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I chose collaboration as my key skill. Collaboration is always a great skill to work on, and especially when working with kids with ASD as it is something they find quite difficult at times within the classroom. It is also a skill that they will use in their everyday dealings with people outside the school setting.
As part of their Junior Cycle they have to complete a short course. We chose ‘Grow it, Cook it, Eat it’ as our first of two short courses. Within that there is a strand which involves growing veg that can be eaten. This is a perfect chance for the students to collaborate, not just in the physical task of planting, but in deciding what veg will be sown, researching when and where the plants should be sown, buying the seed, caring for the plants and the harvest of the plants.
Below is a link to a sway project which concentrates on a short course area my students are working on. This particular lesson concentrates on sowing potatoes and caring for them until harvest time.
I think having completed this module, it is obvious to me that as a school we are not making at much use of Digital Technology in the classroom as we should. This is highlighted by reading the standards of practice. I think individual classes are doing a certain amount but there is no ‘joined up’ thinking on the whole. Obviously this is where a Digital learning team would come in so handy. I do use Digital tech in the classroom and students have use of i pads and laptops and I try and use the Interactive Whiteboard as much as possible. This year i used Seesaw in class with the students as a way of communicating with home. This also allowed the students to do likewise and it was something they enjoyed. Other classrooms have students who use devices for communicating.
I think as teachers we are always self evaluating what we are doing in class and having looked as the standards as outlined in the Digital Learning Framework it is definitely something I will continue to do when we return to school so as to maximise the potential of using digital tech in the class.
As an individual teacher it is important to up skill and make use of this digital tech and I would hope it would have the consequence of maybe starting a conversation within the school that might eventually lead to the setting up of a Digital Learning Team where decisions were made at a school level for the benefit of the students.
Again with Onenote, just like Teams in the previous module I think its biggest selling point is it centralises a lot of what we as teachers are doing.
In my own class it would be very useful for creating content which tied in with Junior cycle curriculum my students are following.
I found it particularly interesting that It can be used to for planning between certain age groups or classes working on certain curriculum area. Within my school (as it covers students from ages 4-18), we cross over from the primary school curriculum to the Junior cycle curriculum around ages 12-13. So it would be very useful for a whole staff to be able to share planning like this. Obviously it may have to be tweaked depending on the students ability.
I found the immersive reader a very useful tool as again it allows the students more freedom while reading which is something we are always trying to promote.
Like other posters have said I wasn’t aware of how much could be done with Teams. It has been used in my school in the same way zoom was used, and that was as far as it went. However I could see that we could and should make better use of it. The most obvious way it could be used in my school is in the arranging of meetings and in terms of collating our planning. We have a number of meetings within a moth, whether teacher or whole staff and also behaviour support meetings. It would be great to have all of these collected on teams. And as has already been mentioned it would be a handy place to upload planning to one central shared resource.
I suppose the biggest challenge is trying to get people to buy into new technology. We already have a shared drive that holds all our planning and notes for handovers or transitions, etc I think the big selling point for Microsoft Teams is the fact that you can do so much with one tool rather than using a number of other resources.
Yes I was thinking it would be ideal for the E-portfolio. We’ve been collecting videos and photos already so this would be an ideal way to collate all the evidence.
Hi, I am a SEN teacher in a special school in Dublin. My students are all working on the l1LP’ss or L2LP’s of the Junior cycle. Some of modules covered are Communication & Literacy, Numeracy, Preparing for Work, Living in the Community and Personal Care. They also must complete short courses to complete the junior Cycle Program. Both of these tools are something i can use in my class. A record of the students progress is kept while they finish the course.
I had never heard of either sway or forms. I think forms is something that I can incorporate into my everyday teaching as an assessment tool but also as part of the collection of data towards the levelv1 & Level 2 learning programmes all of my students are taking part in. It also allows for self evaluation which is great because it allows the students have more independence which is always something we strive for in SEN.
I found sway particularly interesting for two main reasons. Firstly, it would allow me make short presentations on certain topics that I can then show on the interactive whiteboard in class. The forms assessment could be used at this point for example to see what the students picked up from the presentation. Secondly, as part of a short course we are completing we need to provide an e-portfolio. Sway is ideal for this task. It would along we upload video or photos of some of the practical tasks that need to be completed for the short course.
