The PL this week focused on something that's useful for almost every teacher: an easier way to write reports.
We shared some comment bank generators using Google Sheets (can also be adapted to MS Excel) in order to make the process of report writing a lot more efficient. By using a set of pre-approved comments generated by your faculty and inserted into the spreadsheet, you're able to just click a box and have that comment inserted into a cell. When all the comments are inserted, just copy the text in the cell and paste it into your report writing platform. Its as easy as that!
Here are two worked examples:
Many thanks to Sally Cassilles (Yanco HS) for sharing her Sentral focused comment bank (uses Sentral name, pronoun specifics): Report Writing Comment Maker (Yanco HS Maths)
DST Member Craig Merrick also produced a version: Report Writing Comment Maker v2.0
This week's collaborative mentoring session saw us look at different platforms for digital programming, as well as the ability to program collaboratively and the cloud storage options and permissions for these documents
We gave demonstrations of three different methods and applications that could be used for programming. Craig hgame a demonstration around Google Sheets and using the cells to connect a signature and date for registration purposes. Geoff walked through OneNote and how it could be used to group content, make lesson annotations.
While Adam talked about an interesting way to use Google Slide to program in a folder like way for a primary teacher's year, or even across a faculty to house all its units. Finally, Peter discussed the storage options for these items and the need for access and not stored on one particular persons drive or through one persons access. We also worked through an example of using a whitebaord (link here) collaboratively within a team of teachers to analyse a program and find ways to add technology into it.
We took a look across three mediums that students (or teachers) present work in and the different tools available to use in these areas.
There was a demonstration of the coaching tool embedded into Powerpoint that will give the user feedback on rehearsing their speech. The feedback includes data on pace and clarity and is a great too to enable students to practice their pacing of their speech before delivery.
We also looked at the free online version of Adobe Character Animator which allows you to record a vocie over and have it played back in the form of an animated character. Its a great slimmed down version of the main Adobe Character Animator App.
Finally we had a look at using Adobe Express as a portfolio tool to embedd images, text and video links into the one document.