I am still very much a newbie with much of the Google suite because I don't use it as much with my learning impaired K kids.  So it can take me a while to find an application where I think "yes !  That will save me heaps of time !".  It's not "directly with kids" but it is something that really informs our PLC practices (and therefore kids' school experience) in Speech-Language and that's the annotated bibliography.  I found a paragraph I'd clipped from an email to a parent.  The references contained are helpful to share with my team.  So at the risk of using a very basic add-on that most people already use in their sleep, I stuck with EasyBib and used it for what appeals to me most - the journal search.

I found that it can be tricky to use Easy-Bib if the reference you want is a book chapter because then the citation isn't really a "journal" yet isn't the "book" either.  I solved that in this trial annotated biblio-paragraph by just adding the book title in the within-text citation. So it's something I will play around with more but I know my team (who do a lot of journal article reading) will all go "Oh wow" when I show them this and it will make my sharing of Evidence Based Practice resources sooo much easier.

Despite being such a beginner I've taken away ideas from every week of this course.  It's been great learning.

Supporting students who have language impairments

Most of my students have specific difficulties understanding and interpreting information when it's presented verbally.  The "longer and more wordy" explanations given to students who miss it the first time generally leave them even more confused.  So YouTube is  - to me as a therapist - far more than entertainment.  It's a window into visually supported concept development for those who need it most.

I'm looking forward to using it more often and using it more effectively.

Exploring the world and the curriculum with Google Earth

I don't miss seasons while living in Singapore, since I didn't grow up with them.  But I do sometimes miss walking around in quaint Victorian streetscapes, which are plentiful around my house in inner city Melbourne.

This is a streetview screenshot of the Primary School just up from my house. It's a beautiful old Victorian building - which probably doesn't lend itself to educational progressiveness, but is certainly beautiful.

I'm finding I use Google Earth to review with my learning impaired students, things they didn't understand when the teacher was presenting the information in class.  But today it led to a flurry of excited questions such as "...then where is Spain?" (because that's where Real Madrid come from !) and "..is that bigger than Russia ?" (where Mom comes from).  It was great to see the kids so engaged while still reviewing curriculum.

Sheets to mange all that data !

We have SO much data we collect on student progress and because many of our support services students are multi-year intervention kids, it's going to be helpful to be able to track their performance changes across a year and - ideally - across several years, on the one sheet.  I chose to create a sheet this week - even though I like the idea of forms better -  because I (embarrassingly) usually tabulate this kind of data by hand which really limits the ways I can examine and re-examine the data, and/or makes the accumulated data unfeasibly large when I need to examine multi-year outcomes across several cohorts.  Sheets promise to help me arrange information in far more productive ways.  I've done a baby-sized outcome sheet to get me started:

 I am a "newbie" at much of Google because I don't use it with my student population much.  So when I needed to know basics like how to write a new blog post or embed a screen shot (or even take one !) I was somewhat reassured to find the colleagues I asked this week weren't always sure either. Made me feel less "behind" !

I really liked the idea of color coding my Google drive folders.  I've decided that "red" folders will be "the folders where work exists you have not yet completed" - so it's for student IEPs, reports and so on.   The "orange" folders will be for uncompleted work that's at least "on it's way", so our ongoing PLC work and my PGE.  The green will be for things that don't need a panic button right now.

So: Before -

and after:

That's not rocket science - or even a proper exploration of the huge range we covered last week - but it's a start and I'm really pleased that in the process I have also learned how to create new blog posts (I know - baby steps) and embed a screenshot !  I can see myself mining these google slides for ideas for at least the next 12 months, so I guess I don't need to master it all, *right* now.

Search skills - not just for students !

I already felt that search skills were important for students, and if anything, even moreso for teachers and staff because without the ability to limit and specify what you search for, how can you critically evaluate the quality of the information you find ?  I learned how to limit searches, find resources helpfully created by others and how to save myself $600 on airfares (thanks !!).  But what I mostly learned is that I need time.  If "you just need to play around with it" is the key, I need to try and find that time in my day.  Because it's not there now and not having the time to explore beyond the nuts and bolts of I.T that are essential for my job means I am not developing flexibility in I.T use....and that's the real reason I joined this after school class.....