Here are the slides from a recent presentation I was part of at the National College for School leadership “Tomorrow’s Heads” conference. My part of the presentation was mainly focussed around technological tools we use as a department to enhance our teamwork and collaboration. However I did begin with some aspects of what we consider make a successful team. In this post I’ll briefly outline some of the commentary that went with the slides.
The first slide contains lots of elements we as a department considered make a successful team. We also outlined that although we consider the phrase “there’s no I in team” true – we also believe that within every successful team, creative, hardworking individuals should be allowed and encouraged to flourish. As a department we have a mission statement that we aspire to and a set of values that we aim to follow and install in the students-photos of these are shown.
The presentation goes on to look at many of the technological tools we use to enhance team working and collaboration. Our department website was discussed first as this provides the central base for staff, students, parents and the wider community to access a wide variety of information. Social media in the form of twitter and Facebook are then discussed. As a department we have a twitter account which all staff can tweet from. This is automatically set up to post to the departments web-site (twitter feed widget) and Facebook page. This ensures messages reach as many students as possible-with or without the need for social media. At the end of most weeks paper.li is used to create a weekly round up of the weeks events. This creates a newspaper of all the weeks tweets from all staff, from results, match reports to suggested a level reading.
Blogging has been used with our A level students and staff are provided with blogs so they can post information for lessons as they see the need. with an Edublogs account up to 50 accounts can be created.
The department also has an Audiboo account which staff can upload to, mainly via their iPhones. This allows the quick creation of podcasts for students, often to recap topics covered in lessons.
Some uses of google docs were then discussed including our use for collaborating on spreadsheets for recording data such as that from fitness testing. Also for BTEC work marking and moderation-staff mark work shared from students using the comments feature and this can be shared with an internal verifier for comment.
The “PE in the 21st Century” slide outlines some of the other tools we as a department use.
Finally the presentation contains some tweet replies I received in prep for the talk. I asked the question “what are the best tech tools for enhancing teamwork and collaboration”
Thanks for the replies.
The Physical Education Teacher (@DylanBlain) 