Reflecting with the Middle School

Many of us like our students to reflect on the way they learn. It would be even more powerful if the reflections they do in different classes were all collected together in one place. We can do this now! It's often referred to as an e-portfolio.

Building on a great initiative from our Music, Theatre and Visual Arts colleagues, now all MS students have a blog in which they can write; make links; post images; embed audio or video. They then label the blogpost with the name of the subject and the blog will create a tab which collects all of their posts from just that subject.

For the students, it can be a very helpful tool for improving their learning skills. As we work to find a better LMS (which would hopefully include this sort of portfolio), we are keen that the skills the students are learning while blogging will be transferred to the new system (and the blogposts too).

If you would like to learn how to use this tool with your MS classes, please let Steve or Becky know and we will be happy to show you and visit your class to help you implement it.

Here is a short video showing how it works.

Sharing is caring

Dear all,

I enjoyed meeting my colleagues during the meetings on Wednesday. We were talking about a great way to share resources with classes: organising them in Google Drive, but accessible through the LMS. Here are the slides explaining how to use a Google Drive folder to share documents with students via the LMS.

Also, I mentioned in one session that it is possible to edit one's MS Word and Powerpoint files within Google Drive so that there is no more upload and replace file misery. I have now tried this out and it works though the edits are only simple; you can't edit images for example. If you want to investigate this, watch this video:

I am happy to walk you through this if you want; at first it seemed not to work, but it does and it's fine.

Steve