Daniel Dawkins

Hi there, I'm Daniel Dawkins, Head Teacher of TAS at West Wallsend High School. Today I'm going to go through our curriculum monitoring process for HSC. We use a platform called SharePoint, which is the basis for all of our HSC monitoring. A very automated and simple way of buying us as much time as we can to put it back into the classroom. As you can see on the screen this is our front page for our whole school negotiated site. So we have links to everything that's needed but we're going to focus on our faculty documents today.

Our setup is very straightforward and easy to use. If I click on our faculty documents, you'll see that we've had a discussion at our exec meetings and a whole school approach to our curriculum monitoring. So, it's consistent for every single faculty. So, we have our areas here that everyone has access to and can manage. In each individual curriculum area, we then have a breakdown of particular folders. Within each faculty, we have a very simple and basic setup of administration, our PDPs, and in our curriculum monitoring folders. Within each curriculum folder, if I click on that section, you'll see that we have every course that's offered within the school. We're going to focus on one particular area today. And within that subject area, you'll see a very simple and systematic approach to our curriculum monitoring.

For every single subject within our school, we have these minimum six folders that we do for all of our monitoring processes. We'll go through these today and showcase the simple structure that allows us to have everything online cloud-based so we can access it from anywhere needed. Do our registrations ongoing and also have our students sign-offs and access to the documents that are required as well. We'll start off with some of the basics. If I go into our assessment schedules area, you click on what looks like a link for each but it's just the folder structure setup. So you can see here each year we will come in and we can start a new assessment schedule if needed.

So, I can click to select any single file in this area. The dot on the left hand side, as you can see I've just selected it and it's turned red. If I would like to copy this and start a new one, I can mainly click the three dots in the top here you can see in the open of selection so I could start a new one. It allows me to open it straight into Word, or I can come over here and go, I could copy to or I could move to. If I select copy to, it will enable me to select a place that I would want to, if it's in the same folder, I can click copy here and it will open up. The other fantastic area that this works is then we can select the dot and I'll come back up to the top open and I can click share or copy link. We mainly use the copy link function. Now, if we copy this link, I'll just select that again. You'll see that it's automatically copied. So, I can then travel over to our learning management system, paste that link as you can see on the screen, it is a view only link. So, if I'm pasting it on our student management system, our students can view their assessment schedule but they cannot make changes or edit. Just click back on the Year 12 at the top of their tree here. And you can see I'm going to go into our assessment tasks. And we'll now have a look at how we set up the assessment structures.

So, for each year we just have a folder system with every single task. And what you'll see is a great item on the side is we have this sign-off status. This shows whether any document within SharePoint has been approved, if needed by their line manager, head teacher, deputy principal, whoever might be needed to tick those off. This is a fantastic automatic process that lets us run through a sign-off structure. So, we'll run through one. As we click the top assessment task. I'm going to go and select that dot again that we talked about before. And I know this one says already approved but you can get it approved multiple times if you'd like. For this to work I'm going to the three dots, as you can see the mouse is hovering at the apron again. This time, I'm going to slowly take the mouse down to automate, and what pops up is request sign-off. So, I'm going to right click on request sign-off. What you'll see is an item popup that allows this process to begin. Once it loads, the first thing I'm going to place in is who I would like to approve this. So, who's my line manager, head teacher, whoever needs to tick the approval. And I type in the start of an email, and it will come up with the person that I want to sign that off. And then I'm going to write in a message. Once I've written what's needed to be done, I'm going to run down and click run flow. You can see that it said, I've started this sign-off. And now what's automatically happened here, is it's now pending.

So, it's been sent to someone and we're waiting for that to be signed off. So, it gives you status of where it's at for each step of this process. So, as you can see, what will happen now is you'll get an email through from the approval process. So, as the approval has come through requested by and their email, and then has a link to the document that's in SharePoint. So, if I click on that, it'll open up the Word Document. Allow me to look through and approve or reject that proposal. So, if the assessment task or the assessment schedule, possibly unit of work, any document that you would like signed off, needs approval, you can write back a message and send that through to that item and the person that's approved it.

So, I'm now in the email system, I've click approved and that process now will go back into SharePoint and show it's approved. So, as you can see, back into SharePoint that assessment task one that we sent the approval for has come back approved, and we are now good to go and copy that link as we did before and paste that into our learning management system for the students to see the assessment task.

So, now we'll look at our programming units of work and how we will register those throughout the whole year and make it very simple and a easy process. So, if I go into our programming units of work folder just by clicking on the words and we'll go and look at our 2023 setup. So, we've got Word Documents in here that are our development ready to go for our next term. So, if I bring one of those up, this is our unit of work, ready to go. We develop these in program builder, export and upload them straight into SharePoint. So we are always working from a live document in SharePoint. So, this will give you the full functionality of Microsoft Word. We'll also look at how you can download and work off the desktop app, if you'd like to, and you still are able to save straight to the cloud. For now, we'll look at linking documents and how we do our registers.

So, we have the same structure and set up for every single course and you can see I've done a registration here. So, I've put my initials, I've dated when this has been taught and I've written a little bit of information that was required. So for each area that we will register, we will come down and initial, then we'll put the date that is required that we have taught that area. So, if it was the third, and if we've got some registration information that will help us in our planning for the next term, next year, the next time we do this unit, we will write it in this section here throughout. And that's one of the areas that we sign-off. You can also see in these units of work, very explicit teacher, student, but what's really important is also this resourcing area.

So, our resources are all linked to the resources document back in SharePoint. So, if I was going to put a resource in, I'm just going to go back to SharePoint, and on our Year 12 area, click on resources. So, I've got a document here that's in the form of a PDF though I'd like to link to that unit of work. So, I've travelled down and click the dot that's next to our document that allows us to select that item. And we're going to click copy link. Automatically goes can view and that is perfect. So, I'm going to go copy. Then I'm going to travel over to the unit of work. So, I'll just go back up to the Word Document that was here. So, I'm going to write the words, Year 12 major project checklist, and that will be discussed in the teaching and learning side. But if I just hover over and highlight that, then I can right click and come down to this link. So, this will actually link documents that you viewed in the past, that you can see here throughout SharePoint. But what I'm also going to do is just click the link at the top. Then I will right click and paste in that link that we grabbed before. Then I'm just going to click insert. You'll now see that it's got underline, which means it's a document link straight to SharePoint. So, if I wanted to check that that link works, I can click on it and you'll see that it'll open up in another browser area that that whole document will load. And here's my checklist ready to go. This is such a simple but effective process and you can see how the backbone of having SharePoint behind our system allows for everything to be in one place, all on the cloud. And we're always updating as we go. But any teacher that would like to come in and review or look at this process can click on each of the links and see exactly where every document is. If you like to be able to use any document that's within the Microsoft suite in the desktop app, you can also come up to the top corner here and you can see it's got the word editing.

Now if I click on that and scroll down, you can go open in the desktop app. Now, if I click that, you'll notice that it'll prompt me to open up. And now it's automatically on the screen opened up in Microsoft Word. The difference being that now it may or may not have auto saved turned on. That means that every change you make automatically saves up into the cloud but also what it has is the save button in the top corner. Now we'll have a circle with arrows around it. That means that if you click that it will save straight up to the cloud. So, you don't have to upload, download, everything runs very smooth. So, now you get Microsoft Word as the full suite, and you can see that the change that I made before is here. So, if I wanted to make another registration and come down and put the date, and save that, I can now close this document and open it back up into the cloud. And once that loads you'll see that the change that was made in the desktop app will now appear on the screen down below with that second date placed in. You are able to also access this with multiple people using the same documents, even in the desktop app version and it will save and record what you're doing as go.

The next area is our monitoring sign-off sheet. This is our two page document that runs how we are monitoring our students and also brilliant curriculum discussions with head teachers, classroom teachers, line managers and just really feeds, finalises this whole process to make it so clear and consistent. As you can see on the screen, we have our faculty monitoring sheets. We'll fill out the course, the classroom teacher, obviously the year that it is and that line manager. And these are the areas that we really go into detail with. So, this is a Word Document that can be downloaded in the desktop app and used and saved online. But what we'll do is we'll tick off the areas that are relevant to us. So, if we've had, you know, record to contact with students through central, has it been recorded on central? Are all of our documents and SharePoint? Were there illness misadventure forms? And were they upload and stored where needed? As I scroll down to the bottom of the first page, you'll see that we've got documentation for each topic unit of work, with the key areas that are needed for our curriculum monitoring. And it's also is that saved in SharePoint. So, that can be linked like we showed before by highlighting copying the link to the unit of work. And we can also come and tick off for the classroom teacher, have these been done? Are they uploaded and do these key ticket items that are needed, our topics, their outcomes, the content, the teaching and learning strategies, our foreign assessment strategies, are they all in there? As we scroll down, we then go, has that been registered? So it's, are they developed? And then have they been registered? And we tick those off as we go along for each unit. And then exactly the same for each assessment task. So, does our assessment task have the components? The weightings, the date that's received and due? All the areas that we need to cover. And for each assessment task that we might run for year 12. Then have we had them signed off, checked by the head teacher through our process that we showed before and is that saved in SharePoint and uploaded to our learning management system for our students.

We also have our students signing off electronically or through our learning management system. And then we can take screenshots of that and pop that into our middle folder as well. As we go down, you'll see that then what we have is making sure that our teacher signs off the date, any comments that's needed and our head teacher will sign that off as well. This two-page document has streamlined our whole school process and has allowed for great curriculum conversations to get straight to the point. Also, make sure we're not going overboard with our curriculum monitoring and spending too much time instead of what we really want to put back into that classroom and has also allowed us to link everything back to what we're doing within our SharePoint site. So, it's our one-stop shop for curriculum monitoring and can be accessed at any time, anywhere if needed.

The last great piece of the puzzle that allows you to get quick access is that we have the option to be able to sync to our desktop if needed. You can do this on multiple devices. So, if I was to go, I would love to have the TAS folder synced to my computer, I can come up here and click sync. What that enables is for me to go down and I'll bring the mouse down to the bottom file Explorer. And I can now see over the side here. It says New South Wales Department of Education and I've got multiple folders here. So, if I click on that test folder, you'll see it's the exact same as what was on the cloud version, but now I can access it by going through the absolute desktop app, which is great. So, I can come into curriculum. I can come into my course and I can open up the folders that were needed before. So, if I go into that same unit of work that was there, you'll see that one version that I haven't used yet is in the cloud. And the others now been green to say I can open that up, and I can use that from this version and it will save to the cloud as well. Thank you so much for your time, and I hope it's been helpful. Shout out if there's any help that's needed.

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