Top blog posts from 2013

This has been the first year I have used a blog as a form of self reflective professional development, overall I have found the experience rewarding and a good way to build a portfolio of work and share it with other educators for feedback. I have also enjoyed writing about my thoughts on the future of education and where we are heading with things like web semantics and learning analytics. The most popular things I wrote about this year were;

1) Using Google calendar as a lesson planner

This was really great for my own productivity for the year, and along with integration with i-cal on

my phone I could access all dates and lesson plans at any time, I will change the method next year though - and have each class on a separate timetable and share the lesson plans with the students.

2) Overview of Google Drive Workflow #1

This is the original version of how I worked with Google drive, I have since modified the way I work through reflection and the updated post is here.

3) Using Google templates to improve workflow

This made a huge difference to my organisation over the year, as well as how the students completed the work.

Happy New Year!

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How to collaborate with ChatGPT in the research process and actually learn something

If you have used chatGPT before, it can sometimes feel like talking with someone who has done too much of their 'research on Facebook', filling in gaps with random facts marginally related to the topic just so they can respond and keep the conversation going. However, if applied or 'prompted' correctly, with the user utterly aware of the limitations and ethical considerations, chatGPT can be a helpful research assistant. There is already a wide range of tools available that are built on chatGPT that can support many of the things described below; however, I am still a bit hesitant to rush in with most of them being 'freemium' or asking you to upload your own research and other details or data into their database, I'm happy to stick with the open version of chatGPT as it is what our students have access to. Image created with AI The following guide highlights some prompts, some follow-up questions and most importantly, what you need to do next to follow up a...

Motivation and homework follow up...

Last week I wrote about setting a homework challenge to learn muscles of the body as an online game - the students then had to post screen grabs on google+ to show they had done it and to be in contention for the hallowed prize of 'King of the Muscles' and a cafe voucher. I wasn't quite sure how it was going to go, but by Thursday the buzz in all my senior classes was about ' poke-a-muscle '. The boys were so excited about it they'd post a score, and then find out that someone had beaten them, and then rush out of the class at interval to get to a computer and beat the top score. I even had an email on Saturday (two days after the due date) from two boys who had been practicing and spent the afternoon working together to try and beat the original high scores they had submitted with the homework!!!

Group email parents with Kamar and Gmail

After # EdChatNZ on Thursday night I was really determined to make digital contact with parents and share with them the great work their sons were doing! At our school we use Kamar to collect absences, store student data and report back to parents. It has a handy function where you can click on a student and email the parents directly, but I wanted to email all the parents of classes at once. After a bit of playing around I managed to find a way to do it, here's what I did!!! 1) In Kamar select 'Printing' then select 'Export' This will save the file so you can copy the addresses into gmail, rather than printing it out. 2) Now you need to select your class - as I wanted to email one class at a time I need to select a single class, but you have to option to select multiple groups. Click on 'Option Subject' and then type your teacher code into the box. Your classes should all appear and then when you select the class it will copy into the b...

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