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Post date: Oct 27, 2015 8:19:15 AM
This reflects the way they engage with social media outside school and helps to build a class community which sees learning as a lifelong activity rather than one confined to school hours.
Pupils, especially in BGE, have taken the chance to share information with their classmates including relevant news articles, pictures and experiences they’ve had.
Gairloch High School staff and pupils are delighted to be able to use Google Apps for Education. In our first month of implementation we have had excellent uptake across staff and pupils and have begun to use the platform to assist learning and teaching.
1. Staff Training
Staff induction in the form of 1-to-1 support has been provided by the lead mentor. As of the week ending Oct 8th we have all teaching and support staff logged in, inducted and beginning to consider the ways they can utilise the technology in their own subjects. A good number of these are already using GAFE in their day-to-day teaching, some details of which are included below (section 5). A presentation, outlining the background and potential of GAFE, was made at a staff meeting which allowed all members of staff to engage with the rationale behind the implementation and have their questions answered.
78 classrooms have been set up by staff across Gairloch High School.
2. Pupils on-board
Out of 68 BGE pupils, only 3 are yet to login to GAFE. Many are logging in and using Classroom outwith school hours to complete work, stretch-and-challenge tasks or to post interesting content in the classroom for sharing! Having an in-school lead with access to the admin panel has allowed the close monitoring of pupil-growth and has been excellent in solving the very few issues regarding forgotten passwords. The simplicity of the approach in terms of email addresses (first.last@...) has allowed pupils to problem solve with each other in the event of something being forgotten.
In the Senior Phase, with 68 pupils, only 13 are yet to login. Due to subject choices there are pupils in the Senior Phase who, up to this point, have not yet had contact with trained staff. With a wave of staff induction having occurred in the last few days, it is hoped this will be solved after the October break.
We have used an organic approach, introducing GAFE as the need arose, in subjects where staff were able to support the initial login (mainly Geography and Computing). This has ensured, especially in the senior phase, that pupils are able to help each other to get set-up and acquire some familiarity with the different apps.
3. Personal Support
The potential for GAFE in terms of personal support was identified early by the SMT. The Physics department have created templates which can be used to reflect on formal learning conversations and provide a record of progress over the year.
One of our next steps is to consider how GAFE could better meet the personal support needs of pupils through their timetabled Learning, Review, Consolidation (LRC) lesson.
4. Pupils engagement outwith school
From the information available in the Admin console it is clear that pupils across the school are using GAFE in school, at home and via the library.
5 Adoption by Departments
A snapshot of how different departments are using Google Apps.
Geography: using assignments in classroom to set and turn in work; peer and teacher assessment using comments on docs; learning conversation records/reflections on sheets; ‘hyperdoc’ created for new level 3 unit; stretch-and-challenge activities with S1 and S3; integration with Edpuzzle (login using GAFE account) to turn YouTube videos into form ative and summative assessment. (Pic Above)
Modern Languages: submitting writing pieces set as homework; vocab booklets and grammar notes for S1-4 (including using forms for assessment quizzes); peer assessment of pupil work using comments on docs; announcements on Classroom to remind classes of deadlines; posting podcasts and YouTube videos for interested pupils to address stretch-and-challenge.
Suppor t for Learning: working with pupils to add useful apps to help meet learning needs, including dictionaries, text-to-speech, coloured themes and maths games.
Physics: classrooms set up for most classes used to share YouTube videos for S3 and S4 revision; files created to record assessment feedback and as a record of learning conversations; ability to post messages out of hours about interesting, relevant topics (e.g. aurora borealis).
Biology: all classes have classrooms which are being used for sharing videos, posting documents and offering help to support classwork and homework; Higher Human Biology assigned work to research and read about procedures for fish proteomics.
Science: records for S2 which automatically populate scores in biology, physics and chemistry from assessments - shared and collaboratively added to amongst three science staff.
Computing: all classrooms set up, S1 using the classroom for discussion; S2 have posted podcasts to share and peer.
Outdoor Education: Sharing movie clips to examine technique and develop improvements.
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