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.

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David Rogers

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