Autocrat: The Return of the Moustache

This is the fourth (and final for a while) session in The LOFT that focusses on productivity. It's the beginning of the year and there are tasks to do right? Well...here we are and again proud to present another 9 sessions for teachers at Singapore American School. 

Session Goal: 

Introduce Autocrat, or
Retrain users in how to use Autocrat

for…

Creating individual documents for Parent Conferences (the ‘just in time’)
Use in the classroom (potential for your students)

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1SCbZQCotsUWeBGHvNOm63UfiMhvRdhH065ExVYw3cFI

Google Photos Three Ways: PD Session

We ran a Professional Development in The LOFT back in April. The session, we discovered, was a little overcooked. Many teachers had difficulty using the resources we had spent many hours preparing...however, we've used this feedback to come back with something simpler and better!

The idea of this session is to assist teachers to publish photos as easily as possible. So we offer 3 ways to do it. 

1. Create 1 big album in Google Photos and store all photos there. A link gets added to the blog that takes readers to Google Photos.

2. Create individual albums and either create a text or thumbnail that links to Google Photos. 

3. Embed albums (use embed.ly if doing this on a blog, or Insert Album if using Google Sites). 

Google Tips and Tricks for Admin! And other amazing information they should know

This 1 hour session is presented 'by request' and the following slidedeck represents some of the issues we see coming down the road at us when we arrive in the room!

These slides will be updated after the session and we hope it serves as a useful resource for our intended audience as well as anyone else out there looking for this type of thing.

#schoolstarts Tech Survival for new Faculty to get you started.

Welcome to the start of the 1617 year! This is a post that stands in support of a session we are presenting to all new Elementary Faculty. It's therefore a survival guide for those new to Singapore American School.

SAS teachers can also access our Technology Orientation document, the content of which we are confident will be extremely helpful.

1. Getting Started. Transitioning from Picasa Web Albums to Google Photos.
2. Creating. Turning pictures into animations, stories and movies.
3. Sharing. Creating and sharing photo folders with students and parents.

Google spreadsheets are often met with an amount of scepticism from teachers as the assumption is spreadsheets are complex and difficult.  The SAS ES Ed Tech Team is hoping to demystify Google Spreadsheets during our LOFT PD sessions the week of March 28th - April 1st.  These sessions are all about learning:

1. Practical classroom uses for Google spreadsheets
2. How to make your data visible with charts and graphs
3. Quick tips on user-friendly ways to view your assessment data

YouTube has long been used and valued by teachers as a valuable resource in the classroom. There are videos on every topic... But what other ways are there to use YouTube in support of learning? Welcome to this week's session where we attempt to explore that question. 

Goals:

1. Use Annotations to provide 'in-text' feedback on student work (Assessment)
2. Be highly selective about using specific parts of videos (Resources)
3. Subscribe to Channels and create playlists that organize YouTube content (Curate)

This session is hands on and participants will be engaging in each of the goals using their own YouTube account (or class account). 

This week's session in The Loft marks the beginning of our partnership with University of Northern Iowa. 

Personal Best Form 

We've all responded to a Google Form at some point. Wouldn't you love to move beyond simply data collection via survey? To something that can empower and enrich the learning of your students? Welcome then to this week's session!

In this week's Loft PD session, you will score some quick wins, and be exposed to how 'Add ons' can be used to move past mere surveys, in fact impact student learning.

What is Autocrat?

Autocrat is a mail merge 'Add-on' available in Google Sheets. Using Autocrat individual rows of data can be merged into a individual Google Doc. Which can then be filed into a designated folder of your choice. 

Goal of this session in TheLoft