Future Learning Blog

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

I've been using Kamar on ios for over 2 weeks and it's doing the job of reporting absences pretty well!  Our school has good wifi coverage so I can complete absences at the pool and on the back fields, as

Had a great senior school parent teacher evening last night after the inspirational #edchatNZ twitter forum last week. The topic under discussion was how to engage parents in technology.  On the Friday after the chat I set up parent class mailing lists and emailed all the parents letting them know what we were doing with regards to google drive and other technology and how they could get involved and hopefully improve NCEA achievement.  There was a good response with quite a few parents replying immediately and many more over the next few days. I reminded them to come to the parent teacher evening this week...... I had a great turnout, and didn't stop talking to parents between 4:30 and 6:30!   The best thing was being able to show parents the homework that we completed last week where the students reflected on each others social responsibility.  The visual method of looking at the graphs on how they thought each other behaved was really powerf...

  In a previous post  I wrote about a technique I was going to use to help the students understand and reflect on their own social responsibility.  The students watched a video of themselves playing a game of Lacrosse that I uploaded to google drive, and then filled in a form to rate their own and others social responsibility during the game. The boys had a week to do the homework and I had a high success rate, only 1 boy didn't manage to complete the work - this meant we had a fair view of the attitudes of students in the class.  The next theory lesson after the homework was a reflection session.  With google forms it allows you to look at the submitted data in a group of graphs.  I put the results up on the whiteboard and we discussed them as a class. Each graph ignited quite a bit of excitement and discussion in the class, a pattern was developing with positive behaviour and negative behaviour.  We all talked about way...

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...

I first started uploading video clips of lessons in level 1 PE and social responsibility classes, it works really well as the students can see how they act from an outsiders point of view - as often they only see it from their own point of view!  Google drive is a great place to store and share your clips as you can really limit who can view/comment/edit the content - as opposed to other sites such as youtube and vimeo.  Google drive can play: WebM files (Vp8 video codec; Vorbis Audio codec) .MPEG4, 3GPP and MOV files - (h264 and mpeg4 video codecs; AAC audio codec) .AVI (MJPEG video codec; PCM audio) .MPEGPS (MPEG2 video codec; MP2 audio) .WMV .FLV (Adobe - FLV1 video codec, MP3 audio) You can also upload files up to 10GB in size (although the free storage amount is 5GB) Here are the simple steps to get your content in the cloud..... 1) Make sure you are logged into your google apps account, and you have edited and exported/saved your video to 'desktop' or ...

In level 1 Physical Education we have core skills, these basically assess team work, self management and social responsibility using Hellisons social responsibility model.  The students have been working on a weekly self reflection form for homework but this week I thought i'd try something a bit different! I filmed the students in a practical class, they had to organise an aerobic warmup, stretch, skill warm-up, and then divide in to even teams and play a game.  I had already chosen a modified version of lacrosse for them to play and put the gear on the field - the rest was up to them.  Even though the boys knew they were being filmed some of them didn't make much of an effort to follow the social responsibility ethos!! After the lesson I briefly edited the film down to about 10 minutes, including warm up, game, pack up and uploaded it to google drive .  I then made a form for the boys to fill in - it included questions about who was stretching and ...