Sharing the Love ~ Junior Assessment

On my project pages for the junior students on my class Google site, I needed some way to link the assessment scheme for Technology to the tasks that the students were doing within the projects.
On the layout of this page, I had set it up with a left sidebar so that the assessment could be put in there to line up with the tasks. That left sidebar has sat there blank for a few weeks while I come up with a way to do tis that is not just a load of words that will confuse the students away from the project steps.

Today, I decided to make a series of buttons using Adobe illustrator, that will link the students to the assessment schedules that match with the task they have been asked to do.

I has already embedded the folder with the assessment schedules in it on the front page of the juniors section, so these documents were already open and available to the students, but they were not really going to that page unless told to, so I wanted this information more "in their face".
Link to this junior page here.
A How To on how to embed a folder from your Google drive onto your site here.

I made the buttons nice bright colours so the students could see them easily on the project page, but they are not the main focus. I left the design as simple initials of the assessments, using different colours for the different schedules so they could easily see the differences in assessment for each section.

These buttons are hyperlinked to the document outlining the assessment schedule for each one, so if a student wants to see what they are being assessed on for each task, it is there next to the instructions to be clicked on. They can see what they have to do to reach each curriculum level and what level they are working at.

Link to the Pop Up Book project page here, to see the plan in place.

Putting Photos on Your Google Site using an iPad

I have been experimenting recently with putting multiple photographs on a Google site using an iPad. This was originally in response to a question I was trying to help with and then today I was asked to do a blog post about it to help others.
These are screen shots of the process I went through.
I have used a combination of the Google Drive app and the Chrome app, both of which are free.
Make sure that the photos you want to use are on the iPad.

I started by using the Google Drive app for the iPad.

Click on the + symbol on the top right and choose new folder. Then name your new folder.

Open your new folder from the drive list and click the + button again. This time choose to upload photos or videos.

It will ask to have access to your photos on your iPad.

Open the photo album choice and tick the photos you want to upload into the new folder.

Your nicely uploaded photo files will now be sitting nicely in their new folder.

Next, I used the Chrome app to work on my site.

Open the site page that you want to put the photo folder, and click on the pencil to edit the page.

On the insert menu, choose drive, then folder.

Tick the folder that you have just created and put pictures into.

Next, make sure you tick the option for the grid view. This way, you get a preview of your photos when the folder is embedded on the site page.

You embedded folder looks like a normal Google gadget when your page is in edit mode.

When you save your page, you can see the embedded folder with the photos that you uploaded. These photos are shown in thumbnail mode due to you ticking the grid choice.

The Moving Help Sessions.....

So the Wednesday afternoon help session has become the Thursday afternoon help session to cater for people's meeting commitments.
Today we did work about Google sites. I covered some basics to start with, which were the questions that I am always getting asked by staff.

• How to make the navigation on the top and not down the side.
• How to add pages to the horizontal navigation bar.
• How to make pages drop downs from the horizontal navigation bar.

This was good for some of the staff who came, as these are the things that you don't do every day so you forget and need refreshers. It was also no hardship for those who came that didn't really need this.

What got people going during this session was the work we did on "blinging" your site.
This was for people who are sick of the Google theme choices and want to make their own but who don't have any Photoshop skills.
We used online resources that can be used and accessed anywhere and on any machine.

Picmonkey
Colourlovers
Cooltext

We went over taking a screenshot of a chosen background from Colourlovers.com then putting it into PicMonkey and resizing it so that it would fit on their site. We then played with all the bits you can add to an image in PicMonkey, like shapes, lettering creatures and critters etc. This took a while as the choices are pretty wide and you can spend / waste a lot of time on these 2 sites.
I hit a frustration corner when I was trying to show the group how to change the width of the site so that it fits with the size of the graphic they have made. We discussed 900px being a good site size for a netbook, which is why we made the header that size.
Google, in their drive to change things and confuse us, have changed how you alter the width of the site and I guided the group to the wrong settings area for a while as we hunted for the correct setting.
We found it across the top of the "edit site layout" option of "more".

Thanks Google!!.....not

We then had a quick look at using 3 columns instead of just one on the layout option so that it is easier to layout buttons that you can make on Cooltext.com to link the site to other pages on the site or external web pages.

Not bad for an hour and the chocolate biscuits always help...

Open wide please.......

It has been an interesting week. The intermediate schools are having parent meetings and are using the Tamaki College links to the teacher Google sites that used to be on the Manaiakalani website to show parents what students do when they come up to the college in year 9. This was showing a load of buttons to individual teacher sites and not all of them were available for anyone outside of the school domain to view. We were asked to open everything up so anyone can have a look.
The first job was to get staff to send in the links for the sites that they are using with students this year. I did this via a Google form in an email as it collates everything into a handy dandy spreadsheet.
The next bit came from management to tell all staff to open their sites to the world.
This has been met by a very mixed reaction and a lot of worried conversations. I had given up worrying about this a while a go as my site has been open since the start, so I had forgotten the issues that come up about this. The main one has been staff worried about copyright issues. I have been encouraging :-

• use of a bibliography
• links back to the original information sources
• a disclaimer

I have also been using smiles and hugs where needed!!!

I then redesigned the page for the links. I did this by creating a site especially for the job, with buttons for each department / area. These buttons link to a page where I am putting the site links as they come through from staff in the form of a table. The html code for this page could then be inserted on the Manaiakalani site ( handy, as I am REALLY fussy about the layout of buttons, and the html code takes all that with it ). This site is HERE.

On someones else's site, you can only specify what goes on the actual page area, so we sent along the site topper to decorate too!!.....