Let's make the teacher wiki even more useful..

At the group session on 04 July'14, we talked about ways to re-work the staff wiki. 

Teachers at Lalor have put PLENTY of effort into sharing ideas and resources, and these resources are all shared under teacher names. However, when we look for useful ideas & activities, we're more likely to search by theme, certificate module or language skill.

So we thought, let's try collecting resources by theme, and see if that could be more useful. We decided to start with just one theme, and thought that FOOD would be the best place to start.

Suggestion for your collaboration

1) The idea: each teacher gathers 1-3 tasks, activities or resources relating to the theme of FOOD (and 4 other themes - see quiz below)

• share your activities or resources up on the teacher wiki page on food (direct link), 
• in the right level
• with some helpful description for other teachers

Notes from July sessions - from staff wiki to cloud storage

So we had another session during the July break. A huge thanks to the dedicated folk who made it in to share ideas and resources. We talked about useful sites online, how to share resources better, ideas for student and teacher wikis and more. I'll put up some brief notes here.. if you want more details on anything, get in touch or leave a comment.

Great suggestions:

• Use the teacher wiki for sharing resources focussed on a theme, rather than each teacher! We tossed up some themes people have in common, decided to focus on FOOD.. and that's our task for the month. More on this very soon. 
• Wiki: put a link to the staff wiki on the new website, for easy access.

Can you help? people are searching for:

• internet resources focussing on numeracy (Paula)
• video quiz tool (Michael).

Useful sites people have used in the classroom:

Working with images and layout (in microsoft word)

Spent some time last week working with Violeta, who wanted to teach her students about the basics of layout. We started off with putting images on the page. The main issue here of course, is that there are so many different applications, and each has a slightly different way of working with images.

So we chose to look at microsoft word, and the basic way of inserting a photo from the "Insert Menu".

You can insert a photo from within the application, or you can drag the photo across from a file manager (eg windows explorer).

I have followed up with a help file, intended to be easy-to-read. Actually I'm very happy with the file, because it's the first time I've managed to "screen-grab" all those different cursors in word. One of the hardest things to explain is how the cursor changes when you move the mouse. Hopefully this document will help with that.

You can use this with students - let me know how it goes, via the comments below.

• Link to file here (pdf, 1mb).