Gretchen's learning

 After seeing what offerings were available in our online Term 3 Toolkits - I decided I'd use some of this lockdown learning time to upgrade my skills with sheets. The first toolkit Dave offered was Autocrat to Automate. Autocrat is an add-on for google sheets. It's a mail merge tool that takes raw data from sheets and merges it into docs, slides etc. that could be used for personalised letters, certificates etc. In this video Dave shared, Eric Curtis uses Autocrat to show how easy it is to generate certificates for his webinars. He has a google form (which includes participants name, email and a quiz) which is completed by participants that populates the sheet. He had a template certificate ready in docs for those that passed and a template letter ready for those that did not pass. Using Autocrat, you can insert text, hyperlinks and also images (by inserting a web address that points to an image). He shows how he can set rules in Autocrat so that those who pass would get email...

 We signed up for a free maths PLD offering that was shared on the NZ Maths Facebook page. I am doing this PLD with Sam. So far we've had one zoom hui, with another second one scheduled this week. We were also very fortunate to be able to spend a full day with Rob at our school. In addition to this, there is a series of zoom webinars on offer on Thursday afternoons. The notes below are from a Zoom webinar he and Jenny Ward presented last week on assessment. Rob has been prompting us to think about what are we assessing, whether our current assessments are sufficient and a good use of teacher and student time, and how we can formatively assess more effectively. Assessment tools are useful but take much time. If these (above) are the 'need to know' concepts for by the end of Number/Algebra Level 2, how could we use formatively assess these? Also in our current assessments - do we have evidence of all of these concepts - or will next years teacher find gaps? What can we do to ...

 How can we increase student voice using Seesaw? one thing we could do would be to set up an activity asking children what they thought of our fun run? Was it fun? What ideas could make it better? This could be multimodal and include drawings, labels, speech, photos etc. It would be valuable and useful feedback for planning future events.