GAFE Session 1: Digital Tools For Student Voice

Digital Tools for Student Voice- Jan Marie Kellow

Jan Marie-Is a primary school teacher who is passionate about students inquiry and supporting student voice in the classroom allowing them to have agency in their learning. 

Why Students Voice:

• Student voice helps use to find out about our learners. 
• For Formative assessment 
• To provide choice
• Engaging students 
• Finding out what students allow ready know. 

Some ways of collecting student voice 

• Padlet-This is like digital post it notes and allows for a range of ideas to be collected in one place. 
• Answer Garden-put together the most common answers to show patterns.
• Google Forms-Great for collecting any information as it can be changed and targeted to whatever you want to collect. Did you know you can collect fills in forms this may include picture by making the option answer as a fill. 
• Google Slides in Grid view. Getting each learner to add their ideas to one slide. You could pre label each slide with the kids names so that students don't get confused and overwrite each other. 
• Google Draw template to collect student voice. You could have one per student or a shared one for a group of kids or even the whole class. It is just a case of creating boxes with questions, prompts or images. 
• You can use commenting in Docs, Sheets, Slides and Drawing to collect feedback
• You can use speech to text to collect feedback. I do warn that once students start voice typing they want to do it all the time which can be an issue in writing. 
• Jan Marie talked a lot about Google Classroom, While I can see why people would use it. I don't as it goes against the visible teaching and learning value of my school. 
• My Maps- You can use my Maps to find out where students are from. You can even do a Map of their Mihi or Important places in their lives like Church etc. You have to be careful with this as blogging specific locations is not ideal. This can be funky when you edit it and change icons etc. I have also used My Maps in the past to locate areas in a story and add information about the text and the area as discovery for my learners. One of the cool thing you can do is import a list of places. This means you can use a form to collect places names and then add this form the Google Sheet. 
• Flipgrid is a tool I have never used before but it looks really interesting. Students can record short video clips to a grid which others can view and provide feedback on you choose the response time which is up to 1 min 30 secs. A lovely lady at the workshop also suggested Recap again I have not used it and would need to do more research. 
• Google Groups these allow different types of forum that students can engage in and and interact with each other. 

One great thing about this Session was we collected a lot our ideas and could see the similarities of what people used and why they used them. This also meant that Jan Marie could adapt the session to the needs of the group.