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...

Using Google Apps to collaborate on Film Planning

I am a Year 9 tutor this year and I asked my tutor class if they wanted to make a movie for the Manaiakalani Film Festival. Some of them were keen to as they have been part of it for the last 5 years while they were at intermediate and primary schools.


Who wants to do what...

The first job was to find out who wanted to do what job. I did this via a Google form with a list of jobs they could sign up for.

You will have to scroll through this one....






The results came in from this so I could see how many of the group were keen.
It seems like a small number at the moment but I think once we get started, the others will want to jump onboard.







The Theme

We did the next job last Friday, which was talk in tutor time about possibilities for a theme for the film. We started putting those up on a Google drawing, which was shared with them all so they could continue to put their ideas on over the weekend. Some "interesting" suggestions came in which we had a laugh about this morning.






Voting for the Theme

These suggestions have been put into another Google form and sent to the group so they can vote on their top 3 choices.





This has been emailed to them tonight so that there is time for the results to come in and be ready for the script team who are having their frist meeting on Wednesday after school.






The plan for the the script meeting is to do the planning on a Google drawing then to move to a shared Google doc for the team to input into.
It is interesting producing a project this way as I dont actually teach my tutor class and I only see them in the morning and afternoon tutor periods.


26th June

We had the first meeting of the script crew. These are the students who put their name down on the form to choose what they wanted to do.

The winner is...

We kept checking every day on the voting results coming in and Google forms presents it really nicely as a graph for you so you can see straight away what the results are.
Here is a screen shot of the results :-

So Vampires, Zombies and a last minute vote for fruit and veg it is...!!!!

Ideas......

They had the three main ideas to go with so they started a Google drawing to put down any silly idea they could come up with so we could talk about them. We sat around one computer talking with one student doing the typing of everyone's ideas. This drawing has been shared with the script crew so they can add to it in their own time.

The favourite at the moment is a film trailer for Plants vs Zombies the Movie.... we shall see...
The next meeting is Friday so we can start a story board to work on over the weekend.




3rd July

The planning team met to do the scene breakdown plan.
We did this on a Google doc that os shared with the team and we broke it down into the action, who would be in it, what we would need and where we would film it.
This breakdown will help the props team who need to start work next as we now know what we need.

What do the students think about the room changes?

My classroom has been changed around for a couple of weeks now and I have been chatting to my students about what they think about it.

The back tall table...

The boys gave me comments like :-

"love it"

"it's easier to work at"

"it is more comfortable to draw at"

"I feel like the man sitting up here"... ( please feel free to ignore that one !! )

This table has been a popular option for the boys when they are coming into the room, to the point of having a few "words" with each other as to who sits there.

The comfortable sitting area at the front ...

The students have said :-

"We like that we can work on our netbooks in comfort"

"We feel like we are in prison at the normal tables"

"it's kick back" ... ( but I hasten to add that they work in this area and I have only had one "kick back" example to deal with in two weeks ).

I have not told the students where to sit when they come in. They have moved to the normal tables naturally if they have drawings to finish and have gravitated over to the the couch area when they have netbook work. It has been interesting to watch them decide for themselves without being nagged.

Spoilers....

It is that time of year again when I have to start thinking about the Manaiakalani Film Festival. Actually, we are starting a little earlier than usual this year and I am so pleased we are. In previous years, my team and I have made a variety of movies for the festival but the thread running through them all has been music and dancing. This is the first year that we have actors and a script.
We have had our script meeting, which was a very funny session with everyone throwing their ideas in, however silly they were. These were sifted and we settled on a story line and came up with the script, which done on a shared Google doc, so it has gone through a bit of "adjusting" since then. This is the first time I have used a script so this is very exciting and I am wondering how much we can keep to it when we start filming and how much we will "wing it".
The script threw up a number of things that we had to get together before we can start filming, including main character costumes, props and sets.
The set building is the main reason we have started early this year, but it is well underway.

Here are some in progress shots of students preparing the sets.
I hope they don't reveal our theme this year as that is a secret!!

We love glue guns, card and masking tape...

Covering the wall with card and painting it...

The lovely boys from the furniture making course helping us do the heavy building....

You can never have too much paper and glue to hold all the bits together!!!

So far, we have involved the English department for the script writing, the Furniture making boys for the big building job and students from a variety of year groups.

It is turning out to be a year of quite a few firsts for us while making our film festival entry.

I am not sharing the script with you......spoilers.....

Late Night Chats on Google Docs

I had my first experience this week of talking to a student on a Google doc late at night.
I had set my tutor class their blog homework this week to write about respect. I always give them them the option to send their homework to me either via an email or a shared Google doc. The deadline as always was midnight on Thursday ( so that it gives me Friday to kill them if they don't do it..!! ).
This Thursday was the night of the big thunder storm, so at 11.10 I was still up on the couch, browsing about on the net. An email came though that one of my class had shared a doc so I clicked on it to do my usual copy and paste onto their class blog. Link here.
When I opened the doc, Caroline was still writing on it, so I went further down the page and sent her a little comment. This opened the door to half an hour of back and forth fun. It was nothing educational but I found out where she lives and the fact that she has to get the train in every day. We had a joke about me expecting being paid for things in chocolate or pictures of Johnny Depp. ( Can you believe she didn't know who he was!!!..I soon put that right ! ). We then reached an agreement that as this was the first week that the the whole group had hit the deadline we would celebrate with a fish and chips shared lunch.
Like I said, nothing educational and if this had been a piece of work where the doc had to be marked, then I would have used the comments down the side. As I copy and paste the relevant bits onto their blogs, I wasn't bothered about typing directly onto her page.
It was an interesting insight into when the students are online doing their work and that they appreciate a bit of back and forth feedback, educational or not.

Bloggidy Blog....

It's the second week of our Wednesday afternoon help sessions, and we covered blogging basics today.
I had a group of staff who had never blogged before, so that made it an easy session with no differentiation needed.
We started right from the start, finding blogger, starting a blog and finding a url that no one else has. We covered writing a blog post, inserting a picture, then moved on to getting the html embed code from YouTube so they could embed a video.
What really caught everyone's interest was the use of labels and a label gadget down the sidebar. As first time bloggers, this interested them the most as they are planning on doing whole class blogs so will use this labeling system with the students names in order to find al the posts by individual students. I showed them how I do this with my Year 9 tutor class. Link here.
The hour session went over quickly with everyone logged onto a computer, making their own scratch blogs and having a real hands on go at everything. They all went away with plans on which classes they were going to use this with so they can have a go with the "proper"stuff.
We had a good selection of chocolate biscuits this week too!!

Wednesday Afternoon Help Sessions

Recently. Russel our DP in charge of the whole blended learning thing ( and its a LOT to be in charge of!! ), sent out a Google form to get staff feedback about their PD needs.
It turns out that the consensus is that after school sessions and department sessions are what people want! So we sent out a google doc, with a list of sessions each week for the rest of this term. Here is the link. Staff can sign up to what they want as to where they judge their needs are most after doing this for over a year now.
Our first session was today and it seemed to go ok. I had 6 people interested in working on Google calendars and they were so keen that they got there before me !
We covered real basics like making an appointment and then moved on to sharing calendars with others, putting in information that can be seen by others and then we had a go at inviting each other to made up events.
What was popular next was making multiple calendars and then embedding them onto a Google site so that students can see the course planning on a calendar.

As I have been using my calendar A LOT and have loads of different ones for all sorts of things, I didn't think it best to show the start up basics on my own, so I made a dummy account today.
It is under the name of my dog, Bobby.
What is worrying me now is that when students are sharing their work with me they will accidentally share it with Bobby instead, as he is in the system as Bobby Ferguson. Never mind, as long as he does the marking!! So far Bobby has a gmail account, a calendar with appointments on ( apparently he does Social Studies ) and a Google site with his calendar embedded into it.
Next week he will be making a blog as that is our next topic.

The general feeling as they left today, was that they need to practice in order to get it firmly in their heads, but that is the same with all of the this Google stuff. If you don't use it regularly and do it, then the next time you try you have forgotten how to. It explains why I have to show the same people the same things over and over again.

This Pd session was powered by timtams supplied by management :D

All Change......

I was inspired this week by a visit to the room of a fellow teacher. She had turned half of her room into an easy seating, couch area, where students can sit comfortably to use their netbooks in a different atmosphere and environment.
So today, I had a re-arrangement of my own furniture. I already had a couple of items of furniture that I could use from when TCTV did interviews for assembly.
My room was laid out in groups of tables with 6 computers around the sides of the room.

Here is how I have changed it....

A couch and easy chair in a set up with a small table. This is near power sockets for their netbooks and next to the bookshelf. I plan to get a couple of bean bags for this area too, as there is still plenty of space. Here, students can sit comfortably to either work on their netbooks or access the design books on the shelf. They can sit on the floor on the rug, using the low table, or use the bean bags.

I have added a high table at the back of the room, with a couple of stools. This table can be worked on stood up too.

I still have groups of tables, as the students need to be able to sit and do their design work on paper. The desktop computers are all down one wall now.

I thought that this would make my room feel cramped, but there is still plenty of room to move around, which is important as my students need to be able to move around the room to get things that they need.

Here is how it was used when my senior students came in this afternoon.

Working at the tall table...

I am not convinced I like seeing their backs ( being suspicious!! ) I may pull out this table from the wall so the stools can go on the other side.

On the couch with a netbook...

On the easy chair by the book shelf...

A more unusual use of a low chair with the high table. Chin level with his netbook!

He says he was comfortable!!...hhmmm...

I didn't get to see the changes used a lot today, as a lot of my senior classes were out on work experience and most of them are in the middle of design drawings, where they need the tables.

The reaction of the students who came in and saw it was interesting, as they were interested in the changes and what I was trying to do.

I look foreword to seeing how it changes how they use the space in the room and how this affects their work.

Designers and Slaves....

It's exam week this week and while other subjects are sweating under the pressure of external exams, we are having a bit of fun in DVC. ( Design and Visual Communication ).
Instead of trying to keep on task for 2 hours on project work, we are doing design activities.
The first one we are doing is being designers and slaves.
This activity was inspired by watching a video of the architect Frank Gehry working in his workshop with his team.
The students are sitting in pairs and one is the designer, who is only allowed to explain what they want. They are not allowed to help or do any of the work. The other student is the slave ( or "bum boy" as they put it !! ), and they can only do what the designer tells them. They are not allowed an opinion or to make decisions themselves.

They have white card, a pair of scissors and some tape. That is all.
Their task is to design and make a model of a road side bus shelter.
They have 40 minutes to create their design then we swap over.

Here they are just as they were getting to the end of the first session.

Feedback from the students is that it is hard to just give instructions and not do it themselves. They are frustrated at not being able to help and do it themselves and find it hard to just describe and explain what they need someone else to do. It equally hard for the slave, as they have to try and understand verbal instructions about a design they know nothing about.

They didn't realise that I was checking out their communication skills!!!

I am interested in the fact that they did not find the 40 minute time constraint to be the main issue. If this is the case, why can't they get their course work done on time when they have weeks!!.

Watching them during the second session, it was really evident that the students who had just been the slaves and were now the designers were finding it really hard to keep their hands off the work. 

For voting, they have been asked 3 questions on a Google form.

1) Which design will best protect the passengers from bad weather?

2) Which design looks like it will fit onto the side of a normal road?

3) Which design is the best overall looking shelter?

Here is the link to the form responses.

I was reading out the results as they were coming in to the Google form response sheet. It inspired them to get the voting done if they didn't agree with what was coming in. I suspect a mild bit of cheating here even though they weren't supposed to be voting for their own ( note to self - collect emails next time!! ).

Here are their designs...

Netbooks and Crochet...

You get asked the strangest things sometimes.
While sitting up in B10 this afternoon, dealing with student netbook issues, a staff member came up to start her off on her crocheting as she couldn't remember how to do it!!

So..... Netbooks and Crochet.... does that sound like the title of  a murder mystery?

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

Going Slightly Mad.....

We are 2 weeks into the new term and it has been NON STOP. They ( we all have a "they"..!! ) did something to the wireless over the 2 week break, and when we came back non of the students netbooks would connect as it had forgotten all of the pre shared keys (psk's)...aarrggghhhhh.....
The new system for getting a psk onto the netbooks was not playing the game so students and staff were incredibly frustrated at not being able to get online. Up in B10 ( netbook central !! ), it was complete chaos with students up there by the truck load with issues. We ended up supplying temporary guest passwords just so they could get online and get on with their work. There were signs up all over the place with the passwords on, trips around class rooms to write it up on the board and it seemed like more students were at the netbook room than in class, at times.
We now have a list of new psk's, but we have to get the netbooks to forget all of their preferences so they will accept the new ones. I am writing this in a brief gap between collecting netbooks from classrooms and setting them up for Leon ( one of the tech guys ) to put the new psk's on. Oh well.......... I suppose it keeps me fit.

Moderation

It is that time of year again when the moderation is returning.
I had to send a Level 1 standard and a Level 2 standard this year, and I was pleased with the summary that came back.
In an effort to move foreword with it all being online and "out there", I have made a moderation page on my DVC site. Most of the links to PDF documents are open to the world. The only one only viewable in the school domain is the cover sheet as it has the students full names on it.
I had fun using my new A3 scanner today, and I scanned in the Level 1 samples. I ran out of time to scan the Level 2 samples today, so that is a job for next week.
It will be good to get to a point where NZQA will accept submissions in this format instead of posting everything to them in HUGE envelopes, both for the external marking at the end of the year and the yearly internal moderation round.

Link to the moderation page here...

Year 9 Cyber Smart Training

I have got a busy week planned, with the whole of Year 9 coming to me for the Cyber Smart course. I have timetabled them in one tutor class at a time in the library, so that is 6 double sessions.
So far I have done two of them. I started yesterday with my tutor class, so I could be more comfortable as this is all new to me!! It wasn't the "smoothest" thing you have ever seen, but they were very forgiving. ( They probably knew what I would do to them if they weren't !! ).
Lessons learned :-

• have the videos ready to play on the laptop, don't rely on YouTube streaming 
• break it up into easier chunks
• let them do more
• don't let myself waffle on so much.

I shared a Google form with my tutor class at the end of the day to get them to tell me how it went, so I could pick up my game for the rest of the year group. Their feedback is here if you are interested, but take no notice of the top two. They were grovelling!
Today I had 9PTd, and it went much better. Here they are watching one of the cyber smart videos.

I tried something new with this group when we were talking about cyber bullying and I got them to put what they were telling me onto a couple of shared Google drawings.

Their responses are here....

What is bullying?

What should you do if cyber bullying starts happening to you?

I have got another four sessions to go over this week and two days next week. I hope they continue to improve as I get more confident and add more things to do.

Link to cyber smart site - Digital Footprints

Wednesday 10th April

I had 9RGf today and I now know a new word....

Keyboard Warrior.

This is when someone is feeling brave behind the keyboard and saying things they wouldn't say to your face.

Here is their feedback on cyber bullying...

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.

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!!.....

Blogging with Ebenezer

Me and Ebenezer spent some time blogging this morning. He is a new blogger.
We have covered the basics on the desk top and this photo was taken while I was demonstrating the iPad app for Blogger.
This post was made on my iPad mini and Ebenezer is an iPad owner too.

I also feel very special, as when i got over to help him, Ebenezer had printed off my instructions from the "How to" site.

I am a published author.... ha ha ha....

Level 1 NCEA Results.

We have recently had to crunch the numbers at school for management to have an in depth look at the results of individual departments.
I am especially pleased with the Level 1 Design and Visual Communication results as this was the biggest group of students that I had last year.
I have taken a screen shot of the spread sheet that I kept all year so I could see where they were all up to. ( Dear Google, please let spreadsheets be embedded on blogs!!... :D )

There were a number of factors last year.

• This was the second year through for the new assessment standards, so I was more comfortable with them and better prepared.
• This was the first year that I had all of my planning, examples and assessment information on a Google site for the students to access at all times.
• This was the first year that the students were doing their work online on Google docs etc.

I can not in all honesty pin down any single reason why there was a big improvement in my level 1 results, but I am busy putting what I have learned from this into the 2nd year of the new level 2 standards and the brand new level 3 standards.

• Letting the students know as much as possible in advance.
• Sharing everything.
• 24 hour access to planning and instructions.
• Examples, links and exemplars on line for them to access.
• Clear instructions with illustrated examples.
• Multiple ways of working and presenting work.
• Feedback on work online.
• Use of the teacher dashboard to monitor activity.

I am continuing to increase the use of GAFE, with my students all making individual Google sites themselves this year to present all of their project work.

I continue to wrestle with the problem of combining our online work with the drawn work that is in sketch books.

Here is a link to the Level 1 section of my Google site.

Here is a link to a Level 1 workflow video that I made to show how the students go about creating a piece of work using the site and docs.

Update on Friday 8th March


In response to a question about which of the students were involved in the first netbook trial, I have looked at the results.
There were only 3 of my Level 1 students last year who were involved in the netbook trial when they were in year 10 ( this was 2 year 10 classes with netbooks ).
Here are their results.
They passed all of the credits that they were entered into in DVC.

Interested in the Statitstics

Seeing who is having a look at the school blog that I have been involved in for the past 5 years has always interested me. I have installed a ClusterMap and a Feedjit feed on any blog since then, as they give both real time feeds and overviews of who visits and where in the world they are from.
This is on top of the rather cool stats that you get on a blog now, that is a built in feature.

 Doing this on a Google site is not quite so easy.
First of all, you have to go into the settings and enable statistics for the site.

You need to click the "learn more" so that you can be directed to the Google analytics page, where you can get a code to put in your settings. You also get a piece of html code to put on your site. This is easy, as it just goes at the bottom and is not even seen as it works in the background.
So, I have done this for my Graphics site, which is my main teaching site, and for the Digital Footprints site, which is the cyber safety one.
Some interesting readings have been coming through recently for the cyber safety site, which pleases me in a couple of ways. The students have been introduced to it over the last couple of weeks, a few at a time and the site has also been given to the rest of our Manaiakalani cluster as a suggestion for teachers to use as training.
I think people have been looking!!!
What pleases me the most is that the average time was nearly 9 minutes, so they had a good smooch about while they were there. It makes all the work feel worthwhile.

If you want to look....

Graphics site link here

Cyber safety site link here.

TCTV link here.

If Microsoft made Cars...

We have all been there.
We all know the frustration...

Learn, Create, Share

While playing with a new app on my iPad, called Grafio, I had an idea to make an info graphic about the vast range of apps, programmes and add ons we use in our "Learn, Create, Share" focus.
This does not hit everything but I think it gives an idea of all the things our students get a chance to try out while producing their work. It keeps us on our toes as teachers, keeping up with all the possibilities.

Birthday Wishes from Google...

I had to share this.
It is my birthday today and the Google logo for me when i logged in at school was cakes and when I hovered over it it, it said "Happy Birthday Karen".
How cool is that!!!!!

Rolling, rolling, rolling.....

A new year means a new roll out.
This year we have a combination of the netbooks the students own that they have come from intermediate school with and the new chrome books that new sign ups are getting.
We started working on the first set of chrome books yesterday. It was a bit more tricky than we first thought ( and involved quite a varied selection of swear words being used while setting up the first couple !!).
We had to go into the admin dashboard to find the students new Google log ons / email addresses. This then had to be put into the chrome book. To get them onto the internet at school, they all need a pre-shared key (PSK), that will tie their machine to the wireless. To do this, these psk's had to be loaded from a spreadsheet onto a usb stick, via the note app on chrome. As the chrome books don't come loaded with any software that works offline, in order to read this psk from the usb stick, it had to be online. Temporary access to the guest network had to be used, the psk put into the student wireless connection, then the guest network forgotten.
For the students who have arrived with a netbook, we need to put in a psk so they can get on out network.
We ran out of psk's and new ones of these were sent at the end of today.
I guess I know how tomorrow will be spent.
Hey ho, at the start of last year we had to sit and put the bios on and image 450 netbooks from scratch!!... this is easy compared to that job!

Having a go with the YouTube Video Editor

I have been aware of the YouTube online video editing ability since last year when I went to the Google PD day. I have had a little "play" with it, but nothing too serious.
We had our Powhiri at school this week for the new staff and students and I shot a bit of video as well  as taking the usual photographs. I usually use my MacBook to edit videos on iMovie, but i decided this time to have a proper go using the YouTube editor.
It took quite a while to upload the footage to Google. I decided to keep those files as private, so no one could see the unedited version of anything. The editing itself was very easy. Trimming the ends of clips was simple and adding a title and a fade out was easy to find. There is a basic set of tools at the moment, but it is all very easy to use and find your way around.
I am more confident now in recommending this method to staff who have no experience in editing videos. A lot of staff members mentioned making videos for their sites on their "wanting to learn" lists when polled at the end of last year.

Here is my first effort...

Starting my Class Sites

I made a decision at the end of last year that my Graphics classes this year would all be making their own sites to present their work on.  I wanted to do this so that everything they do this year will be in one place an not as separate documents etc that I have to nag them about sharing.
I made a start on this today with my Level 2 / 3 class. We made the basic site and put the pages on that they will put their project work onto.
I am thinking already that this will give them more alternatives to present their research work as they can embed so much more than the words and pictures that they have been used to.
I told them that when they shared it with me they could make me be able to view it not edit. Then after they had made them I hit them with the small piece of information that I am one of the school admins on the Google account, so I can get into anyone's site. Ha ha ha...their faces were a picture.

The list of sites on "my sites" since today has grown rather a lot !!

I am looking forward to seeing the students' Graphics work develop on their sites. It is a new way of working and presenting for them and me this year.

We have just got to convince NZQA to accept the work being submitted in this way!!

Seriously!!!

Yup...seriously...what DO these kids do with their netbooks over the holidays.
We had enough come in over last year at the ends of the two week holidays. It was always a busy first week back with repairs and re-images.
This is our first experience of having the whole school come back with their netbooks after the long summer holiday.

This is the haul for this week that has been booked in to be looked at by the tech team.

I don't know if it is just me being really fussy about how I treat my tech equipment ( you are reading the ramblings of someone who won't put her phone down unless it is in it's case or put on something softer than the table), but I really don't understand how they treat their netbooks so badly. I really think they use them as doorstops, frisbees, rugby balls etc....

This one looks like it has been a dog chew toy!!

Here we go again....

It has been an interesting week. The facilitation team is a lot bigger this year, and we were all in this week to meet some of the new members of staff. They have to get on board with the whole Google thing really quickly if they are to keep up with the students. It is a big ask, I think, but this is the way that teaching and learning is going so they may as well get on board now. We ARE the first!!
Dorothy and Fiona gave them the the whole "big picture" thing. I think it is bigger than they thought by the looks on some of their faces. It wouldn't hurt all the staff in the cluster to hear that too so they can see where they are in the whole project. It is easy to get bogged down in the little things like netbook and connection issues, students being off task, transferring all your planning to online, learning new ways to do things when you didn't want to, and everything else that keeps teachers on their toes. It is perfectly normal to stress / moan about these things, but if they could just see where we are and why we are going through these speed bumps, it might give them the perspective to not worry so much.
A great site has been set up for everyone to access, The Manaiakalani Professional Learning Network. This is for everyone to dip into and get ideas and support from. Thanks Fiona for this, and thanks to Dorothy and Fiona for an interesting and useful two days.
We spent a large part of the time working on starting sites with the new staff members so they have the basics under their belt and something to build on with their subject content. It was a good way to get to know new colleagues.
More PD planned for next week, and we also get to see the students too!! And it was soooo quiet without them.....

Open planning

While working on my Google calendar today, getting ready for next year, I found a cool little thing. I filled in lesson information into the information section on an appointment. The calendar is embedded on the Graphics site and when you click on the appointment on the embedded calendar,  it shows a pop up box with that information in for the students to see the lesson plan. I showed this to 3 different people and they all said, "oh, I already knew that!!". Gee thanks for telling me!!

This got me thinking about the whole Google sites thing we have been going through this year.

A lot of staff have had to be persuaded to open their sites to be seen by anyone with a school email address. They had previously had them private and put their students email addresses in to share just with them. A lot of staff had already opened them to the whole school. My site has always been open to the world as it has been used outside of school for example purposes. Personally, I have never had my course and lesson planning so open. It has been in folders on a shelf. It has been saved in folders on my school computer log on. It has been looked at by me, a HOD, maybe a member of management occasionally. Now, it is on the open internet for anyone to look at who wants to, both at school and anywhere else. I don't know why this has suddenly dawned on me today, as I was starting to put more detailed lesson planning on the calendars. Am I bothered? No not really, but I now understand the reluctance of those members of staff that must have realised this small point WAY earlier than me. Coming to terms with sharing and having it all "out there" in a totally non judgmental way is part of the whole thing we are going through at the moment. 

That was a long favor!!

I spent quite some time today doing a favor for a fellow member of staff. Mr T has his workbooks that his students go through in PDF format, which he prints out as a booklet for them to fill in. He was not convinced of the way Google docs was going to work for him, as they have to fill in activities in the workbooks, and the conversation has been going various directions for a while now.
I offered to make one of his booklets a Google doc for him to see what it would be like, so he sent along the PDF.
Just straight uploading to google drive was no good, as it was pretty to look at but not able to be written in.
I had both my Google doc and the pdf open side by side, and was copying and pasting a section at a time. This was not the easy job that it sounds as all the lovely formatting in the pdf disappears as it is copied over. It was called a variety of interesting names today as I had to reformat the whole lot to make it look like the original. The original booklet also had lots of nice pictures in it, so the "shift, command, 4" got used a lot on my mac today, to take some nice sectional screen shots.
Two and a half periods later, it was finished. This is just one standard!!!
When I shared it back to Mr T, I made sure he remembered that I like mint chocolate :D

Dear Google, please make it easier to load up PDF documents to Google drive so they are editable!!!

Google Plus at School

Google plus has not previously been available in schools. When we got the word through that it was now there to turn on if we wanted it, some thought had to go into it. We have had lots of staff discussion regarding Facebook, so is this just going to be another one to worry about? It was decided to   turn it on for the staff and not the students at the moment, so we can have a play, get out heads round it and then have a more informed chat about access for students into the new year. Is it going to be a good communication method with individual classes that we can put in "circles" or will it be a great place to waste time? Personally, I am interested in Google events on Google Plus, as a place to do group research on topics and share everyone's input.
We shall see.