A wonderful project at Community West in St Albans, where Dinna Tayao has invited teachers to join a weekly session of exploration and sharing.
I went out to visit Dinna and her team of investigating educators. They have been running a fantastic in-house exploration of all kinds of e-learning.
Each week one teacher explores a new strategy, software or other resource, evaluates its usefulness in class with students, and then reports back to the other teachers. 2 hours a week. They’ve had visiting expert speakers as well. Brilliant work from Dinna and the teachers at Community West. What a great job they are doing.
One teacher had researched the idea of using powerpoint to engage students in the colour, language and meaning of signs. What impressed me most was the way she had given such close attention to noticing how the students responded at each stage.
*Question of the Week*
I showed the teachers at Community West how google docs/ drive can work for collaborative writing. There was some enthusiasm around its potential, and also some reservation around the complication of requiring a login (too challenging for lower levels).
And a great question from one of the teachers: tell us who’s been using this, and how?
[Oh no, did I really turn up without any case studies in hand? Yeh, I don’t think they were too impressed actually, and fair enough.]
So who can tell us of some great examples or case studies of teaching and learning with google docs? Please add your thoughts in the comments below.
I read this AFTER I answered your previous blog post:-)
I'll keep you informed as to how my students manage to edit the Google doc (it's not really shared is it, if they don't sign in – they'll be contributing as 'anon' users, which could be a little risky in a conventional class). I agree with those teachers you write about – signing in to something is proving to be the hardest thing for them!