Sunday, April 22, 2012

Planning and Working as a Village

Since my last post on this topic we have changed our whole village planner to make it more user friendly. Using Google Presentations to plan was ok visually, but...
1. It was problematic when 2 people were editing a slide at the same time
2. You had to scroll through the whole presentation to get where you wanted
3. You couldn't edit it from iPad

So this term we are trialling using Google Spreadsheets to plan as a Village - why?
1. More than one person can be editing the same sheet at the same time.
2. We have one day per sheet so everyone can select the day they need straight away
3. You can edit cells in the spreadsheet from iPad!

So far we have found the planner to be user friendly. We have linked it to a my classes page and embedded it in a google site created for our village.

Now we have a lot of children who plan their day before they get to school and families and staff can see what is happening in our village at any time. Feedback from parents so far is positive - they can see what work is being done at school and they feel that their children are empowered because they know what will be happening each day and when they will be responsible for being self directed.

Here is what it looks like: