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

The Teacher Toolkit - Teacher Dashboard, PowerSchool and Casper Focus

Importing Parent Contacts in not many Steps

Step 1

Access your Grade Level Folder which has inside a '.csv' file inside. The folder is called 1617 #BOY #Gmail contacts and you'll find it in Shared with Me on Google Drive. Download your file to your Mac's hard drive (right-select). 



Step 2

In Gmail, change to the Contacts section:



Step 3

More > Import



Step 4

Select your downloaded CSV file



Step 5

Import!



Step 6 

Take note of your new Contact group



Step 7

Rename the Group to your 2016-17 Class Contact

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

K-2 WL teachers attended a Seesaw session in The Loft last Wednesday and began implementing this tool for students to share their learning straight away.  After testing it out with G1 and G2 students, I was so pleased to read their positive feedback.  See their comments below:

"On Thursday I did a Seesaw trial with Grade 1 kids, then checked Friday to see if there were any login, "error" issues. There were none, so I plan to use Seesaw from now on for G1 and G2. One benefit is students could easily listen to each other's work, very smooth."

"I tried it with my G1 class too. It went very well. Kids are really quick getting familiar with seesaw. Students can view each other's work which is really nice. And it's easier for me and my assistant to manage it too."

Description:

This is a session about using QR codes in the classroom. QR perform tasks that greatly exceed just taking you to a specific website. They can also trigger tasks. Indeed: of the 'barcode family', the QR is the high achiever!

Bring: 

Your iPad or smartphone.

The Seesaw app was shared with K-2 WL teachers as an excellent option for students to be able to share their learning with teachers. The mandarin and spanish teachers loved how easy it was to setup a class and then share a QR code with your students so they could start creating straight away.

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