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I think this is a very good starting point for your SSE on wellbeing ie what is being used, what is working and giving the students a voice too. Repeating your process across the whole school would I feel give a great starting point to implement and invest in the most effective strategies to have meaningful change.
<span style=”font-weight: 400;”>The aspect of teaching and learning that I would use for SSE is literacy with a specific focus on the writing genres. Each class level would have a number of specific genres to do so that each band (eg 3rd/4th) would get indepth teaching on all genres over 2 years. Assessments would be made at the start before the teaching of each genre. This would be done by taking a photo of the children’s work on the Google Classroom App and uploading it to a digital portfolio for the child on Google Classroom. The work would be assessed by a rubric decided at the whole school level (and shared with the students after grading), this then would be the basis of teaching. The feedback could be given via Google Classroom to have a running record over the years. Pupils’ work could then be sent home to parents and feedback shared with parents to celebrate children’s progress. Children’s work could be displayed at the end of the teaching unit within the school and then that work compiled in a scrapbook to be shared with parents for a night or two before being returned to the class. Finally, rubric scores will be entered into Google Sheets to track class-wide progression and serve as quantitative digital evidence for our SSE process.</span>
I think using Gems for specific history topics or subjects is a great idea. I presume that it will adapt to your needs and become more accurate in knowing what your particular requirements are. It is a great addition and refinement in the use of Gemini. I plan to create them for all curricular subjects and to vet some of my online planning to see if I can add value to them. Your example of ‘Viking or not’ highlights to me how Gemini can add value to teaching.
I created a gem called 5th Class Primary Maths to align with new primary curriculum goals and streamline my lesson planning. The specific task was generating strategies to teach multiplication tables to incoming 5th-class pupils, accounting for diverse learning styles.
The initial output offered solid, scaffolded ideas, but I wanted deeper differentiation. I prompt-engineered it further to focus on ‘low floor, high ceiling’ tasks. From the refined response, I adapted the target board games and missing factor puzzles for my stations, while rejecting a few overly abstract theoretical activities.
To review the output, I cross-referenced the suggested strategies against the Primary Mathematics Curriculum learning outcomes and checked the mathematical logic for appropriateness. Regarding safeguarding, I maintained strict professional boundaries by ensuring no individual student data or identifiable information was entered into the Gem.
Ultimately, this Gem adds genuine value to my teaching practice. It acts as an instant sounding board for active learning methodologies, saving me from digging through old chat histories while ensuring my instruction remains fresh, inclusive, and curriculum-aligned.
This reply to the forum is useful for me as I will try and incorporate the voice typing. I think I will try and do it as a whole class at the start of the year though. Last year I had an intelligent student who could not read or write very well and while this was the resource I tried to use he refused to out of embarrassment. If I had used it as a whole class methodology at the start of the year I am sure that I would have had more success with it and him.
Within our school we have google embedded in the school with all children having a school email account etc. Due to resources the children only have access to a computer for about 1-2 hours a week depending on timetabling. Elements of this module that I will use to improve my practice will be using Google forms for AFL. I generally use KWLs but I think Forms will be more inclusive and give me a better insight into children’s knowledge before and after teaching.
I will also use the Responsive Slide Template. I think this is a great opener for a lesson/unit of work. I would use this as a whole class presentation and as the impetus for their own project work. I often let the children work in groups to complete tasks where they work on the same presentation simultaneously using a jigsaw approach. As we can be short for time this works great for getting projects completed but also for peer learning, peer teaching and differentiation. When the children are finished they share their work via google classroom and can present their work to the class.
This is a great idea. I have used Scratch to create something similar. It is actually easy enough to code and the child can virtually grab the item by being in the scene. I did a course a few years ago and it only took about 10 minutes to create it. I feel it may be worth exploring to help achieve your objective.
I am just wondering about your thoughts on Claude. I used it to synthesis some plans together and to be honest it seems so powerful, and in my experience to date better than Gemini and ChatGPT.
Topic and Class Level: Science: Rocket Design & Flight Dynamics (5th Class), adapted from the SFI Curious Minds resource.
For this learning sequence, I chose to design student-facing material using Google Slides to deliver the content sequentially. Anchoring the lesson on slides helped establish a clear, predictable flow. I started with inspiring rocket launch footage to hook the pupils, followed by clear step-by-step instructions for constructing and testing their rockets.
The core goal was using a fair test procedure to investigate how trajectory angle affects maximum flight distance. While I have taught this lesson before, using AI as a planning partner helped refine my scaffolding.
One adjustment I would make would be to introduce this to data, and use Google Sheets to show children how to compile a simple table on sheets and create a graph. I may also follow up the lesson by allowing student to design and make adjustments to their rockets to investigate the results of their adjustments.
Link to Reflection / SSE: From a School Self-Evaluation (SSE) perspective, analyzing pupil recordings from these flight trials offers valuable evidence for assessing STEM problem-solving and critical thinking skills across the senior cycle.I like your use of AI to generate differentiated questions. It really can take out a lot of the workload of the teacher in terms of creating this type of work. It is definitely something that I will use it for in the future.
Every year to inspire creative poetry writing in my 5th or 6th class pupils I use the poem Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins as my stimulus. I gave Gemini the prompt to design three activities around this poem and lesson objective.
The three suggestions were: 1. To create descriptive compound words, 2. Poetry writing based on things that are imperfect. 3. A snapshot based on a common scene to be done in three minutes.
I chose number 3 as it aligns well with my usual repertoire but adds a more polished product to demonstrate learning. While the activity was well conjured by Gemini I felt that it needed more scaffolding for weaker students and asked it to tweak the lesson by adding more discussion, vocabulary and words at the start of the lesson.using the term word thief to encourage word smithery within the class. As no pupils’ names are ever shared, Gemini does not use any personal information about pupils within its ideas.