tickets are something I frequently use and find them extremely useful in informing future learning experiences.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Elaine,

You may be unable to locate the ‘record’ function if you are using a different version of PowerPoint. Within the most recent 365 version, you should be able to find it on the menu after you click ‘slideshow’. Teams and 365 in general are very powerful learning tools, and are certainly more geared towards senior primary classes and secondary school. The work you are doing and ideas you have will certainly stand them in good stead. The potential for teamwork and collaboration for school planning and administration with Teams is endless, and I can see more schools moving in this direction over the coming years.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Sharon,

There is huge scope within the Microsoft suite of resources for assisting pupils with additional needs. I love using the lens tool when on holidays to translate road signs, menus, etc. which proves its use in all settings. I really like the idea of being able to integrate it in a special class setting, by producing photographs that may prepare these pupils for a trip/outing. The Dictate feature is of great help to students who have writing difficulties, and really helps remove the stigma and negative connotations they may have with writing. It’s brilliant that you are able to picture some students that may work well with these tools.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Megan,

Thank you for sharing your sample notebook on Australia. I really like the way you have laid it out, and the variety that is included. There is so much scope for integrating this with Teams and ‘sending’ it to pupils. You will then have this as your ‘core’ notebook and things can be added as they arise to help you with your planning for the following year. The joy of using a tool like this is that once the work has been done once, there is no need for any extra work to be done in subsequent years. It affords you, as teacher, so much scope in your approach. You could decide to focus on collaboration (as you’ve indicated), or assign individual-based work.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Laura,

Thank you for your post. I also feel very strongly about the value and potential for Google Classroom within a flipped classroom approach. The use of rubrics is something I am a big fan of – sharing the success criteria with students is very effective at focussing them on what is expected within the task – this may take a couple of goes (but in the end, they really get into the swing of it and find them very useful). From a teachers point of view, Google Classroom is an ideal ‘one stop shop’. Having everything in the one place allows you to direct pupils to relevant websites and resources and removes the worry about children browsing freely on the internet.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Laura,

Welcome to the course. The short course n creating a photo journal is an excellent choice. The beauty of the Google Workspace apps is that the pupil themselves can choose whether the work they have completed should be shared with a wider audience or kept personal. Having this knowledge before they start a task can often lead to them ‘freeing up’ and expressing themselves clearly, as they view it as a safe space. The task can be manipulated to suit whatever you are doing and can focus on recall of personal events, or be a collaborative endeavour that focuses on some element of school life.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Noirin,

Welcome to the course and thank you for your comprehensive post. It is very clever to attempt to map the course content to some of the students you have worked with, or will work with in the coming year. The Microsoft Education Centre is an excellent resource and one which is best kept at the front of our bookmarks – every time I visit the site, there is something new that I pick up. As you have said, using the DLF enables a school to create that ‘shared vision’ of what they want to achieve with the technology and the methods they will use in order to meet the needs of all learners.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Rioghnach,

Welcome to the course and thank you for your post. The storage and organisation of files within Google Drive is something which can either cause immense frustration or make your workflow much easier. Setting up a system from the start is an excellent idea and hopefully this short applied digital skills course will help you. The 100 TB organisation limit essentially means that users within an organisation will have unlimited storage. ‘Drive for Desktop’ (which can be downloaded under the settings wheel with Drive on the Chrome browser) has been a game-changer for me. I have this downloaded on my work and personal laptops and can save files seamlessly without the need to move them from documents to Drive on the web browser. It essentially appears as an extra folder on your desktop. You can also add any shared school drives in this way too.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Aoife,

Thank you for your post. Like you have said, when designing and implementing a SETT plan, it is crucial that all personnel working with the child are involved. The same could be said for drawing up a School Support Plan. Indeed, it may also be useful to get the views of the pupil themselves, especially if they are in a senior class. From sharing your plan, it is clear to see that the students’ needs are very much fitting in with the different tools suggested at all three levels, e.g. pencil grips for handwriting difficulties, Chromebook access for developing touch typing, voice recorder and Dictate for spelling difficulties.

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