Using Office Live Apps to prepare students for Controlled Assessment

I'm a big fan of allowing students to chose how they complete work. In response to this, I've found that many of our students prefer to use Microsoft Office based products rather than Google Docs. We also have the Live@Edu set up, so it makes sense to use it. In addition, in a bust secondary school with huge pressures on curriculum time, I just don't have the time to up skill students to use unfamiliar software, when it's not important to the outcome. I don't really see the point in doing so either outside of a whole school approach...

For controlled assessment practice, the limitation of not having simultaneous live edited is not an issue. I want to provide feedback to students without printing. Plus I want to be able to provide this feedback from where ever I am.

The students use the Live@Edu accounts to draft their work. Then, they share their work with me by:

Clicking on the File menu and selecting 'Share'
Entering my school email address

A work in progress can be seen above. An improvement is that I would like to see a basic 'review' menu bar as this would be preferable to using coloured text.

Comments

Year 10 need your help! Can we get Twitter and Facebook in to a GCSE project?

I’ve been told that social media has no place in the classroom. Now, this post is not to battle that argument head on. Let’s smash it. This week, Year 10 are visiting Hengistbury Head . They are investigating whether this piece of coastline should be protected. They are wondering what you think? You may know the location well, you may not know it at all. But we’d like to hear from you all the same. This will either result in some usable data and comments, or not. Either way, we'll know and I’m sure that your comments will help spark discussion in class! What would Year 10 like me to do? Just simply comment on this post or tweet me, with an answer to this question: ‘Should Hengistubury Head be protected from the Sea? Just answer Yes or No and give a brief reason. It would also be useful if you could tell us whether you know the area or not. Many thanks in anticipation…… Image – my own.

Banned Word Board

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What makes a learning experience profound? Personal reflections and possible implications for classroom practice.

I have recently begun a Leadership Pathways journey. As part of the first core day, we were asked to reflect on a profound learning experience. This got me thinking about how many profound learning experiences I have both been involved in, and how many I have been able to give to others. Our group came up with a huge long list, but these are my five. Emotional Connected Demanding Reflective Collaborative As always, these are personal thoughts and quite mixed up. I put them here so that I can look back on them (plus they’d get lost inside my world-cup-free brain) 1. Emotional I can’t think of a time where deep learning hasn’t engaged my emotions. From being awe inspired to that tingle feeling when a student gets a light bulb moment. From this-is-the-happiest-day-ever, to I-think-I’m-about-to die. How often do we engage the emotions of those we teach? Here, I would argue that having a safe learning environment i...

David Rogers

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