Don's Party V1.1 When good kangaroos go bad and learn new IT skills

Here are some links to the main topics covered at the 17 July 2023 Staff PD Day at berry Springs Primary School. The topics we covered were:

Topics

• Firefly
• Reaching Microsoft Office 365 through Office.Com
• Gaining access at home to additional Microsoft 365 office licences available to students
• Accessing the free Immersive Reader through Edge and MS Word
• Reading Coach - accessing and using this tool at home or in school
• Teams Classes and Reading Progress
• Adobe Express Beta Features

Firefly

The photo at the top of this page was created in Firefly by simply describing a school logo using words. The literacy and visualisation combination of activities is great and available to you right now.

Adobe Firefly is a generative art tool that uses AI to create and alter images and video. It can produce various visual effects for text and images, such as abstract, landscape, and portrait styles. It is designed to work with the Adobe Creative Suite and to simplify the process of creating artwork. It is available as a standalone web-based app for testing its features.

You can use Firefly to generate art, pictures, textures, fills and more by simply typing in the words that you want. Now you can type in more than one language to create what you want. For language learning - this is great. For literacy combined with generative AI this is such a fun way of mixing these skills.

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Reaching Microsoft Office 365 through Office.Com

One of the easiest ways to reach your Microsoft 365 Office Applications is to simply open an Edge Browser and enter "Office.Com" - you may or not be prompted to sign in.

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Gaining access at home to additional office licences available to students

Accessing the free Immersive Reader through Edge and MS Word

Immersive Reader is free to use in a Microsoft Edge browser and in tools like MS Word and Onenote. It is also the gateway to Reading Coach and its more powerful cousin, Reading Progress. These are termed Learning Accelerators by Microsoft and include a range of tools available to all teachers and students - but many like the Immersive Reader are free to parents, carers and folks outside our school environment.

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Reading Coach - accessing and using this tool at home or in school

Short Video - Access at home by opening the web version of microsoft word from https://office.com - Select View, Immersive Reader, choose the "book" looking icon on the top right and then choose reading coach.

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Teams Classes and Reading Progress

Reading Progress is a free tool built into Microsoft Teams designed to support and track reading fluency in your class. To use Reading Progress, you need to create a Teams assignment and attach a text document using the Reading Progress function. Students read the text out loud within the Teams environment and submit the resulting audio or video recording, which you can assess at any time3. Data is automatically collected and organized in Insights, helping you spend more time with students and less time analyzing data.

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Adobe Express Beta Features

What applications are included in the free Adobe Express for Education?

Create Images, posters, flyers, and templates online through a browser or with the apps. Share for editing or publishing, download, remix, incorporate into pages on the web and more. Class Journals, Infographics, Videos, School Newsletters and more. Here is a sample template I remixed as if I was a student.

Apps for your laptops or computers, mobile devices or just the web.

Premiere Rush for easy but powerful video editing - or use the video editor built into Adobe Express. Photoshop Express - photo editing on the go and a cool way to integrate with your posts and art compilations, composites and remixes from Express Post. A bunch of other apps like Photoshop Camera (all of these are free) allow students to be creative without copying.

Although legacy apps from the days when Express was called Spark, check out Spark Page and Spark Video as apps to use offline on iPads (useful for remote or poor bandwidth locations where you can mix WiFi web access to the apps with downloaded offline versions. Both types of app generate great multimodal creations.

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Viewing SMOOTHIES Episodes

SMOOTHIES are short online sessions covering a wide range of IT related topics on solutions we use in the NT Schools environment (or should be). The button below takes you to the Catalog of Episodes complete with links to PowerPoints and curated interactive videos covering these topics.

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Don the Kangaroo - Beloved Mascot of Berry Springs Primary School