ON-DEMAND WEBINAR
Creating Learning Stories in the Playground web platform
Video Details
Creating Learning Stories in the Playground web platform
Join Candace from the Discover by Xplor training team as she shares tips and ideas for creative ways of documenting Learning Stories in the Playground web platform.
Candace will provide insights on using the three formats available to you in Playground, namely:
- Canvas
- Tables
- Documents
Video transcript
Candace: Kia ora koutou. Welcome to our learning story webinar. My name is Candace. I’m the trainer here at Discover and this morning I’m going to be taking you through how you can create some fun and some interesting learning stories on Playground web. We do have Posts available on the app version of Playground. I’m going to be leaving Posts alone for today and I’m going to be focusing us more on Documents, Canvas and Tables, the three features that are available on Playground Web. So, I’m going to dive right in, and we will go straight into Documents.
Now, when we think about a learning story, it’s, it’s one of those things that that’s not really hard and fast, is it? And exactly what your requirements are. So, we, we do have that structure of notice, recognise, respond, but, aside from that, it’s, it’s up to the individual, how, how you want it to look. So, If we pop in here, into a new Document, we can go blank and that gives us, it gives us a blank page, which is, which is great possibility, but also a little intimidating because, what can we put here? But, What I would say to use Documents for is if you’ve got a learning story, or if you’ve seen something, or done, you had an experience with, one of the children in your care that is going to be quite involved in terms of the amount that you need to write, if you’re going to be doing a lot of typing, a lot of analysis, a lot of following up, Documents is a really good place, to do a learning story. And even though it isn’t as bright and as colourful as, your, Tables and Canvas, which I’ll show us in a few minutes, It’s still a great, we can still make it look nice and fun. So, I’m going to start us up the top, with the title. One of the things that I always say when you start, with anything new in Playground is create a title for it and don’t make it something generic like learning story, because otherwise you’re going to end up with 500 learning stories and you’re not going to be able to tell which one’s which. So, let’s go learning story for Matilda, you know. Or term three learning story, just make it easy to identify in some way. And I’m going to start typing into my Document. It’s like a Word document, in its, in its appearance. I’ve started typing and I’m going to turn this into a heading.
I’m going to come to my drop down here and I’m going to centre it to make it look pretty. Now, because I’m a very visual person and I think most of us as teachers are quite visual people, what I want to do is come in and in our content bar there, if I pop in I can see these, these options, collage, image, video. I’m going to drag and drop a collage in there, and that’s going to give me a nice structure to drop some photos in. So, if you’ve taken some photos of the child during this experience, or, during, the observation that you’ve made them, you can pop them in here. So, what we’re going to do next is drag and drop the image over. So, we’ll pop that in there. And now this media widget here, this is going to show you any photo that has been uploaded in Playground previously, and that includes photos that were Posted, from the app via Posts. So, I always say when you’re doing your programming and planning, you want to start with Posts in the app. It’s a great way to, to get things out there quickly. And it also means that you’ve got your photos in the web version. You don’t have to go digging, through your, your cloud or your files or anything. You don’t have to do any transferring onto your computer. I mean, you can upload from your computer at the top there if you want to. But, if you’ve Posted your photos via Posts in the app before, or if you’ve put them somewhere else in Playground, they’ll be here for you to use. So, I’ll select this one for now, and then we can drag and drop some others over here if we want to, make it look really nice. So, we could drop a few more in there. And then what you can do is, and it’s entirely up to you how you’d like to do this, but you could type one great big, long paragraph, you can just go for it. Go for broke here and type everything out. Personally, I like to keep things nice and structured. So, I’m just going to go with the notice, recognise, respond format here, and I’m going to create headings out of these. Excuse me. There we go. I just made a little mistake there, I accidentally deleted my collage, which I don’t want to do. Yeah, I like to keep things nice, and structured. So, I’ll create my little second heading there, and you can choose your different sizes. And then when I come underneath, I can just return back to normal text. I won’t type a whole lot in here, just in the interest of time. And I might do my second heading there. So, I’m going to use heading two because it’s a little, so we’ve got heading one up there and then I’ve used heading two just to differentiate between the two. Now what can be nice is, even though you’re typing, throughout Documents and you haven’t, you don’t have a whole lot of creative freedom in here, but you can still make it look really nice. So we’ve, we’ve got our collage up there where I can put three different photos, but you can also put your photos in if you just, instead of dragging collage in, if you want to just drag and drop an image in, at any point, you can dot some photos throughout the learning story, just to maintain a little bit of, a little bit of interest as the, as the family is having a look in Home. So, on the Home app, they’ll be able to see this. We can print it out if that’s something else that you would like to do. There’s my third heading.
So you can go through, type everything out. Now, if at any point, because when we’re talking about, Posts, which is like your shorter, quick, get them out, get them done feature of Playground. Whereas Documents, you might be writing something that’s a little bit longer, or you might have something that’s ongoing. So, what you can do. is save it as a draft. You don’t have to tag anyone, it won’t go out to the families just yet, you can just leave it there for now. So, the next time that you come into Playground, and you jump into Documents, there it is there, Learning Story for Matilda, and we’ll click on our little three dot menu there and go to Edit, and you can just keep going with it. So every time you save it as a draft, it’ll just, update and only when you’re ready, do you, can you click that pub I mean, honestly, if you click on publish to parents and you haven’t got any children tagged, the family still won’t see it. When you are ready for the family to see it, what we can do is click on children and we can drag and drop children into the document, individually. If I drag Alfalfa across here. There he is there. That just means that, Alfalfa’s family, parents or guardians actually can now see this, once I hit publish to parents. If you’re doing like a big group, type of learning story, you can do multiple children. You can click on that tag all children there button. Drag that over and drop it in and that’ll tag everybody. Or you can go through this list, and you can pick and choose. So, if you want to go, maybe I don’t want Amanda, or Briar Rose wasn’t here today, or Dash wasn’t, you can click those little X, buttons, as needed.
If we go with that notice, recognise, respond, type of format, and you’re doing a lot of typing, if there’s anything else that you have created, maybe a Post or a, another Document or something that is relevant to this particular learning story, you can drag and drop those in. If we have a look on the left-hand side there, I click on Posts, all the Posts that I’ve created previously will be there. And I can drag and drop those in. And we get that little preview of it there. So, if that’s relevant, you can pull that in as well. And that way you can see the cycle of planning and you can see the references. And it’s a holistic perspective.
Important to note here, when we’re talking about, tagging or dragging and dropping in other pieces of work that you have created, elsewhere in Playground, whoever is tagged here, so you can see in my Document down the bottom, I’ve got everybody tagged. If these children are not tagged in the Post or the Canvas or whatever else it is that you pull in here to reference, they, the family’s not going to be able to see all of this.
They’re not going to be able to click on it, save the photos, anything like that. They’ll see a reference to it, but for privacy reasons, they won’t be able to access any further details.
So I’m going to just move on from Documents for now, because it’s perhaps not the most exciting. It is a really functional place to do a lot of detail and typing, but it’s not the most exciting to look at. So, I’ll move us on. If you’ve got any questions about Documents, just pop them in the Q& A. You should see a box at the top of Teams.
Just pop them in there and I can, I can answer those at the end of the session. So once again, I’m going to save my draft. And next I’m going to move us down into Tables. Tables, definitely a fan favourite. Very easy to use and you can make it look really pretty as well. So, I’m going to click on new table.
And Tables is really good if you would like something that is going to be a little bit more structured. So, I’ll click on blank. Now, I’m going to click on, A lot of people can look, look at Tables and go, oh, maybe this isn’t necessarily a place that I would do a learning story, but I humbly disagree.
I think there’s a really great way to do these. So, jump into yourselves. This is like the world’s friendliest Excel spreadsheet without all the maths and the coding and all that thing. If I’m going to create, a, a learning story for a child. I’m going to do this for one particular child, needs learning stories with an S.
So if you want to compile your learning stories for children in one place, you could have an entire table dedicated, to just one child, if you wanted to. Or, if you have a room, you could even, have a table for all of the, all the learning stories for a particular room. There’s no right or wrong way to do this.
But for now, I’m just going to type up my cells there. And I’m going to use my headings.
And I’m going to use my Notice, Recognise, Respond format as well.
But you can make your headings whatever you would like them to be. Again, no right or wrong. I’m going to centre them too because I think that’ll look nice. Now, because we don’t want just a great big wall of black and white, difficult to read, text. What I’m going to do is colour these cells. If we come up to our little colour palette up the top here, just going to give them a little bit of colour, so we can differentiate the headings.
There we go. All
right, so we’ve got our headings. Next, if you’re doing a whole bunch of learning stories in one place, because, because these are living Documents, you can always come back, you can publish this to the family, so they can see the learning story. And then you can come back in, edit it and publish it again, and everyone will get the updated version.
So this can be a great place if you just want a one stop shop for, all of your learning stories for one particular child or, or even a room. So, let’s put, teacher’s name and date. And we can copy that and paste it into each of the cells. So anytime you come in here.
It’s fresh and it’s ready to go. I’m
actually going to bold that so that I can clearly see the difference. 6th of November is our date. Can you believe it’s the 6th of November? What happened to our year? Where’s it gone? Goodness me. Alright. So, in here, you might again start typing. And you can, you can change these to be a little bit wider if you would like or a little bit shorter.
Again, no right or wrong way.
I do a lot of garden type themes in my, my work, in Playground. And then again, we’ve got, it’s just like in Documents on the side there, we’ve got our content and I’m going to drag and drop an image in. Cause I love, I love colour. I love pictures. I want to document, with, like a, an aesthetically pleasing style.
We can pop our photos in there. If you’ve got videos, you can pop them in here as well. And again, if there’s anything that you want to, refer to. Actually, I’m just going to click on my little plus button here to add a row. And I’m going to put, related in here, actually. And I chose heading four.
Yep. Centre that one. Give it my nice colour there. And then I can come in the side. And again, reference any other work that I’ve created previously that might be related to this particular learning story. When I publish this, even though we can only see that little, reference there, when I publish this, any families that are tagged in this, overall table that have also been, whose children have also been tagged in this Post that I’ve referenced, they can then click on that Post.
It’ll open up for them in, the Playground app, and they can read that as well.
And similarly, tagging children. Again, it’s just like Documents, you drag and drop into one of the cells. And same goes with your outcomes. So, if I pop into outcomes there, I’m just going to switch this over to Te Whāriki. If you’re really super familiar with Te Whāriki, you can even type in your principles or your strands. And actually, if you. This is amazing. You could search for them. If you know them off by heart, and you would be, and you’re the kind of person that would search for, a strand, a specific outcome, rather than going through with these drop downs and dragging and dropping them in, please let me know in the Q&A.
I have been trying to find someone who knows Te Whāriki off by heart. We’ll drag and drop that in, and that will reference the particular strand or principle.
Okay, so again, what we can do is just save it as a draft if we want to, or if I click on publish to parents now, Art, Art’s parents, parents or guardians are going to see this. So, I’ve published it. They can leave comments on it through Home as well, which is really nice. Now I’m just going to close out of it, and if I want to do another learning story for Art later, I can always come back in. And, oh, look, I’ve just, I’ve, I’ve done it, untitled table. I didn’t put a title in, which was silly of me. So, I’m going to click on my edit button, Leaves Learning Stories. There we go. And I can add in extra photos, I can do more learning stories. I can just add bits and pieces in and update it and republish it. And now the tagged children, will get the, it’ll show up the updated version on Home.
Similarly, and I, this is one of the things that I come across as a trainer very, very often is like a, a hesitance, in Playground Web, like, what if I make a mistake? And trust me, I get where everyone is coming from with that, because it’s, if you, if you click on publish to parents, it goes to the parents. What if you’ve put in a typo or type the wrong thing or done, done something, that you didn’t mean to do. Don’t panic, whatever you do, don’t panic, because if you’ve published something to the family and you go, oh, my gosh, I didn’t mean to do that yet, or, oh, it’s not ready. What you do, you come in, click your pencil edit button, and you can just delete, you can delete the tags. That was just a backspace on my keyboard. You can remove the children. So, if I jump into children, I can just see, I can use that little tagged children toggle. No children found, I’ve removed the tags, and then what you’re going to do is republish. Now when you, it’s, it’s a bit of a, it’s a funny thing, right, because it says publish to parents, but you, when there’s no children tagged, you’re not actually, actually publishing to your families. If you’ve sent this out previously to families and you go, oops, nope, need to do more work on it, remove the children, republish it and it will withdraw it from Home. They won’t be able to see it. Or if it’s a smaller mistake, you can leave the tag in there. And just make the changes that you need to make. So, if I go, I didn’t mean to put that photo in there. Just delete it using your keyboard, republish. And they’ll get the updated version. They will no longer see the old version of it. So, if you start to worry, please, please don’t. It’s all, there’s all, it can be fixed. It can be fixed.
We are really blasting through time here. I, I wish I had an hour for this actually. Please post any questions in the Q&A if you’ve got them. I’m going to move us on to Canvas, our last feature in Playground for now. My personal favourite, everyone’s got a favourite in Playground, this is mine. I love Canvas. Um. Jumping into new Canvas. Now you’ve got your templates there. And you can create some really intricate stuff, on play on Canvas. I mean, you can go all out if you want to, like, this is one that I created as a template for everybody. But trust me when I tell you, no matter what you see, what other centres have created. Whatever’s on the layouts that are existing, you don’t have to make something this big, you really don’t. This is a huge elaborate Canvas and when you’re starting out with it for the first time, it doesn’t need to look like this. It doesn’t, I mean it can, eventually with time and practice you can create some really cool, big elaborate projects. But when we’re talking about a learning story and if you’re new to Canvas, let’s just start really simple. I’m going to go new Canvas, I’m going to go blank, and along the left here, I’ve got my menu. I’m going to start with shapes. Have a think about the theme of your learning story. What are you documenting? What are you creating? What did you see the child doing? And I’m going to go back to my garden example again, and I’m just going to use a leaf. So, you scroll through here, drag and drop your shapes in. Using these little circles on the side, you can adjust the size. I’m going to, actually I’ll put a couple of leaves in. You can move them around, just click, hold and drag. My circle in there. Zoom out, zoom in. This is a big space by the way. This is like six, if you printed it out it can be like six A4 sized sheets of paper. It can be really big. Clicking on my shape. Go to the colour palette up the top here, because, again, most of us are very visual being teachers, we love a bit of colour, and I always feel a bit better about a project when I just splash some colour on the page first. I’ve got my circle, I’ve got my leaves, and see how about my little stem is going behind? My circle there, I don’t really want that to happen, so I’m going to use these little arrow buttons. And I can change the layers. Same with this guy, I’m going to pull him up through layers, I can pull him down. And now this is really cool. Click on your shape. Go to your colour palette. And you’ve got this opacity slider down the bottom, and this can look so pretty when you start layering things. See how I can change the opacity there, change the colour of that one as well. Cute. That’s the start of our learning story. It doesn’t have to be big. What I’m going to do next is come into content and I’m going to drag and drop some text in. Put in a header. Learning story. I’m going to drag and drop that into my little leaf there. And you can see it’s, it’s gone behind the leaf. So, I’m going to pull it up through the layers. There we go. Now I’m going to drag another bit of text in, and here we can start typing. And you can see there I’ve gone, my little box has started to give me a scroll button. If you don’t want the scroll button, just make the shape bigger. And we can then fit that into that little circle there. Having a wonderful time. If you need to, you can change your font size as well. There we go. So, we’ll put that in there, you can keep typing. And what I’m going to do now, and this is a cool little trick I like to show everybody, I’m just going to drag another little, circle in there. And I’m going to come down to Documents. Don’t let this section confuse you, it confused me when I first started.
Documents means everything. It means Documents, Canvas, Tables and Posts. If you’ve got a Post that has a picture, so like this one here, if I drag and drop that into this circle, the circle fills up with the picture that was the first picture that was put on that Post or that Document. And like, like I showed you in Tables, families can click on that, and it’ll open up the other piece of work that you’ve made. Or if you just want to keep it really simple, if you go back into content, you can drag and drop your images in. And you can do a collage. You don’t have to type a lot in this one. You can just do a big, beautiful collage if you want to. No right or wrong way. But the thing that I really want you to take from this is it doesn’t have to be big and elaborate. It can just be super simple and sometimes that’s really effective. So don’t be intimidated by Canvas, a lot of people are, don’t be. Just start small with it, create a collage, put a couple of shapes in. Don’t make it harder than it, don’t make it hard for yourself by trying to do something big and elaborate when you first start, just go simple.
And now quickly, children and outcomes, so again it’s like that drag and drop situation for the rest of, Playground. What we’re going to do this time though is you’ve got a couple of options, so you can drag and drop children onto the Canvas, and it’ll bring up their little photo if they’ve got one in their profile. Or if you don’t want a whole lot of extra photos hanging around the outside of your Canvas, I’m just going to click on my little bin icon there. What you can do is drag and drop children into shapes and now at first, it’s going to look like they disappear. But if we click on that leaf there, we can see the tag for Alfalfa. So, we know he’s tagged. His family are going to see this if they log into Home on the web. You can do that with your outcomes too. And it’s just a way of keeping it really neat and tidy so you don’t have a whole lot of outcomes and children and stuff laying all over the Canvas. I mean you can, if you want to do a design with that, that’s great. But if you want to hide them a little bit more and just make it about the colours and the photos, drag and drop them into a shape.
Okay, now I have really, cut it very close to u the line here. So please pop any questions that you might have about Playground and creating learning stories in Playground in the Q&A and I’ll answer them. And let me know if you’d like me to like to do another one of these. Before we go, I’ll refer you to our Pinterest. So, Discover does have a Pinterest So if you want to copy that link there, I’ll actually, what, I’ll pop it in our, our chat there if you want to copy and paste that link. This can be a great place to get some inspiration, if you’re just starting out for the first time. Come in and have a look in here, we’ve got Documents, we’ve got Canvas, we’ve got Tables, all different things that you can try, if you would like to.
All right, last chance for any questions. If you’ve got them, pop them in the Q&A. Otherwise, I will see you next time.
