And school resumed. We began the process of regaining a sense of normalcy. Back to reality means back to our regularly scheduled meetings. I surveyed the group - they unanimously voted to keep it as scheduled.
The group: our Secondary Collaborative. This group consists of Middle and High School Instructional Technology Facilitators (ITF) and School Library Media Coordinators (SLMC), and while we meet informally throughout the year individually and in small groups, we get the whole gang together four times a year. Each meeting consists of sharing our own professional learning, discussing relevant topics in small groups, and - my favorite - PLEARNING! Our realities at the moment are rough as we adapt our professional and personal lives to clean up after Hurricane Florence, we needed this meeting to help us escape a bit. With recent updates to Google Expeditions, we dove back into reality by breaking out the virtual reality sets our district loans to teachers and checked out the new Augmented Reality addition to Google Expeditions. Then, we dove into green screen technology and tried out the features of Do Ink. The week before, two of them had reached out to me for guidance with a project a teacher wanted to try back at the school they support. What perfect timing! It's often hard to get folks together for formal professional development AND I was quite certain that the entire group would be able to use this back at their schools. Given a table of props to help them think creatively, a few features to test out, and two ways to share their creations the groups tackled their mission. The groups had two ways to share their creations: the Padlet (embedded above) and a Google Form. Each of these provided a different way to access the videos. I often share Padlet as a super easy way to get creations - videos and photos especially - off of student devices. As the majority of students in our schools have access to shared devices, finding easy and quick ways to get the content off of a device is paramount. Padlet is THE easiest. No log in is required, but the videos posted are visible by anyone with access to the Padlet. This can be a great addition to a teacher's website if they have made sure that permission has been given by the parents to share a student's image and work. Google Forms has the option to allow for file uploads. This method of sharing is more secure as the files submitted are held in Google Drive. Adding this question option creates a folder in the drive of the creator of the form. It also requires students to log in to Google to complete the form. (Not hard for many students...the trick is remembering to log out!) When the file is uploaded, it is named based on the email address. The end result is a folder with each student's work, named, in a folder the teacher can access. These educators had a great time plearning. I know of two schools that have taken this task and plan to run with it. When teachers are excited about a task, their students know it. Enthusiasm is contagious - I can't wait to see what our students create!
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AuthorJeannie Timken Archives
March 2023
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