Future Learning Blog

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...