Master Microsoft Forms for Teaching, Learning & Assessment: Online Course

With the ever increasing growth of digital learning in schools, colleges and universities I have created a course to assist teachers and educators to get the very best out of Microsoft Forms. 

The aim is to enable teachers and educators to become so familiar with MS Forms that it transforms teaching, develops students’ learning, and assists with student assessment. All with the overall aim of supporting students to achieve their absolute best.

I wanted to spend a little time here letting you know about my online course entitled Master Microsoft Forms for Teaching, Learning and Assessment. 

Unlike other books or guides which look mainly at the functionality of MS Forms the course takes a deep dive, approaching the use of MS Forms through the eyes of the educator, promoting understanding of the student’s perspective, as well as what quizzes look like ‘behind the scenes’, how to mark and grade quizzes and how to provide feedback to students before posting them their results.

Here’s what you’ll learn on the course:

• How to create, edit, copy & distribute quizzes to students & colleagues
• How to create many different kinds of questions, including Maths, Ranking & Likert Scale questions
• How to copy, delete, shuffle & move questions
• How to give an extra dimension to your questions by adding images & videos
• How to use the amazing Immersive Reader
• How to use branching to support student learning
• How to create & view File Upload questions
• How to manage settings, give feedback & print quizzes
• How to manually mark quizzes & access summaries of students’ responses
• How to promote meta-cognition, retrieval practice & spaced learning

There’s a ton of extra stuff too!

When you enrol on the course, you’ll get access to a 60+ page e-book which includes all the written key takeaways that you’ll see in each tutorial. As well as watching and listening to the tutorials, you can refer to this easy to follow e-book to help you master MS Forms for Teaching, Learning and Assessment.

You’ll also get downloadable practice activities from the course which will enable you to practise on the go and will help you master MS Forms for Teaching, Learning and Assessment.

Learn how you can generate QR codes of MS Forms to provide differentiated learning activities for your students. There are also some further useful tips and ideas on how to devise retrieval practice & spaced learning activities. Plus downloadable links to free pre-created quiz templates!

I hope you find the course useful. I’d love to hear your feedback.

Remote Teaching using Break Out Rooms in Microsoft Teams

Much has been written about remote teaching and learning recently with a considerable focus on the features and functions of online teaching platforms, such as Microsoft Teams.

Using Break Out Rooms in Teams

In this blog I want to go further than simply explaining what these features and functions do and look at one way in which we can put these capabilities together so that we can involve and include all our students in a lesson. Let’s look at break out rooms for remote teaching and the potential they have to offer.

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“A break out room is a separate channel within your Team that you can direct your students to (either in small groups or individually), where they can work on their own, or collaborate on different tasks with classmates and where the teacher can communicate with the students.”

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We’re going to look at a lesson I created recently about the impact of hosting global sporting events (OCR A Level), but this method could be used for any topic that lends itself to discussion and debate.

The topic you are teaching and number of students you have in your class will determine the number of break out rooms you will need. In this example I had 11 students and I structured the lesson so that I could divide the class into two groups of four students, and one group of three. Each group had a different task to do in their break out room.

The first group of students were assigned to Room 1 and their task was to prepare for a debate in which they would be arguing in favour of hosting the Olympic & Paralympic Games in Birmingham, in the UK. The had to include as many positive impacts on sport, on society, on the economy and politically as they could think of.

The second group, assigned to Room 2, had a similar task, except their focus was to argue against hosting the Olympics & Paralympic Games in Birmingham. Similarly, they had to include as many negative impacts on sport, on society, on the economy and politically as they could think of.

Arguing for and against hosting the Olympic and Paralympic Games

The third group, in Room 3, were the judges. They were assigned a different task. The students in this group were given a document with the positive and negative impacts of hosting such a global sporting event, (a mark scheme, if you like).

Their task was to assign a points value for each of the impacts they had been provided with. A low score (1 or 2 points) would be given to an impact which they believed was very obvious and which they would expect both of the other teams to produce. A higher scoring tariff (7, 8, 9, or 10) would be allocated to an impact which they felt would be less obvious, but nonetheless creditworthy.

The judges created a points tariff for the impacts of hosting the Olympic & Paralympic Games

After I had explained the task to the whole class, each student then went to their own breakout room and started to work together with their fellow classmates. In each breakout room I explained in the post / conversation exactly what their task was and the roles that the students in that room were expected to fulfil. They could work collaboratively on a Word document to articulate their thoughts about either positive or negative impacts.

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Before the start of the lesson, I had already started a meeting in each break out room. This meant that the students could come out of the whole class meeting and enter their breakout room meeting to talk to the other students in their group without anyone else in the class being able to hear them.

As the teacher, I was able to go into each break out room and listen to the students discussing their ideas and to support and guide them, where necessary. When I wasn’t visiting each room, I waited in the main lesson meeting so that students could come and find me if they needed me. If I wasn’t there because I was visiting a breakout room, I told them to leave a message for me in the chat and I would then go and visit them in their room.

Students allocated to their break out room – a private channel in Teams

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Retrieval Practice with Flipgrid

Retrieval Practice with Flipgrid

I recently bought the excellent book by Kate Jones called Retrieval Practice. This book is really accessible and is packed with great ideas about how to promote retrieval practice in your classroom. If you have not yet picked up a copy of this book, I highly recommend it and as an added bonus, it is very affordable.

Reading through Kate’s book got me thinking about how I could support my students through technology with their retrieval practice and I came up with the idea of linking a retrieval practice task with Flipgrid which would enable my students to access model answers after they had attempted to answer the question for themselves.

As Kate says in her book, the key concept of retrieval practice is about getting information out of the students. It is the process of trying hard to remember which ultimately aids the students. And so it is important that students are not given the opportunity to access the answers before they have attempted the questions. It’s also really important that the students grapple with the questions and try hard to retrieve the information required without using any notes or any material that will assist them.

So this is what I did.

Firstly, I made a retrieval practice exercise which included a set of 12 questions based upon content and material that we had recently studied. I created the document below using PowerPoint. The QR codes that you can see in the image came later.

Next I had to create the QR codes and this is where Flipgrid comes in. I hopped over to my account in Flipgrid and created a number of topics as you can see from the image below. In each topic I recorded a video which explained the model answer to each of the retrieval practice questions. But instead of the students seeing my face and me explaining the model answer, I decided that I would put the question onto the video screen so that the students were able to see the question whilst they were hearing the model answer. I thought this was a good idea because it enables the students to see the question and hear how I was often referring back to the question when providing the answer. This way I was not only providing an answer, I was also modelling how to construct the answer based upon what the question was asking of me. Using the snip tool in Windows 10, I snipped an image of each of the questions from the PowerPoint slide and saved them. Then, after I had recorded my video on Flipgrid, I used the ‘Add Custom Sticker’ function to put the question onto the video screen, as in the images below. I then made the rest of the background white by using the whiteboard function. Once I had made the video and entered the white background with the question on the screen as a sticker, I then followed the usual procedure in Flipgrid and created my video. Then I downloaded the QR code that is automatically generated by Flipgrid and I cropped it a little bit, before saving it as an image. Next, I then inserted each of the QR codes onto the slide, resized them, placed them in the corresponding position with the relevant question, aligned them using the alignment tool and that was job done! I printed the PowerPoint slide out a number of times to use in my lesson and I also inserted a PDF version into OneNote and distributed the page to my students, which means that they can now access this retrieval practice exercise whenever they want to.

Public Schools – The promotion and organisation of sports and games

In this blog we take a look at the promotion and organisation of sports and games in 19th century Public Schools.

Below is an extract of an audio tutorial taken from my online course – Teaching A Level PE – Influence of Public Schools on Sports and Games. 

 

“Here we are looking at the promotion and organisations sports and games in the public schools and it is important that we make sure the students are aware that we are talking about what was going on in the public schools themselves. So this isn’t about what was happening in society, this was what was happening internally within these public schools, post 1850.

A key point to establish before you start teaching this area and to avoid potential pitfalls that I have fallen into in the past, is the assumption that your students understand what we mean by public schools. So it’s a good idea of course it take the time to make sure that they do understand.

Often students will know of Eton and Harrow and it’s useful for them to do some background research on one or two famous schools, such as Charterhouse, Shrewsbury, Winchester, etc. 

So, let’s look at the characteristics of what was going on in the public schools which promoted the organisation of sports and games in schools.

Space

The first thing we need to be thinking about is that the schools had space and they had facilities. I draw your attention to the word specialist and that is because the exam board in the past has been very picky about this point and will not accept just facilities or just space on its own. In this case, facilities and space on its own is not acceptable, therefore we need to make sure we teach our students to use the qualifier ‘specialist’ or ‘high quality’ before facilities. 

We then have to ask the question ‘so what’? If students just identify characteristics on their own they are unlikely to obtain marks (depending on the question asked). So we need to coach and train our students to answer that question and that, for me, is with the linking phrase ‘which meant that’. So for example, if students identify specialist facilities and space they would then have to develop that with which meant that ….. the boys had the opportunities to participate in sports which lead to skill levels rising and the growth of the cult of athleticism.

Specialist coaches

The next point is that the schools had specialist coaches. And again, students would need to develop this point by saying that this meant that this enabled the boys to become proficient at sport, which also promoted the growth of the cult of athleticism. 

Character Development

The games themselves promoted the idea of character development. Here, we’re talking about values such as honesty, integrity and courage, leadership, teamwork, for example. All of these values which the public schools at the time espoused as being great attributes of a Victorian gentleman. 

Time

The boys had plenty of time to play sport and in most of these schools during this era games was compulsory. This meant that the boys probably played five or six afternoons a week. This would have lead to the growing popularity of sport and reflected and developed the cult of athleticism.

House matches and School matches

The boys played house matches within the schools and they played fixtures against other schools. Both of these points reflect the growth and popularity of sport and the start of how competitions were set up. 

6th Form Role Models

The games were organised and promoted very heavily by the sixth formers who acted as role models to the younger boys. This point links back to character development and meant that the senior boys were developing organisational and administrative skills, which would be used later when, as ex-public school boys, they codified the games and established national governing bodies of sports.”

‘If students just identify characteristics on their own they are unlikely to obtain marks’

To find out more about the promotion and organisation of sports and games and to develop your teaching on all areas of the 19th century public schools, including the promotion of ethics and the cult of athleticism, head over to my online course here:

Teaching A Level PE – Influence of Public Schools on Sports and Games.