Using Google Documents for curriculum development

As a department we always had difficulty in agreeing on what we PE skills we should assess and how we should assess them. Google documents came to the rescue giving us the ability to edit a live document online and simultaneously. We categorised our sports into invasion wide areas - "Net and Wall", "Invasion Games" and "Striking and Fielding". Each staff member was assigned a sport and required to fill in skills that a student would need to demonstrate if they were at, below or above the year level. We also thought that vocabulary for each sport would be useful from a literacy perspective.

The main advantage of using google documents was that we could quickly see what other staff members had written and adapted our areas so we had consistency across the department, we also took advantage of the 'comment' button - starting discussions about different areas. This document is still live and it has been an ongoing process updating different areas and refining small parts so we had good skill progression and it was still attainable for the students. Overall a very worthwhile experience. It was some of our departments first dip into google documents and was a relatively easy one as they were not handling a huge amount of data and there were always other staff members on hand to talk to and ask for advice.

For a guide to see how to set up a similar document follow this link. If you would like to see what we came up with send me an email!!

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