[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Carina,

Thank you for your detailed post and for the many fascinating insights you have shared. Your experience as a special class teacher will be very useful to others doing this course. In this setting, the work is so varied and you have mentioned the huge variance in the difficulty of work you will be assigning. Digital technologies and the Office 365 suite are certainly something that can help lessen the load for you. The use of this platform could be transformative for home-school links. As you mentioned, Sway could be a way of documenting things in your class for newsletters. Social stories and other related content could also be shared for parents to review at home, etc.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Mary,

I love the idea of using the lectern for pupils to present from. It’s a skill that is so difficult, and is something hat many adults find daunting. Having practice at an early age is a huge benefit to the children. You often find that the most outgoing and sociable child can find it difficult to get up and present to their peers. Very often eye contact and enunciation of voices is severely lacking. The incorporation of digital tools, especially within the ‘Speaker Coach’ rehearsal tool within PowerPoint. Perhaps it may be an idea for some children to practice recording their presentations at home and playing them to the class as a scaffold.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Deborah,

From your post, I can see that you are clearly aware of the benefits of using an online learning platform such as Teams. While there is some work and upskilling to be done in the early stages, it certainly pays off further down the road. Content, resources and assessments can be re-used and shared from year to year. It’s possible to share videos of you completing maths sums for the children to follow at home. It opens up a huge amount of new opportunities for pupils to showcase their learning. We are all aware that different children perform and express themselves better through different modes of language – the use of online platforms allows all students to express themselves through a medium that suits their strengths. It gives us far more options than the simple pen and paper.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Catherine,

I am particularly interested with your comment regarding the completion of workbooks and textbooks. Like most other schools I’m sure, we have the exact same problem. It is very easy to become slaves to textbooks. However, this does deprive children of a range of rich learning experiences that they could have.

In terms of Gaeilge, I have made a concerted effort to try to move our school away from a specific textbook or programme towards a more bespoke plan, that focuses on specific vocabulary, sentences, questions for each class level, as well as the use of levelled readers and a PDST-designed grammar plan. While this all sounds great, it is very difficult to get many to part with ‘Bua na Cainte’, ‘Abair Liom’, etc.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Elaine,

You have listed a number of benefits around the use of Google Slides in the classroom. The Chrome extension called ‘123Apps’ is a great one to download. This allows you to record audio, download as an MP3 file and attach it to different slides. It could be particularly useful for recording reading or phrases ‘as Gaeilge’, or if they were describing the content of the slide. Indeed, an assignment on Google classroom could simply be to record an audio file – given that 123Apps downloads directly as an MP3 file, it could be uploaded to the classwork section of the assignment.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Margaret,

Collaboration is such an important 21st century skill. However, I fell the way the term is often used in schools is anything but 21st century. Often, activities such as ‘comhrá beirte’ and ‘think-pair-share’ are put down as collaborative activities. This is surface level collaboration at best.

The way you have described using Teams is exactly the way in which we should be promoting the 21st century skills. It gives the students real ownership of their learning tasks, and forces a deeper level of skilled communication and collaboration. The children simply have to do this to get their project finished and it is far more self-directed and organic (all of which prepares them for life outside school).

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Elaine,

Forms is an excellent assessment tool and really is one of my ‘go to’ tools. I really like the way you can add images, video and audio into the questions and create a multimodal assessment if required. Unfortunately the quiz you have uploaded is not open for public viewing. This can be altered by changing the settings within the Form and unticking the ‘only share with others in your organisation’ box.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Catherine,

Thank you for your post and for your interaction throughout the course. You have made a good point around how the response to both Covid lockdowns has increased the use of various LMS that now allow for a ‘blended’ approach. It has also heightened awareness of the different ways in which children can respond to activities – allowing children to respond orally to tasks is a real bonus for children with literacy difficulties.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Mary,

I can totally relate to your situation in terms of trying to break down the reluctance of others in this field. A few years ago, we worked on coming up with one topic per term that could be covered using our chosen digital technologies. We demonstrated how the relevant apps/sites were to be used and allowed teachers to experiment for the other weeks. Each June, the class teachers add one more topic for each term. This has created a bank of topics (a digital curriculum of sorts) that are covered each year. It has made the integration and use of technology much more manageable and has passed some responsibility and ownership over to teachers when they know they will be contributing something extra to this library each year. While it’s not perfect, it has helped to bring those less willing along.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Jane,

One Note really is a fantastic tool. In terms of comparing Google Workspace and Office 365, there is little difference in the functionality of most apps (e.g. Docs v Word, Slides v PowerPoint). However, OneNote is something that Google have yet to find a competitor for and gives Microsoft a huge advantage. You have mentioned a number of ways in which it could be incorporated into staff planning. In addition to this, uploading class content, exemplars and videos can be hugely beneficial for students to refresh their learning, and also for teachers when they cover a similar topic in subsequent years.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Amanda,

Thanks for your contribution. We found ourselves in a very similar position in my school a few years ago. As a staff, we were engaging somewhat with the email and cloud storage functions of our platform, but it was having very little impact in terms of teaching and learning in the school. We moved to try to incorporate it into classroom practice and have children become ‘creators’ as opposed to ‘consumers’. There were plenty of bumps on the road, but we are moving towards a point where these practices are becoming more embedded. With using Office 365 in your school, start small and spread the success stories to others – it won’t be long before people want to come on board if it’s going to make their workload lighter.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Elaine,

You have shown great insight and inventiveness to integrate the ‘Sites’ app into this activity. This will allow for the development of multiple 21st century skills. Whilst collaboration may be your central focus, I can see ‘skilled communication’ also being crucial as children make decisions on what content makes the cut for the final site.

I think ‘Sites’ would be a brilliant platform for exploring the Olympic host city activity – a site could be created for each candidate with different tabs outlining the reasons why it should win the vote, explaining the amenities, transport links, etc.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Greg,

Thanks for sharing this resource. I have had a look and I am very impressed. In our school, we have a ‘Scratch Jr’ manual that teachers can use to walk the children through each of the characters, backgrounds, moves, etc. that can be completed. However, this can often be the height of the interaction with Scratch. The fact that this resource gives a ‘project’ type activity allows the children the opportunity to showcase a final product, and could be a great follow-on to what we currently use. This would tie in neatly with Google’s ‘CS First’ programme which can be used for coding in the upper primary/secondary classrooms.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Elaine,

Your post has listed a myriad of reasons why the Google Workspace tools are ideal for use in a classroom context. Forms is a wonderful tool for formative assessment, and once a quiz/assessment has been created once it can be used over and over. Building a bank of assessments within the school and collaborating in this way can make life so much easier for teachers when they move class levels. I also like to use Forms as an ‘exit ticket’ to some lessons. Here, the students will respond to a one-question survey about how they found the lesson. The feedback gather allows me to plan whether I can continue as planned, or if I need to revisit something in particular. Perhaps this is something you could try out next year to see how it works?

The ability to attach specific pre0recorded instructions, links to relevant sites, video tutorials, PDFs is a great resource to have. You have also clearly outlined this within your post.

[Eoghan O’Neill]

Hi Kathleen,

You may notice that the formatting of your post is a little off. This is likely because you have written your response on Microsoft Word and copied it across to the forum.

To avoid this, once you’ve copied the text from Word right click in the post window and choose ‘Paste as Plain Text’. Alternatively, you can first paste the content into Notepad (Or similar) and then copy it from here to the topic window. Either method should remove the excess formatting…

[Author]

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