Newsletters

GHS Connect #23 Monday 6 March

Mia's notes

Apologies in advance that I won’t be around much this week as I am out on Thursday and Friday at the Ealing Learning Partnership Headteachers’ Conference and will be interviewing during some of the other days.

Thank you to everyone who will be at the Year 12 Parents’ Evening. We are almost at the end of our run of Parents’ Evenings, with just Year 7 to go after this one. It has been great to have connected with our parent body in person once again, and feedback suggests that they have really valued it too.

Congratulations to Paul Stokes who has taken on the role of Acting Head of PE and a welcome and thank you to Phoebe who has begun her role in Andrea’s absence. 

Inevitably, the focus for the next few weeks will be on Year 11 and Year 13 and the final push that we can give them to achieve their very best. As usual, positive motivational strategies can do wonders at this stage - just telling students over and over again that they can and will do well, even if we are secretly worried, can somehow swing them towards success. So please remain positive and optimistic and thank you in advance for all of the work I know you will be doing on marking timed essays or assessments, posting work on Google Classroom, setting revision tasks on Show My Homework, running interventions and ensuring that every lesson now counts.

Have a great week

Mia

The week ahead

Monday
Normal day.

Tuesday
Meeting: No meetings due to Year 12 Parents' Evening on Thursday.

Wednesday 
Briefing 8.15am.
No meetings after school.

Thursday
Year 12 Parents' Evening 4pm - 6.30pm. In person with appointments on School Cloud - login here to check your appointments.

Friday
Normal day.

Notes
Year 11 mock exams - Monday.

Learning and teaching: Spotted!

A round up of some of the great learning and teaching strategies we’ve noticed being used around school recently...  

Digital Learning

Google Workspace
On our Staff VLE we have a number of video tutorial guides for the Google Workspace suite modules – Forms, Sheets, Slides, Docs, Drive and of course Google Classroom. 
They can be accessed on the Digital Learning page here
The video guides for Docs, Forms, Sheets, Slides and Drive cover the basics, but there are a range of tutorials for different elements and functions of Google Classroom that may be of use.

If you wish to take your Googleyness even further, there are also links to a Google Workspace Certification - a qualification at two levels, made from a series of modules which can be completed as and when.
Level 1 is a ‘Learn the Basics’ - a series of modules to complete (15 hours in total with each unit approximately 1 hour long) which will lead to becoming a Google Certified Educator at Level 1.
Level 2 enables you to ‘Go Further’ with more advanced training to become a Google Certified Educator at Level 2. It is also made up of modules lasting approximately 15 hours in total.

Google Chrome
In addition to the material above, there are a range of Google Chrome extensions relevant to education that you may find useful and wish to add to your Google chrome browser at home. They can be found here. 
I would welcome any feedback on these, as well as suggestions to add to the list. If you feel they are of particular use, we can add them to the school Google Chrome browser.

Tips and Tricks
Digital Learning Tips and Tricks already shared can be found here. 
I’m keen to continue to develop a bank of useful Digital Learning teaching tools that you can dip into to enhance lessons - if you have any additional tips/tricks that you have found useful and wish to share, or particularly useful web based software or tools, please let us know by completing this Google Form.

Paul Manby

Character Points/SMHW Update

You may remember in last week’s Connect, I mentioned something ‘big and exciting’ with regard to Show My Homework…

Now I imagine that the words, big, exciting and SMHW may come as a sort of oxymoron for some people but humour me and read on! I may just have found a reason for you to love SMHW, if not already!

Starting on Monday, we are asking that ALL CHARACTER POINTS ARE RECORDED ON SMHW! The reason is that parents have visibility on the apps parent view now. It’s a new add-on which will help not just celebrate our students more effectively but will encourage more parental engagement!

You don’t have to worry about SIMs, SMHW will write back to SIMs every 5 minutes so, no doubling up on work. See my VLE announcement for more detail.

Happy Monday!
Noble

Inclusion Heroes

This week’s Inclusion Hero goes to Tara Quigley and Ange Thomas who organised a cookery morning with 2 of our most vulnerable Year 8 students to give them a bit of a boost – they had a fab time (both staff and students!) and made burgers. Thank you to both of you for organising this and taking the time to make the girls feel so special.

Lou