Category: Digital Learning and Teaching

enhancing learning and teaching with digital

Planning with Microsoft O365 (This is Digital)

Microsoft O365 has a range of tools and apps that can be used to support planning digitally:

  • Forms
  • Whiteboard
  • OneDrive 
  • Teams

Forms can be used to create forms for evaluation and polls or quizzes for assessment and feedback. Engage with your learners and use their ideas to plan better learning.

O365 Whiteboard allows you to share ideas with pre-made mind-mapping layouts and post-it notes

O365 Teams allows you to work together by sharing files or with video calls

O365 OneDrive can be used to create and collaborate on documents together.

male and female teacher holding devices

Evaluating Use of Digital to Enhance Learning and Teaching (Features of Highly Effective Learning, Teaching and Assessment in Schools)

This document aims to support educators in evaluating their use of digital to enhance learning and teaching. It takes features of How Good is Our School and exemplifies how digital can be used to enhance features of effective learning and teaching.

This document is part of a series, view the other documents here: Digital Literacy Series

  back to Enhancing Learning with Digital

Christmas Activity Booklets for Early, First and Second Level – North Lanarkshire Digital Pathfinders

The North Lanarkshire Digital Pathfinder Team have created these digital Christmas Activity Booklets for Early, First and Second level.

Book Creator was used to create the booklets as it allows children to access the books independently at home or in school. The booklets are a more sustainable method to accessing a range of Christmas activities across the curriculum and can help to reduce photocopying. The learners have enjoyed using this resource as it allows them to engage with different digital media. The booklets also provide the opportunity for the learner to consolidate their digital skills and use personalisation and choice when completing the activities.

Assessing Numeracy and Maths with Forms

Forms can be used to create Quizzes (which allow assessment and feedback) or Forms (which collect information, such as evaluations). They can contain text, images and videos, which makes them engaging and accessible to more learners. A Quiz can also be set with correct answers and this will automatically assess and provide feedback to learners, which is ideal for metacognition. They are easy to duplicate and share between staff which can support moderation, ensure assessment is proportional and comparable between classes or levels.

cyber in numeracy and mathematics

Cyber in Numeracy and Mathematics

Mind Your Money

 

When so much spending is done online, or digitally even when in-store, surely it makes sense that we explore how cyber resilience can help us look after our finances? The UK Strategy for Financial Wellbeing aims for more ‘children and young people getting a meaningful financial education’ and we believe that cyber resilience forms a significant part of this.

This presentation explores the links between financial education and cyber resilience and ideas, such as:

  • explore how to make better spending decisions
  • understand how advertisers and influencers encourage us to spend our money
  • learn effective strategies to keep our money as safe and secure as possible

By taking the time to understand how children and young people spend their time and money online, while reflecting on their own online habits, practitioners can make learning more reflective and representative of what their learners experience. By linking these curricular areas, the learning becomes more engaging, relevant and realistic.

Cryptography


Cryptography
is the study of constructing and analysing protocols that prevent third parties or the public from reading private messages. Encryption is used to secure our digital devices and services – whether that’s passwords, emails or social media – it takes information or data and disguises (encrypts) it, so that only the person who is supposed to access it can (be decrypting).

This wakelet contains links to cryptography resources that may be engaging for learners in numeracy and mathematics, computing science or social studies contexts – for example, Alan Turing and the mathematicians at Bletchley Park who decrypted hidden messages during WWII.

There are lots of other examples of encryption and cyphers throughout history – do you know of any?

 

cris across the curriculum

CRIS Across the Curriculum: literacy, numeracy and HWB

The internet and interconnected devices play such an important part in all of our lives. Therefore, it’s more important than ever that we help our children and young people stay as safe and as secure as possible. Below are links to ideas for embedding CRIS across different areas of the curriculum, such as literacy, maths and health and wellbeing.

Digital Quality Assurance of National Qualifications

This post outlines one possible digital solution for a quality assurance process when reviewing leaner evidence.

Using Microsoft Teams and OneNote, learner evidence can be curated and shared with peers. Discussion around learner evidence can be done asynchronously or live, with the results of the discussion recorded in text, video or voice notes.  Every member of the team will be able to access the record of quality assurance to enable them to make judgements about their own learners.

An interactive summary of this suggested process can be downloaded here.

Quality Assuring Senior Phase Learner Evidence

Step 1- Identify Staff Groups

Identify a group of teachers who will work together to quality assure evidence.  Example groupings might be

  • trios of subject departments from across a local authority or regional improvement collaborative
  • a group of single teacher department from across a local authority.

It is likely to be more manageable to limit the number of staff per group.

If possible, when creating groups of staff, distribute staff/departments who are experienced with SQA marking appropriately.

Step 2 – Set up a PLC Team in Microsoft Teams.

One person from each group sets up a team and creates a OneNote notebook to host the quality assurance evidence.  A template page can be created to ensure consistency of recording evidence.  The template text used in the video can be downloaded below.

This short video outlines the process of creating a PLC Team and a structure for the Notebook. At this stage, it would be beneficial if the person creating the team and notebook had access to the OneNote desktop app in order to add Section Groups.

Download the NQ template text

A note about the welcome page – you may wish to add some instructions, links to SQA understanding standards documentation for your subject, or embed the adding learner content (below) videos on the welcome page.

Useful SQA links include

Understanding Standards www.understandingstandards.org.uk

NQ21 pages  to keep up to date  https://www.sqa.org.uk/sqa/95157.html

Step 3 – Invite/share the team code with the group of teachers

At this point, learner evidence can be uploaded.  This can be done by individual teachers. However, it may be that a nominated person from each department uploads content onto individual pages.

In the first instance, you may want to focus on just one area / topic / unit.  For example, Folio from Higher English.

How to add learner content to page

You may be in the position where you have multiple paper based pieces of evidence for a learner.  For example and exam script. If you have a mobile device, you can use the OneDrive and OneNote apps to combine multiple photos of that into a single PDF and insert it into a OneNote page.

Step 4 – Carrying out Quality Assurance activities

Once the notebook is populated with learner evidence and each page is named appropriately, staff can then carry out QA activities.  This can be done during live meetings of the group where breakout rooms could be utilised and each breakout room is allocated a set number of pages to discuss. Alternatively, the group can agree who will quality assure what pages by a set date and this can be done individually.

Some examples can be downloaded below

Download Example Use Cases

In recent webinars, these use cases were summarised and presented as a set of slides.  You can get these slides below

Quality Assurance Presentation from webinars

Notes about learner evidence

OneNote allows us to store a wide variety of media on each page.  It is important to mindful about data protection and copyright.

  • Ensure that learners cannot be identified – remove any personally identifiable content eg names from images, documents etc
  • If using video content. do not embed videos where a pupil is visible. In these cases, you can play the video in a live meeting, have the QA discussion and record the outcome in OneNote.  You should make a note on the document that this has happened
  • Video content such as a walkaround of a product that pupil has created can be stored on pages, as long as it is anonymous as with photo/text based content.
  • If you are using assessment materials that have been commercially created, do not upload them to the pages.

In Practice

This an example of how the West Lothian English Network are using this method to quality assure evidence of National Qualifications.

Assessment within Literacy and English

The videos on this page demonstrate some approaches to formative assessment and feedback with digital tools in Literacy and English learning. These approaches could be adapted to other subjects and we would welcome examples of this Get Involved – DigiLearn (glowscotland.org.uk)

There are a number of virtual whiteboard/notebook tools within Glow and these are useful tools for learners to demonstrate their knowledge and understanding – making them effective assessment opportunities.

We presented a webinar on the use of digital tools and platforms to support online learning and this segment looks at learning activities that could be delivered remotely and how this can be assessed and feedback delivered.

This video demonstrates the use of Jamboard to capture learners’ knowledge and understanding in an online reading context. The Jamboard allows use of ‘sticky notes’ which help learner organiser their ideas alongside others’. The text in this example is a film from the Screening Shorts catalogue available through Glow. 

This segment explores the use of G Suite and Classroom apps to deliver, assess and provide feedback on literacy and English learning.

In this video, Susan, a teacher from Glasgow, explains how she uses Forms to check learners’ understanding and then build on that to develop their knowledge.

This video looks at how OneNote could be used for online literacy and English learning, particularly around note-making, and how the educators can assess and provide feedback on this.

This video looks at how Jamboard could be used for online literacy and English learning, particularly around note-making, and how the educators can assess and provide feedback on this.

Assessment within Numeracy and Mathematics

The videos on this page demonstrate some approaches to formative assessment and feedback with digital tools in Numeracy and Mathematics learning. These approaches could be adapted to other subjects and we would welcome examples of this Get Involved – DigiLearn (glowscotland.org.uk)

There are a number of virtual whiteboard/notebook tools within Glow and these are useful tools for learners to demonstrate their knowledge and understanding – making them effective assessment opportunities.

 

This is an example of how O365 OneNote could be used with learners to demonstrate their understanding of number, using virtual manipulatives and annotating their thinking on their whiteboard.

Part 1 – We delivered this workshop on how to transfer Concrete Pictorial Abstract numeracy and maths teaching practice to the online environment. CPA can be supported effectively with interactive manipulatives and whiteboard/notebook tools.

Part 2 – This video demonstrates the concepts in Part 1 using Jamboard and OneNote to capture assessment evidence.

O365 also has another dedicated whiteboard tool, separate from OneNote, and this can be used in Teams calls to share thinking and understanding. The whiteboards are automatically saved in your OneDrive and can be edited and annotated to provide feedback to learners.

Book Creator is a platform external to Glow but can be effective for capturing learners’ thinking and allows them to create a meaningful end product to showcase their learning. However, it can be added to in an ongoing basis which makes it effective for formative assessment.

Assignments

Assignments are a useful tool for effective assessment. They allow the educator to make clear the learning activities and instructions, including all relevant resources in one place, and enabling learners to respond in a variety of ways with different tools. These assignments can then be posted or shared to communication channels, such as Teams and Classroom, making them easy to access for learners.

Being digital means that it easy for learners to submit learning, the educator to assess it and add feedback then return it, and for the learner to make changes to improve it before submitting for further assessment. Assignments also allow the educator to keep track of all learners’ submissions in one place and to easily track progress with at-a-glance data.

 

Assignments, on both platforms, can contain:

  • Title
  • Instructions – perfect place to explain learning intentions and success criteria, as well as instructions
  • Materials – you can add web links, videos, documents (O365 and G Suite)
  • Rubrics – excellent for making success criteria and feedback clear and transparent for learners
  • Scheduling – time and date to be set and completed
  • Pupils – whole class or individuals only

Assignments using Teams

Assignments using Classroom

More with Assignments on Teams