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Link to sway on collaboration
In the rapidly changing world 21st century skills are becoming more important. Traditionally students could expect to leave school and move into a particular field at third level or further education and stay in a similar career for life. Todays learners are more likely to have broader careers and change careers and upskill over their lives, where lifelong learning will be key. To prepare for life and future careers, some which may not exist yet, there are certain skills that will remain very valuable and are becoming more valuable in digtitally enhanced world where many routine tasks are automated and knowledge can be accessed online.
The skill I chose for the sway above was collaboration. This skill can be developed from early years up, for example during structured play. One way that I could develop this with students is to provide a scaffold of assigned group roles at the beginning and rotate these roles so that students participate in different ways. An socail intervention that helps this skill is the lego group, where one student is the builder, one is the architect (read plans), and one procures/selects the bricks for the builder. This structure was helpful for students who needed to learn this skill. In middle and senior classes students can collaborate on a range of tasks. Almost all classroom tasks and activities can be converted to a collaborative activity, e.g. answering questions on a worksheet together, a design and make activity, a writing piece e.g. a persuasive letter. There is no end to the possibilities so I think for me the most important thing is to keep asking myself whether the planned activity might work better and result in more skills as a collaborative activity. I also included a pdst resource on co-operative activities as a fun way to warm a class up for collaborative work and help groups gel.
Consider how you can use Digital Technology in your classroom to enhance students learning?
Digital literacy is an important aspect of student learning. Students are both consumers and creators of digital content and need to be well versed on both at an early age. Skills such as the conventions of online print can be learned at a young age and can learn critical literacy skills related to consumption of digtial information. They also need to learn how to create content. The primary language curriculum recognises this and allows for this new form of literacy to be embedded into the curriculum.
Digital technologies also have accessibility features that allow for more inclusive classrooms e.g. immervise reader. Technologies also allow learners to represent their learning in multiple ways and students are no longer confined to pen and paper to represent their learning in assignments.
How can you now apply School Self Evaluation Guidelines to your teaching? What impact can developing your own use of Digital Technology have at school level (SSE)?
The SSE process can be used to enhance our own teaching. At school level the SSE process is used to identify an area for improvement and develop actions that are relevant to all teachers. SSE is for every teacher so if a school has an improvement goal teachers can look at how digital technologies can be used to help meet that goal and perhaps improve learner outcomes or learner experiences. The DLF applies the same process as SSE and is a tool to reflect on your own teaching in the classroom. When teachers individual practice improves this helps with learner outcomes. At school level I would collaborate with other teachers and learn from each other to ensure a more cohesive experience for students. An example of how this could be applied would be if all teachers in primary used similar colour coding of their onenote subject section so that children can instantly recognise that the their English resources are in the green tab. ANother example would be teachers sharing the WALT and WILF during lessons using a similar template or coloured background.
onenote lesson notebook https://1drv.ms/o/s!AnNEWMFwsRDdkGCsYcY71QbmJ8N3?e=Rk93tL
Onenote is a very versatile tool. Primarily it allows everything to be kept in the one location and will be very helpful for students particularly those with organsiation difficulties. Colour coding can be used within the class notebooks for example subject chapters in primary, learning intentions/WALT and success criteria/WILF.
The content library provides a space for teachers to layout all the content related to a topic. Onenote features allow this to be very visually appealing and allows for a range of mediums including audio, video, text and drawings. The acccessibility features will also make it easier for all students to access the content.
Student notebooks allow students to complete their work and share it with the teacher. Similarly to content library the range of features allows studetns to represent their learning in a number of ways and the space allows both the teacher and student add feedback to the work. Students can reflect on their learning.
Students could use sections of their onenote as a portfolio of their work.The collaborative space can be used for pair and group work and I like the feature that allows the addition of intitials or names to ensure everyone contributes in some way and that the task is not left to one person. This space can also be used for peer assessment with students giving feedback on a piece of work.
Powerpoint recording
I was unable to upload to stream due to using my own 365 subscription but I have included a link to it in my drive below.
https://1drv.ms/v/s!AnNEWMFwsRDdkF858pLqUP5kbZuC?e=MUpROTMicrosoft teams has a lot of benefits for communicating, collaborating and sharing resources among staff members in schools. In primary I can see how it would be beneficial among different teams for example a whole school team, a SEN team. class levels etc. Anything that encourages sharing and collaboration while keeping it within the platform will be very beneficial to teachers and other school staff. I wonder if a challenge arises in schools where teachers are added to multiple teams and the notifcations etc. become overwhelming.
At primary I would be interested if many schools chose microsoft teams as their learning platform and how this worked with younger classes or if they limited it to senior classes and used something like seesaw for younger classes. I expect that students in senior classes would become used to the platform and be well able to work with it and the linkage with the microsoft suite of apps would be useful, particularly given the accessibility options that microsoft has such as immersive reader.
Here is a link to a bilingual sway on the Red Fox.
Students could create a sway on their topic for a peer group. The peers could then be asked to create the exit quiz based on the sway.
Both of these tools can be very useful in education.
Sway can be used for a range of purposes in classrooms. Benefits of sway include the ease of use and how it allows students to represent their learning in mulitple ways including audio, video,text and images. Sway has multiple uses in schools:
Students can use sway as a digital portfolio to record and reflect on samples of their learning.
Students can create a range of digital stories including reports, newsletters, project reports, websites and presentations.
Teachers can also create content on sway to share with students, for example in a flipped classroom the students might study the information in the sway before coming to class.
Schools can also use sway as a communication tool, e.g. to share information about the school.
Forms also have a range of uses from the more traditional surveys or collecting information at school level, to being used for formative and summative assessment purposes in the classroom. Examples of their use include:
Pre-topic knowledge check
Entry and exit tickets
Graded quizes
Quizes that branch into differentiated learning experiences depending on result.
Students can also extend their learning by creating quizes related to their learning.