Cyber Safety

As our school's ICT leader, cyber safety is always a major consideration and priority. Our school has began 1:1 Chromebooks for Grade 5/6 students this year and has subsequently reinforced the need to "bolster" our approach to cyber safety......bring in Susan McLean!

Having attended the ACMA free cyber safety evenings at 2 previous schools, we were keen to explore another option. After much research online and speaking to other school directly, we decided on paying for Susan McLean to run a student incursion and a parent information evening early in Term 1. Having seen the poor attendance at previous parent evenings for this very topic, we decided to make it a compulsory element of the students receiving their Chromebooks...funnily enough when the students knew their parent's attendance = Chromebook in their hands that same week- we had a 100% parent attendance! (hint: we also offered free babysitting and screening of Frozen so parents had no excuse)

Susan's proudly states that she doesn't "sugar coat" the message, she tells it how it is. With her experience in the Police force and broadly in cyber safety education, she has anecdotes to share to reinforce all of her messages. In short, the kids were blown away and parents were too! Our principal and I have received overwhelmingly positive feedback from parents both on the night and in the week since..."it was confronting but what we needed", "I guess I just didn't know those apps existed", "it's fantastic that all the parents now have the same message and can act together", "we will be making a few changes at home immediately".

We surveyed the students (click here to see the survey) a week after the incursion to get some feedback...the results were very encouraging!

Anyone interested in more information, I'm happy to discuss our experiences: 
Marty- mmcgauran@hfmw.catholic.edu.au

Can highly recommend Susan McLean: http://www.cybersafetysolutions.com.au/

Google Forms in Schools

Google Forms are an often underused element of the Google Apps for Education suite. Here I will share 3 different examples that I have played with in my primary classroom.

Student Peer Feedback
As part of our oral language curriculum, students present fortnightly presentations to the class on a range of topics. There are a number of elements that we have focused on and following on from just having teacher assessment, we created as a class, the following Google Form as a peer assessment rubric. Students (with 1:1 devices), would complete the survey following the presentation, providing immediate feedback to the presenter.
*I initially created the template and then each student would create a copy, and share their link on the day of their talk. This way the feedback was only viewable by the presenter (owner).



Student Pre and Post Assessment
Thanks to Anthony Speranza (check out his great blog here) for inspiring my interest in this incredibly powerful use of Google Forms. At this stage I have only just scratched the surface, creating a pre-assessment (that will also be used as post assessment) for a 5/6 "Fractions" unit. Using Flubaroo add-on, the test is graded immediately and allows targeted teaching from the very beginning of the unit. Following the unit and with the pre and post data, effect sizes can be calculated. If this interests you, please read Anthony's blog and his slides from his presentation at ISTE 2014- it goes into great detail and truly outlines the power of Forms for a whole range of assessment- pre, post and formative.



Staff Feedback
A quick and easy way to gather feedback from staff is to design a form that can be emailed out with the click of a button. At the beginning of this year, new to my role as ICT leader and new to the school, I designed the following Form to get a snapshot of staff competencies, attitudes and uses of ICT.



I'm sure these 3 ideas are only scratching the surface of Forms and how they can be used in the school setting. Please leave comments and share any thoughts and ideas of how you have or could use Forms to enhance teaching and learning.

Presenting with Glogster (Module 5)

An exciting, engaging and super easy to use tool for presenting projects is Glogster!

*make sure you visit the EDU Glogster, not the glogster.com

Glogster is an online, interactive way to create project posters. Posters come to life by combining text, pictures, audio and video. Completed Glogs can be embedded into Google Sites (watch the how to video here). Another plus is that you can login with your Google account, therefore no separate password required (you will need to choose a unique username).

Teaching Ideas:

*Perfect for presenting projects (SOSE, Science, History etc) because it allows text, images, video and audio.

*As there is design elements in Glogster you can also assess visual art and technology if you set up the rubric and assignment focus on presentation as well as content)

*Present autobiographies.

Here is a quick one I whipped up myself & embedded into blogger:

News and Views Project

This term you will become a news blogger! 

What is that I hear you ask?

A news blogger reports the news but most importantly gives their opinion on the stories. Blogs are public pages on the web that also allow comments from other people.