Today was the third annual Curriculum Planning Day for the Geography department. These days are designed to enable the team to construct the curriculum.
This post will outline some of the tools that were used during the day.
Any day that the team are together, whether it be an off-site planning day like this one, or a residential, there is always the opportunity to strengthen the team.
We used two collaborative tools today: Microsoft’s Office Live Apps and, an old favourite, Google Docs. They were used for two reasons, the first was to familiarise the who department with how the tools could be used with pupils, and because I think that it’s a nice way to work (okay, I just lose paper!).
Office Live a a recent innovation. Through the Skydrive I created a shared folder:
This contained all of the documents needed for the day. I prefer using Office Apps because more people are familiar with the layout of Office documents. With some of the team with relatively low ICT experience, and others that were new to the school and our way of working, this familiarity gave them confidence that the unfamiliar world of Google Docs doesn’t.
However, there is a major drawback as Office Live does not support real-time collaboration.
This wasn’t a problem for some of the tasks – we wrote one of the Guerrilla Geography units together, and then paired off to write the remaining two. The documents were then uploaded. This worked well as we were all physically in the same room, but real collaboration would have proven difficult if this wasn't’ the case
When we did want to collaborate in real-time and online, I reverted to using the tried and tested Google Docs. It was important that the team had time to reflect upon the training they would need in order to support the new activities. A Google Doc was used and the team entered in their training needs. This allows me, as head of department, to coordinate and put together a training programme that makes good used of the department’s existing skills set.
The document was then downloaded and added to the Skydrive. I decided on this because:
- As mentioned above, all of the team were much happier using the interface of Office Live. I’d rather spend time on developing pedagogy than training staff to do fairly straightforward tasks. I think that it makes sense to use my teams existing skills than to replicate them in another system. In addition, the school has just gone down the Live@Edu route.
- All of the department already had Windows Live sign ins.
- Windows live provides 25GB of free storage space. At the moment, Dropbox (a tool that I love) is used to store and share all of our curriculum resources (those that we don’t want on the VLE). However, Dropbox costs and I think tat it’s unfair to expect staff to pay.
Overall, this is a great example of using a range of tools, from different providers, in order to reach a good learning outcome
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