Trello Part 1 - An Introduction to Trello

Following on from a recent blog post, you may already be aware that this week we are going to be focusing on Trello - a simple web tool to help plan meetings and projects. It's a tool that we haven't promoted much of, despite using it a lot for our team meetings and general planning. However, it's a great tool if you want to individually and/or as a team or a class, want to map out ideas. Have a look at this first video of a three part series which provides a short introduction to Trello - how to create an account, create boards for planning, and basically what all the buttons do!

Click the image above to access the video 'An Introduction to Trello'

Coming up this week:

Part 2 Managing Projects in Trello - how to use all the features in Trello, which will help you and your team plan a project or hold a meeting more effectively.

Part 3 Using Trello in the Classroom - this video looks at alternative ideas for classroom activities using Trello. Some examples include creating fact cards, creating a quick interactive matching game, checking progress of the class for practical lessons and workshops and keeping organised throughout the school day.

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Jamboard - New Tool

Jamboard has been around for a while as a high-end piece of digital office furniture from Google but the software is now part of G-Suite and therefore available to all dret.cloud users.

Staff or students can either go to jamboard.google.com for the web version (which is really only useful for viewing and sharing boards) or use the iOS app available on the Self-Service store.

What Jamboard provides is a lovely app to pull different kinds of documents from Google Drive or web pages, move and resize them and annotate over the top with different pen tools or a number of icons.

I plan to do a couple of blog posts about Jamboard in the coming days - one about the whole premise behind this kind of software and other comparing it to what up to now have been my go-to pieces of software, Google Keep and Microsoft OneNote.

If you'd like to see what Jamboard looks like in action, this (staged) teacher demonstration from Tom Mullaney gives a good overview.

OneNote and Google Drive in Harmony

Many of our staff use OneNote well and happily, as well as being a great place to keep everything for a topic in one place presented visually and annotated (in many ways better than with a specialist interactive board app) it is useful to share what you have had on the big screen with your class with a single link.

Most also use Google Drive as the main place they keep all their files to collaborate, share resources and work on them from anywhere.

When word reached us that Brendan Brannigan from Bringhurst Primary School had combined the two and now works on his OneNote files at home and school using Google Drive we asked to make a guide for colleagues - this video (also available on dret.tv, login required) is the result.

I must admit, after watching it I had a "why on earth hadn't I thought of this?" moment - there is absolutely nothing wrong with OneDrive which is where OneNote prefers to live, but it is one more thing to worry about.

Now all I have to do is work out…

New Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) affecting all staff

This week, on Friday 25th May 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will come into force and replace the current Data Protection Act 1998.
Although GDPR derives from EU law, it will be UK law even after brexit. Basically, every EU country is adopting the same set of regulations, which will make doing business across the EU much simpler with just one set of rules. While the main principles of data protection remain largely the same, GDPR is much stricter than the current Act. It is more prescriptive in terms of how we must comply and the penalties for non-compliance are more severe.
If you handle data regularly, or you are likely to be the person receiving data protection requests in your school, it’s important that you are aware of the new process to submit a data protection request, and how it will be handled going forward.
Therefore, to help you understand the key principles and changes affecting the Trust, we have created a brief ‘Staff Data Protection’ guide to read …

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