Future Learning Blog

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

This quick tutorial relates to my previous post about how to upload a document to the template gallery, there is a slightly different method now since the update - both still work effectively however.

GClass folders is a free script that runs from a google sheet that will automatically create class folders for all the students that you teach.  Sounds complicated - watch this video and you should be able to do it in under 10 minutes. Here is the link to create the spreadsheet. You will also need your class email addresses and names - follow these guides to help you make a class mailing list , and export it to your desktop .

This year I have decided to completely digitise senior level NCEA PE - 3 classes completing all internal assessments and home/collaborative work on the drive.  I wrote earlier on my blog how I thought I was going to make it work - but I have discovered a couple of tricks since then that have ironed out some of the issues I was having - you can have a look at the original post here  - but I have made some modifications below. I was beginning to find myself overwhelmed by the amount of work in my folder - I thought I had a pretty bulletproof system for organising the work and placing it into appropriate folders but in the end it was taking me so much time to keep on top of it - after a bit of googling I discovered gClass folders .  This is a script that runs in a google sheet that automatically creates a folder for all of your students - they also have access to the folder, and simply place the work in there for you to mark and comment on.  Have a look at the web...

At the end of last term I surveyed my students to find their feedback on how my plan to digitise NCEA PE was going for them.  Most of it was positive, but some of the boys were getting frustrated when I shared a document with the whole class and someone didn't save a copy (and just hijacked the original) - making the original document that I shared locked - this was the current way I was organising my workflow and I knew there must be a way around it.  This was frustrating for me as

Reflecting back on this term, here are 3 simple ways that I used google apps that have really transformed my teaching and the students learning.... 1) Use forms 1.1 and 1.5 require the students to reflect on experiences that they have had in class.  In previous years the students filled in sheets over the term/year with the entries on how they thought the lesson went with respect to team work and interpersonal skills.  It was unlikely that the sheets would stay intact

I have been using the drive for several years, but this year I am teaching and collating all work from all 3 of my senior classes in the drive.  This is a basic overview of what I do and some of the advantages I see from using this method.

How to save and share google docs (I use this as a link for students to follow....) 1) Open the document by clicking on the link that was shared with you. 2) In the window with the document go to 'File>Make a Copy' 2) Text box will pop up - keep the name the same (at the moment it will be highlighted in blue, so all you need to do is press the right cursor once and delete the 'insert name here' bit), then fill in your full

Unless you are French you will remember 2011 as a the year New Zealand hosted the Rugby World Cup and that it was victorious in the sense that the All Blacks won, and also that as a nation we hosted the event with pride and passion that only the kiwi's could.  It was also the year that I first attempted to use google apps to teach and assess a level 2 NCEA standard.  The standard 2.6 required students to look at the effects that the Rugby World Cup (or any other international sporting event) has on self, others and society.  There was a endless amount of information and opinion about the RWC and how it was going to effect the country, this was the information that the students needed to enable them to write the report but it was really a case of filtering through the noise to get clear information.  As a keen reader of blogs and digital information I had a bit of a brainwave and came up with a cunning plan…. 1) Look for reliable and useful resources with fac...

Google drive is a great place to create research environments for students where they don't waste time and energy at unsuitable sites.  I recently worked on a project with senior students on the 2011 rugby world cup and collected resources from different rss feeds and websites (have a look at it here) - I wanted the students to read the data and then comment on it in groups - this is how I uploaded the pages to the drive so I could share them with the students. 1) Make sure you are running google chrome as your web browser and you are logged into your apps account, search for 'send to google docs' in google and it should direct you to the extension, if not - hit this link .  Follow the instructions to install into your browser. 2) It should install at the top right of the screen 3)  When you open/ find an appropriate web page click on the icon and it will show you a preview of the document in google drive - you then have the options of downloading it to yo...

Google reader is an amazing way to aggregate information from a variety of sources from anywhere on the web!  I am planning a research project on the New Zealand Winter Games, this is how I will collect the resources. 1) Sign into your google apps account - the black bar at the top has links to google products, go along to more and click on 'reader', this is the link to your google reader account and it is here that you can search and subscribe to rss feeds. (rss stands for rich site summary and is a family of web feed formats used for news and other frequently refreshed sites) 2) Type the topic you are searching for in the subscribe box and press enter. 3) The list of feeds will appear in the main part of the screen, some might not be what you are looking for but if you see one that looks good click on subscribe.  Once you have filtered through the sites to meet your needs you can look at what you have selected by clicking on 'all items' on the lef...

How to set up a class mailing list This is an easy but essential task if you are planning on doing any e-learning with your classes. 1) Make sure you are logged into your google apps account and are at the 'mail' screen.  Click compose and start to type the names of students in the class in the 'to' field - you can use last names or first names - it should auto complete as the students are in the system, if the correct name pops up, click on it and move onto the next.  When you have the complete list send the email - name it test, or just say hello.  This is a funny way to do it, but with out sending them an email first, the boys will not be in your 'address book' - don't ask me why, its an admin issue?! 2)  Now....navigate to contacts by clicking on the 'Mail' button on the top left of the screen - in the drop down menu 'contacts will be one of the options.  2) Set up a new group of contacts by hovering over your contacts on the ...

In Physical education, like any other subject we are constantly collecting data on all students - our data then has to get crunched to go into our Kamar reporting system.  A few years ago things were getting a bit messy and data was going missing on old bits of paper and numbers were getting plucked out of the air more often than rugby balls were going missing from our store cupboard! Google spreadsheets seemed the obvious choice as some of the department were already half using excel to collate data.  I created a shared document (see here for a guide) and headed the table columns for each term/credit period.  Our reporting system required a 1-9 scale for each skill assessed so a formular was applied to turn a beep test score into a numerical value, or a sprint time into a value between 1-9.  This could then be applied to all students for all teachers in the year group.  We could also create totals and averages for each class, teacher and year group. ...

I recently blogged about the advantages of using an online collaborative document to develop your curriculum area here .  This quick guide shows you how to set up and share the document! 1)  When you are logged into your google account click on the 'drive' button by going to the 9 tiny squares at the top right of the screen. 2) This will open a new window and take you to 'My Drive' the wonderful place where you can create a plethora of documents, forms and spreadsheets!  Click on the large 'Create' button on the left of the screen. 3) You are now given 6 choices - for this exercise we want to create a 'document' - it is very similar to a 'Word' or 'Open Office' document and has similar editing and presentation attributes. 4)  A new window will open with a text editor in it.  To change the name of your document click on 'untitled document', a box will appear with the option to type a new name.  The rest of ...

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 a...