Facilitating Professional Development

Introduction to Microsoft Forms @ Secondary

I was asked to provide training to secondary teachers around what Microsoft Forms is and how they could implement forms in their own departments. I then did a follow up session looking deeper in to the more advanced functions such as formulas, branching and inserting media.

The staff seemed to get a lot out of the session and I even got to witness my training being used first hand in the PE department. Teachers had created a form that contained images and videos that showed individual skills and pupils had to comment on the form used by the
individual being videoed or pictured. This assessment data allowed teachers to easily see who could identify the correct skill form and who needed some extra support.

Introduction to Online Learning Journals on Microsoft Sway

A lot of schools in North Lanarkshire use ‘Learning Journals’ for pupils to save and share work from nursery through to primary 7. These can sometime be pricey and establishments were looking for other ways to record and share learning.

One way I introduced to my cluster schools and nurseries was by using Microsoft Sway. Sway allows the learners to insert text, images, video, sound and files in to the presentation. This can also be shared privately via email to the parents and they can go on to their designated parent comment area to add any comments if they wish.

Staff really engaged in this training and utilised the training instantly by sharing their newfound knowledge to their primary seven classes. The primary 7 pupils then shared their knowledge with learners in primary 1-3 to support them creating and adding content to the Sway.

NL Presents This is Computing Science @ Primary & Scratch CLPL – Colleagues

The NL Digital School team expanded and we gained more colleagues to help support North Lanarkshire’s teachers in all things digital learning, teaching and assessment. As part of their induction I provided training on Scratch coding and general computing science platforms and resources.

This was hugely beneficial as some colleagues had never done any kind of coding before or had only used follow along videos or resources previously. This training provided an introduction to computational thinking skills and how they can be adapted to fit across Curriculum for Excellence.