This year the Science department took a leap of faith and started using Sharepoint to store thier files and organise things. Along with Technology, Science really are leading the school in their use of Sharepoint to manage workflows, store data and organise bookings. It has been a real collaborative effort, but Kevin and Ryan has worked ridiculously hard to get in up and running, and I think we now have some really good systems to help Science department members find what they need. I has been a massive change to move away from the massive ‘hole’ the was the teachers shared drive on the server, but it has been well worth the time and effort. This post is about how the STAFF are using sharepoint to work with other staff, rather than with the students – There has been some use with students, but with the increasingly successful classroom roll out I think we are going to use sharepoint for staff/staff work and collaboration, and classroom for staff/student work and collaboration – with a few exceptions of course.
So the Science Site looks like this – Ryan definitely likes things to look ‘nice’.
Each of the scrabble letters takes you to the subsite for that cohort or class – they are our most frequently used pages. With the exception of the coffee cup, which takes you to our Science Support page. All the links are also down the left hand side of the page.
The Sci support page is where our super awesome technition helps us with our gear bookings etc. The current date is always displayed on the landing page, but you can click on the calendar and bring up the whole week as you need, or flick forward to make future bookings. There is also a message board for the ‘who has this and hasn’t returned it’ type comments.
We then have different subsites for the different cohorts in Science. Here is the home page for junior sci.
The folders go to a big ‘dump’ of documents for that year level that have all been tagged with file type, topic and year level. The buttons on the right go to pre filtered libraries and show only the documents tagged with that tag. (Big ups to Kevin for this, he has worked relaly hard to get this working as well as it is). Below are some pics so you can see how the tagging and filtering is working.
Our latest step has been to revisit and update our unit plans so that the resources are all linked it. Here is a snapshot of our genetics unit plan for year 10
Each of the blue lines is a link back to the resource – either online, youtube etc, or stored in the sharepoint library. It means 2 things – 1) a new person working from the unit plan can find a range of resources without having to go looking and 2) an experienced person has a reason to check back to the unit plan often to grab the resources. The goal is that as we work through them next year we keep refining and retuning – which will make the unit plans living documents.
So our next steps is for each department member to start adding some of their resources to the sharepoint library and the unit plans. Everyone has had some training on this, and of course everyone has slightly different ways they like to do things, so it should mean we get a really good array of resources for each unit of work. It will also hopefully let us have a bit of a clean up of all the old cross words and word finds that have been around for ever.
And again, just acknowledging the huge amount of work the Kevin and Ryan have done on this, I’m really excited to see them making such progress and how useful this will be next year.
ibpossum takes on tech 