ETC T&L CHRISTMAS ADVENT CALENDAR

Advent Calendar

2023

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The gift of Gaming

Educaplay Making games with Educaplay is easy and fast. Simple to share, save the scores and integrate into other platforms. Try our christmas quiz here and watch the 2 minute video to discover how to create your own games....

Have you tried Quizziz yet? Like Kahoot but made for education. Sign in with your Microsoft account and search through the millions of free quizzes, try searching by level or awarding body for subject or unit specific quizzes. You can play live, at your pace, at their pace, share to teams. You can create your own quiz, or use and edit and existing quiz, there are many possibilities. There is a great tutorial on how to use Quizziz here:

Gift of Quizzing

Come back tomorrow for more gifts

Today's gift is the gift of self-care

Self-care is a vital component of maintaining a healthy lifestyle. It involves deliberate actions to prioritize one’s physical, emotional, and mental health. Taking time for self-care activities, whether it’s meditation, exercise, journaling, or simply resting, replenishes energy reserves, prevents burnout, and promotes resilience in facing life’s challenges.This has been a very long and tiring term and with Christmas round the corner things are not letting up. If you click on the link to the audio file below it will guide you in a three minute breathing exercise. We have also linked to the Free Mindfulness Project site where you can access other guided exercises and even download them if you want to use them in your teaching

Three minute breating exercise

Free Mindfulness Project site

Gift of funToday we are gifting you fun. Genially allows you to create a range of fun, interactive activities and presentations. Working from templates it is easy to create interactive quizzes, escape rooms, infographics, presentations and more. You can create unlimited activities with the free account as long as you use the free templates and publish your genially publicly.Try out our Christmas escape room from last year. Click on the expand icon on the banner below.

Gift of outstanding teaching

Walkthru resources are simple to follow and easy to use, with every teaching and learning strategy broken down into 5 steps. Each step is explained in a slide deck and there is also a short video to explain the process. You can work on individual units or combine different strategies into ‘clusters’ to build a CPD session for staff development. The resources are divided into categories which link with our teaching and learning themes, this means you can easily explore appropriate strategies to enhance and develop any areas of your teaching and learning.

We are away enjoying some festive activities this weekend, come back on Monday

The Gift of Creativity!

Canva is a fabulous tool for making teaching and learning resources. With many existing resources and templates that can easily be edited, or blank to start your own from scratch. New AI features make it easier than ever. Great for creating Knowledge organisers or scaffolding for worksheets and mind-maps to help learners organise their thoughts. We use these for many of our staff resources, posters and infographics

Gift of inclusivity

Ensure SEND learners feel welcome and supported by ensuring their learning needs are being met by using these strategies to support those with Dyslexia, Autism and ADHD. If you are struggling with supporting a learner please contact the learning support team for training and guidance. Clikck the link to see the infographics Jayne has created:

Nothing here today, come back tomorrow

The Gift of Virtual Reality

Harness the potential of soft skill training with Bodyswaps – an award-winning immersive solution that empowers learners and employees. Soft skills are increasingly in demand but they can be difficult to learn and master. Bodyswaps training platform offers immersive experiences that can help learners develop vital skills like how to communicate, collaborate, and lead.Bodyswaps staff development workshops are available from the week commencing 8th Jan every Wednesday 12..00-13.00 and every Thursday 16.00-17.00 in the Digital Sandpit. Email Tristan Smith to book a place and have your account created.

The elves are having a little break at the weekend.

Nothing todayThe elves are taking a weekend break

The gift of knowledge

Did you know we have a whole range of teaching and learning books available electronically? The links next to the book name will tke you to the LRC catalogue, click read me and then under sign in below select "Open Athens" and in the institution box type Education Training CollectiveMost recent purchases include:

• When the Adults Change, By Paul Dix
• The latest Innerdrive book, Teaching & Learning Illuminated: The Big Ideas, Illustrated
• And Retrieval Practice 2: Implementing, embedding & reflecting, by Kate Jones

No gift today, we are off to enjoy ourselves at the winter review

Today's gift is the gift of timeQwiqr verbal feedback tool uses QR codes to link feedback to audio/video feedback.This speeds up marking time whilst not compromising on the quality of feedback. Staff using the tool have reported that they are able to give personalised and in depth feedback. Contact paula.kilburn@the-etc.ac.uk to access the premium account features.Click the link button to go to Qwiqr Watch Paula's demo here

Enjoy the xmas spirit

It's the weekend

The gift of organisation

Wakelet is a web tool that allows you to easily organise a collection of web links, videos, images and text in a visually engaging way.It is easy to share Wakelets and they also work well in Teams. You can use Wakelet as a collaborative tool, so you could get your students to work together to create collections of resources by topic, or you could use them to work with other staff when planning you curriculum. Wakelet is also an app, so you can save resources on the go/Wakelet is a Microsoft Partner so it is easy to sign up with your college account and you don't have to remember a separate password.There are two links below - one will take you to the main Wakelet site where you can create an account, the other is an example of a Wakelet collection we put together for some training we delivered to subcontractors

Example of Wakelet collection

Wakelet website

The gift of understanding

Todays' gift follows on from yesterdays gift of magic. Today's gift allows you to quickly and easily create self marking formative assessments, giving you an insight into your student's understanding of that topic.Generate questions using AI tools such as chat GPT, Perplexity or Magic School AI (see yesterdays gift!). You can generate quiz questions quickly and then copy and paste into word to upload as a quiz. Just double check the correct answers are selected and give each question a points value before sharing . Watch the short video below:

Please pop back tomorrow

Magic school AI – youtube generator Make videos more engaging by increasing active learning.Magic school AI Youtube question generator works by ‘reading’ the videos captions to create questions to consider during the video. Click on the link below to try it out. Sign in with your Microsoft account, then simply select the level and number of questions, then copy in the Youtube video link. You can choose multiple choice or open questions.

The Gift of Magic!