Online Teaching Support - Changing the Sharing Settings on your Calendar

I have had a few people contact me about making their Google Calendars public.
Here is a quick how to video explaining how to do this.
Here is the link to more Google Calendar help too.

Online Teaching Support - Adding Links to Calendar Events

Communication with your class - Useful Links

Link to Google Drawing

Using the Priority Workspace collections in Google Drive

The Priority collection on Google Drive is really useful. Here is a quick how to....

Making Google How To's for my Students

If I am expecting my students to work more independently, away from me, on their project work, then I expect them to be confident with their "Google stuff" too.

I thought that maybe I could let them  use the How To site that I have been working on for staff for a year and a half now. This would be Ok if I linked to specific How To videos at key points in the process on their class site.


I decided not to do this in the end as I thought that the students would have more understanding if I linked the videos with what I was expecting them to do on their project sites.

So, the upshot of this has been a new section on my class site called Design Portfolio.
I have been trying to think of everything that the students might need to be reminded about when they are making their design portfolios and putting their work onto it. They can then refer to these videos when they are not in the class and need to be reminded about what to do.
I have also linked to the specific parts of this list that refer to activities within the project explanations on the class site. This is useful as I can then make one video for a skill and refer to it at multiple points within the site.

I can see this area growing to include drop downs for topics such as using Google Plus, and specific design apps that we use online.
I will do them as different pages for each different topic as the students do not like pages that are too long to navigate.

How To Site - One Year On

It has been a year since I started the Tamaki College How To site. This was to offer support for online needs.
I have been amazed at how much it has been used over the last year, and not just at school.

Students as the Teachers

Over the past couple of years, I have noticed that my knowledge of using all the Googly stuff gets stuck into my head much more as I have to show others how to do it. I have also found that the action of making the how to screen casts, where I have to be really clear about the process, has been really beneficial to me in my own clarity and understanding.
This term, I decided to try this out on my Level 1 class and get them to make a "how to" instruction set about something they had just learned.
We have been learning how to render a few different surfaces, like wood and plastic.

They had a practice through the process of a couple of the techniques, then they had to decide which one they were going to use as their example of a teaching how to.

I made them a quick example to show them how I wanted them to set it out using a Google slide show. This was also a good time to show them the new crop feature in Google slides, which they were delighted with.

I didn't put any written instructions on my example, so we had a class discussion about what possibilities they could put on each slide to explain the process to someone who didn't know what to do. Their growing experience with these class discussions meant that they quickly came up with some good ideas as a class, without too much fuss.

I feel it was a useful exercise for the students. One of their internal assessments is how they render their designs within a project (AS91066 -  Use rendering techniques to communicate the form of design ideas), so they need lots of practice with the techniques. If they can get the steps firmly in their head by teaching someone else, then they can concentrate on improving their techniques through practice.

Saying of the lesson through all this has been :-

Practice makes better...

Here are their how to's....

Help Sessions are all go...

We kicked off the term with a help session this afternoon. I decided to keep the first one a bit free and easy, so people could come in and get help with what they wanted, rather than it be a structured topic.
So we did a bit of Class Dojo, which was fun, putting our classes in and deciding what they would get awards for.  We then covered a bit of using images for the front page of a site as buttons to other site pages. This then lead on to a bit of what I have planned for next week which is making your own site header using Pic Monkey.  I have a How To on one way to do this here.
It is interesting to hear from staff what they want to cover and it made for an interesting session that went over very quickly..
Gummy bears with the chocolate biscuits today certainly helped.

Here is the rest of the plan for this term.

Using Google Analytics

I have been working on the "How To" site over these holidays. Every time I have put something new on there, I have emailed the whole staff, so they are probably a bit sick of my emails this holiday and I suspect that I have been put in a few "special" lists. I have also been posting them up in the GAFE Google Plus community. I felt that this was only fair, as I am always going in there getting tips and advice from others. As a result of this, I have had a lot of overseas interest in my How To site, so being a nosy type, I decided to use Google Analytics to track how many visitors i get on that site.

I have been using Google Analytics for a while to be nosey on my class site and the Digital Footprints site. ( links in the side bar ).
You can have as many sites to track that you like, as you can see here on the analytics dashboard, I now have 3.

It is easy to set up, you just have to put a couple of pieces of key information in specific places.

You start in the manage site section on your site, and part way down you will see this box to tick. It will not have a code in at that point, click on the part that says "learn more"

This take you to this, where you need to click the second option, for configuring.

This configuring page takes you through all the steps you need to do to set up your site.

You need 2 things, the code to put in the box and some html that you put onto the pages you want it to track.

I only did this the other day for the How To site, and I am already surprised by the traffic that has come through the site. It gives the information in nice handy little graphs, and breaks it down into where they are from, browsers used and all sorts of other stuff that I really don't care about, BUT, you can never have too much information!!!....

Making Screen Casts...

I made the How To site a while ago for staff to dip into when they have questions and can't get hold of anyone to help them. It is definitely an ongoing site, with a slow build up of content.
I started on the site by doing lots of screen shots of how to do things and creating step by steps.
Now I am getting more into creating screencasts using Quicktime. There is an extremely handy dandy "new screen recording" option there.

If you don't have the Quicktime version that does this, there is an online programme called Screenr. This is useful, as you can also download the screen cast that you make so you have more control over hosting it.

Recently, after the 2 week break, I have had various staff members wanting refreshers on adding site pages onto the horizontal navigation bar and onto the drop down menus, so I decided to make screen casts to cover these two things. The first one took 3 tries as I hadn't made one for a while and kept starting to talk too early, and stumbling over my words. I got there in the end, but it is weird sitting in an empty quiet classroom, talking to a computer screen!!

Here they are....

Adding a Horizontal Tab

Adding a Drop Down

Staff Online Support using Google Plus

This is my second year as one of the Manaiakalani facilitators at school. I have come to realise over this time that the staff are WAY more difficult to help than the students. It is pretty obvious when a student is needing your help, even when they don't really tell you, but the staff are a whole different thing.
Communication last year was a mixture of emails, filling in a spreadsheet for bookings and verbal (the latter happening the most often in corridors).
I have started a "How To" site this year, with the most often asked things making their way onto there. I recently branched into making a screencast for this site for the first time, which will be ok as it is not me having to listen to a recording of my own voice!!!
Verbal communication / questions / step by steps have been a lot more popular this year, with staff not being so shy to ask for help ( no one is judging!! ).
So, over this long weekend, I joined a Doctor Who community on Google Plus, and a lot of fun it is! This got me to thinking about a community set up to support staff, where they can ask questions and help others with what they already know. I get round to a LOT of classrooms doing this job and I realise that this is not available to other staff due to lack of time, so sharing seems to be just on a departmental level. We have been doing slam sessions in morning staff briefings with different staff members, but these are not recorded.

I set up the community over the long weekend, and have it set to invite only. I have currently invited all the staff that are on Google Plus, so the next job is to email all staff to let them know, so that those who have not yet started their plus account know what is happening.
I am finding the categories interesting and I have started one so far about internet safety. The sharing has started already as the first post in there is information from another staff member.