magazine.T4L Issue 23

Director’s welcome

With a few small tweaks, you could change up your assessment and tailor your feedback to be even more personalised. The good news is that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. In this issue, we step you through some of the new features in your favourite tools you use everyday.

Got a tip to share with us or a sample of student work? We’d love to hear from you.

Linda Lazenby Director, Digital Teaching and Learning

About magazine.T4L

This magazine is produced by Technology 4 Learning (T4L) at the Information Technology Directorate with the NSW Department of Education. This magazine is created on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation.

Teacher feature

Meet Chris Dodds, Digital Learning Advisor

Hello Chris. Tell us about your role!

I‘m currently a Digital Learning Advisor with the Rural Access Gap program (best job in the world!). My job takes me to schools across NSW.

Give us an insight into your teaching journey...

I’ve been teaching for 12 years... and counting! I achieved my accreditation at Highly Accomplished in 2020. I was already supporting other teachers in my school to improve student outcomes. I thought the accreditation process would be an excellent way of formalising what I was already doing. Achieving accreditation at the higher levels has opened doors for me and has allowed me to make a larger impact on students and staff across NSW. I am now in a position where I can assist other people on their accreditation journey.

Contributors

Editorial Director

Linda Lazenby Editor

Yvette Poshoglian

Co-writers

Joachim Cohen, Sandy Phillips Designer Aditi Verma

What do you wish you’d known about tech in the DoE in the beginning?

I wish that I had known where to access information about all the tools that were available to me at the time I first started. The stem.T4L resources and the learning library challenges are fantastic!

What have you been working on lately?

I’ve created a learning tool called ‘How cool is my school’, designed for use with the 360 camera and VR headset. Students devise a survey using Microsoft or Google Forms to discover the amazing things about their school, then plan and create a virtual tour using Situ 360 and the 360 camera. They can then reimagine their school using CoSpaces and showcase their creations. Try

Artwork created by Suzanna, a student from Boggabilla Central School on Gamilaraay Country. It represents themes of community, school, friendship and family.

T4L LOVES

T4L Kids gets sporty

Explore how training and tech work in tandem with our cover star - world champion wheelchair racer Madison de Rozario in the latest issue of T4L Kids. The sports issue of T4L kids includes four sporting + tech challenges for Stages 3-4 including links, resources and teachers’ notes.

The Virtual Staffroom

Craving an edu podcast with fascinating guests, tech talk and plenty of resources?

Subscribe to T4L’s The Virtual Staffroom – new episodes coming from Week 3 of Term 2!

DoE design thinking

Explore and embed the department’s design thinking model in your planning and lessons. This page includes downloadable posters for your staff or faculty room.

Beginning Teacher Information Hub

Visit the Hub - a great location with guided links to support, guide and orientate teachers in their first two years of teaching.

Universal Resources Hub

Share and access quality teaching and learning resources for your classroom, mapped to your teaching and learning cycle or your school’s success model. Find the Universal Resources Hub on your portal.

Beginning teacher tip

Don’t

create everything from scratch! There are plenty of links to resources here to help you on the journey

- Michael West, Digital Learning Advisor

Streamlining feedback and assessment

Term 2 is a busy time - reports are upon us and parent teacher interviews are just around the corner. Let’s streamline and enhance some of these processes for you!

Microsoft OneNote

Why use OneNote for feedback and assessment? Its immediacy is a gamechanger and its collaborative nature allows for great dialogue between student and teacher.

Give voice feedback

Give annotated and personalised feedback with the pen feature

View all students’ work at a glance

Explore these quick videos to further investigate these features.

Microsoft Forms

MS Forms automates many of the feedback processes and allows you to gather data immediately to identify problem areas and set appropriate tasks.

Discover the power of the Math tool with equations editor and autosuggestions

Quiz tool for automarking is a timesaver collate data

Linked spreadsheets allow for data manipulation Helpful webinars

Discover 15 tips on Forms in 15 minutes with this helpful webinar.

Google Forms

Using Google Forms for feedback and assessment? Create and share online forms, surveys and quizzes to easily collate and track responses and results.

Integrate Google Forms into lessons to support students to collect data related to an area of study or interest

Explore new features such as retaining content and autosave

Google Forms

Originality reports

Check students’ work for plagiarism in seconds or get students to run this report on their own work before submission.

Compare student work against web pages and books with a single click

Avoid manual searches for web matches

Use on an unlimited number of assignments in Google Classroom – watch this demo

Explore these quick videos to further investigate these features.

Google Classroom

Originality Reports

Assignments in MS Teams

Creating assignments keeps your learning and assessment centralised in one location. Design, develop and deliver tasks digitally to all students in minutes.

Differentiate tasks by assigning different work or attachments to individual students

Create a rubric to link to your assignments to mark student work quickly

View student progress at a glance or assign self-marking quizzes

Assignments in Teams

Explore Assignments in Teams and watch a mini course at Microsoft Learn

Learn how to assign, collect and provide feedback all within Google Classroom

Apple Classroom

If you have iPads, it might be time to fully explore the functions of Apple Classroom. This classroom management tool allows you to:

Monitor student progress in an instant, guide students quickly and effectively - you can see their screens

Watch student progress in realtime

Direct students to apps and lock devices when needed

Watch this video to explore the features of Apple Classroom.

Google Forms offers teachers the ability to design customised, self-grading assessments, allowing us to provide instantaneous feedback.

- Zrinka Krisovic, Digital Learning Advisor

Image credit: Apple

Get creative with assessment!

Try mixing up your forms of assessment with some of these great tools and push

Design with Minecraft Education GREAT FOR Student collaboration, design thinking, creativity, synthesis

Curriculum connections:

HSIE, Geography, English, Science, Mathematics, Visual Arts

Create with Google Sites Communication, collaboration, publishing GREAT FOR

Curriculum connections: English, HSIE, Science, Geography

Prototype with Adobe XD

Real-world skill building, design computationalthinking,thinking, collaboration GREAT FOR

Take your students’ love of Minecraft Education one step further! Why not use Minecraft worlds as an assessment space? Students can visually express their answers through their design concepts and through the use of NPCs and signposts explain and define their answers more fully. The portfolio, camera, book and quill tools can also be used to create different kinds of answers as well as support student reflection and growth. You could even utilise the signposts as your own feedback tool.

Get started: Explore the Minecraft Education intranet site and our Minecraft issue of T4L Kids

Creating a Google Site gets students collaborating, organising and embarking on the editing and publishing process. Students can work in teams to plan and create content, draft, edit and publish - just like an online news site. Students can create an informative blog, publish a school newspaper or start an information campaign using the simple drag and drop building blocks to make learning the focus. The end result is easy to share and best of all, it connects with other Google tools.

Get started: Explore the Science edition and Influencers edition of T4L Kids

Curriculum connections: Design and technology, Science, English, Visual Arts, HSIE, Technologies

Get students to protoype their ideas in an app interface using wireframes. By unpacking their ideas and presenting a synthesis of information, students will tap into their design thinking and computational thinking skills. Better yet, get them to collaborate as teams and pitch and showcase their app designs to peers as well as you. Students can preview and share in mobile devices - great real world training for the future focused workplace.

Get started: Explore the App design issue of T4L Kids and Adobe XD resources

Explore film as an assessment tool - the power of student video responses lies in their creativity.

- Geoff Childs

students to respond in different modes to demonstrate their learning.

Create a book with Canva Creativity, multimodal assessment tasks, public speaking, design, synthesis of ideas GREAT FOR

Curriculum connections:

English, CAPA, HSIE, PDHPE, Science, Technologies

Make a movie with Apple Clips

Creativity, organisational thinking, storyboarding ideas, assigning tasks, video and performance, synthesis GREAT FOR

Curriculum connections:

English, HSIE, CAPA, Science, Geography

Image credit: Apple

Publish a podcast

Real world skill building, collaboration, writing, producing, publishing GREAT FOR

Students who love to write, design or illustrate will love creating a book or interactive video presentation in Canva Explore templates to suit your assessment needs and share them with your students to get them started. Students can explore their creativity in a professional design framework. By getting them to create immersive presentations, they can further reflect on their work by using video presentation mode, or even create an interactive picture book using a storybook template.

Get started: Explore book creation with the T4L team and take it further with the T4L Kids animal issue

Why not get students to submit work in a short film format? Whether it’s informative or creative – or a combination of both – students will need to demonstrate a planned approach including storyboarding, assigning tasks and publishing. With Apple Clips they can insert title slides, special effects and then share to a camera roll then Google Drive for ease of delivery to you or the whole class.

Get started: Explore making videos with Apple’s Everyone Can Create Video on iPad guide

Increasingly, students are embracing the podcast world to demonstrate their learning. So why not encourage them to take it to the next level? Get students to assign their key roles in scripting, broadcasting and publishing an audio file/podcast for assessment. As well as demonstrating their learning, they can enhance the experience and develop further skills in production including creating stings, intro and outro music, enhancing editing and lifting production values and so much more.

Curriculum connections:

English, CAPA, HSIE, PDHPE, Geography

Get started: Try the step-by-step Student Podcaster modules with your students in Stages 2-4.

Online bookings made easy!

Are you keen to make it easy for people to lock in time with you? Perhaps you want to streamline the bookings process for parent meetings. These step-by-step videos show you how!

Take a refresher on the guidelines for using live video with students

Google Calendar bookings and Google Meet

Create appointment schedules using Google Calendar. Simply jump into Google Workspace through the Portal and use the calendar to start the process.

 Customise the length of your appointments and set your start/finish times

 Offer virtual appointments through Google Meet

 Schedule effectively for one day or have them recur each week and watch as your calendar automatically builds around your existing commitments

Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Bookings

If you use Microsoft Outlook, utilise the calendar and the Bookings system to organise your approach to busy meetings periods. There are options to set up meetings virtually through Teams or in person with parents or colleagues.

 Set custom lengths and set bookable hours to schedule effectively

 Build in buffer time to let you gather your thoughts

 Schedule effectively against your existing calendar