Digital Fluency Intensive #9 - Exam day

Hallelujah! I am definitely thrilled to have passed the Level 1 of the  Google Certified Educator exam. It put into practice a lot of what we had covered in DFI. 

Our last session of DFI covered the term 'Ubiquitous' - Anytime, Anywhere, Any pace. 

This means, due to digital affordances, our learners have the potential to be experiencing high quality learning experiences right now while we are here at DFI. This is especially important and crucial for the learning of our students who generally are exposed to 30,000,000 less words than students living in higher decile areas. 

The following image shows the effects the Summer Learning Journey can have on students who take part in the holidays. As teachers, if we make it an everyday practice to make all learning rewindable, and check on our learning online during the break, then we are ensuring that all of our students have the tools they need to be successful. I found this rewindable accessibility especially helpful during the Level 1 exam. 

I feel very grateful to have experienced and tried out the various skills and tools covered in the 9week DFI course. More exciting than passing the exam, are the rich rewindable resources/tools now available to us! Knowing where to find it and being able to help others with new things I've learnt brings more meaning to our Learn, Create, Share journey. 

Thank you to Gerhard and Dorothy for the fun filled whirlwind adventures and life hacks online. I've definitely enjoyed my time.

DFI Cohort #3 - 2019 signing out!

Digital Fluency Intensive #8

Session 8 already! Today's session was all about Devices: 1-1 devices using chromebooks or ipads.
Today's pedagogy was about Cybersmart and more specifically using the right language when talking with our students. Here are the cybersmart lessons available on the Manaiakalani site. Check out my screencastify further down this blog post for a tour through one of the options 'Smart Learner'.

Smart learners - can be as simple as: just like you set your books up with date and ruling pages, set up your docs and google drive so students know the expectations and know the right folders to put their work in.

This smart learner lesson also carried into our session on Hapara - Teacher Dashboard. It was great to see the push for keeping it positive by always displaying dashboard not as a means to threaten kids or x them out of their tabs but rather as a 'norm' and focussing on more positive things like "Great to see ___ moving onto the next task..." We also covered many of the useful options available to us on dashboard. One new thing I found out was that I could see student's blogs which haven't been published yet and also anonymous comments that are highlighted in red. I need to make sure I check this more regularly as I never knew this.

I really enjoyed being in our students shoes and having a go at working off a chromebook and ipad. It definitely makes me realise just how talented students are who are able to draw detailed images on google draw as the touch pad is not as big and easy to manoeuvre as it is on a mac.

Our create challenge was to create a screencastify about one aspect of the cybersmart areas and talk through the lesson plans provided. Check out 'Smart Learner'.



We also registered for the Level 1 Google Exam for next. Looking forward to it.

Digital Fluency Intensive #7

Our sessions with Dorothy looking into the Manaiakalani pedagogy and kaupapa have always been really good reminders for me personally. Even though I'd already heard most of it before, it is great to hear and be reminded of where this pedagogy came from, its back story or history. Today was all about empowerment. Great reminder that being in a Manaiakalani school and 1-1 chromebooks is NOT just a tool. But rather something that empowers learners, who then empower our whanau and wider community.

Today's session was all about computational thinking. This is thinking like a computer would, coding directions/instructions and also debugging or problem solving. Our kids have had great experiences with this part of the curriculum in Term 2 when we covered coding using scratch and students were able to use their animations to show their way around the world. Here is an example from Tha Zin's blog. 

We all had a go at trying out some basic coding on scratch and Vivian from OMG Tech took us through a simple coding experience that can be used to introduce computational thinking to beginners. This involved 6 players, each with a number (we used the distance from where we were born to where we are now). Rules/code was, whoever has the biggest number goes right (or straight if up against a wall) and the other person goes left. We carried this on and ended up with 6 players in numerical order at the end.

This was a great hands on session so even though it is not something I would personally take interest in (but I learn it for the sake of teaching my students and it being part of the curriculum). Here's another hands on activity we did about the called the zombie lights we used to distract the zombies so we could get away.

     

The image on the left is what we received in the pack and the image on the right is our completed zombie light.

I really enjoyed learning about the binary number system which is how you represent data using electricity (how computers are programmed) using 1 and 0. 

Digital Fluency Intensive #6

Our focus for our 6th DFI session was all about dealing with data. This was definitely the perfect timing to have this session as we near the end of year with all our data analysis for end of year testing. This will also help me to collate data and how best to show progress/achievement from my own inquiry as part of our CoL role.

My 2 interesting things I learnt was the use of Google My Maps and Pick a path option in Google Forms. My maps was great to see the potential it has when teaching maths or showing a classroom profile in terms of where students are from using the world map. Forms would definitely be an option to use in class more often - especially with the current quiz form I am currently composing - as students are really interested in being tested on current events.

Google Sheets - this great tool just got better as I learnt more things I can do on it. I use sheets daily for planning, student turn-in sheets, and for team data collection. Something new I've learnt how to do today and will be sharing with my team is analysing our students blog post numbers. Here is a graph I've created using sheets about Zaeeda's blog posts over the years. From here I could have some really good learning conversations with her about her blogging over the years and ask maybe why she has only blogged in Jan this year and last. It could be that she didn't take her chromebook home over the holidays? I will definitely be revisiting Robyn Anderson from Panmure Bridge's blog post to follow through on her statistics unit as part of our maths programme in Term 1. Thank you Robyn!

Digital Fluency Intensive #5

Enabling Access: Sites

This was our focus today for our first DFI back in Term 4. This was great timing as some of us are preparing already for 2020 and our new class/team sites.

In our Connecting with Manaiakalani session, Dorothy reiterated our Manaiakalani message that Connected Learners Share - Tohatoha. This is definitely true both online and in person. A great reminder to us as teacher to continue to keep this in mind as we start Term 4.

Our deep dive session dove into a heap of different sites and shared what we thought were visually appealing and if it was user friendly for learners. Following on from this each of us then presented our own class/team site and took the cohort on a tour of our site and where everything is. Our cohort were then given the opportunity to rate and give feedback about improvements we could make. This proved a very worthy activity as you become so used to your site because you use it daily, that if a third party comes along, are they able to find things so easily. Some key comments from peoples feedback were that some teachers hadn't shared access for everyone to view their students learning, and someone also made a comment about the class blog button not being easy to find which is true as this is not labelled but simply linked to each teachers name. I have already started working to make these improvements to our site.

Our last session was lead by Gerhard who took us through making buttons, and banners for our DFI sandpit site.

This was a great exercise and I can now confidently say that I know how to make buttons for my own inquiry sites in the future. During this time I also managed to have a go at the DFI google sites challenge. You had to complete the set of instructions in creating a site within 5 minutes. I took 8 minutes to complete mine so will definitely need to keep practising this at a later time.

Something I'd like to add to our current site is an image carousel as I know my learners would love seeing school wide events on display rather than hidden in a folder.
One cool tip I picked up today: Normally when taking photos of students learning or events, I take it on my phone, then upload 9 at a time to students blog photos folder which students have access to on our team 5 site. This takes a while and I normally get students to start writing their blog while I upload. Today, Shiralee and Rachelle shared that if we click into the folder first on our phones, press the plus button, click camera and WALLAH! You can take photos and this goes straight into the folder without adding to your gallery on your phone. I will definitely be using this tip from now on. Thank you ladies!

Digital Fluency Intensive #4

Todays focus was collaborating around google sites. What a task they set for us today. It was definitely great to be able to start a site from scratch over and over again so we go used to where things were and how to line things up so it looked neat and tidy.

Here is a link to my multimodal site - Idenity.

A lot of the information or linking of texts was taken from Angela Moala's multimodal spreadsheet which is a collection of texts which make up a multi textual series of learning. The only things I had to create were the learning tasks that linked up the different texts.

Dorothy also went through some of Woolf Fishers research about T shaped literacy which our team of teachers in Year 7 & 8 have been looking at over the last couple of years. This is taking students through a literacy lesson that is both deep and wide. This is ensuring you as a teacher are diving deeply into a main text with your group of students, but also providing opportunities for them to work independently on activities with a variety of other texts/videos. This was the purpose of us creating a multimodal site.

One take away I will definitely remember to keep in mind for the rest of my planning, is to ensure I provide opportunities to empower students through free choice of texts to read. This is also added on at the end of my site.

I would love to keep creating multimodal sites like this for my teams inquiry studies or even during units of learning in literacy.
Thank you DFI for another workshop filled with useful knowledge and tools to use daily.

Digital Fluency Intensive #3

Our 3rd DFI day I missed out on due to being on leave. Upon reading up on the agenda for the day, I was quite guttered that I'd missed out on it as my students and I quite enjoy creating on google slides and drawings.

Here is my attempt at one of the tasks on google drawings. I've also added this as a button on the left hand side of my blog.

What I really enjoyed and find useful is the Google drawings sandpit with links to examples of it's many uses which gave me new and fresh ideas I hadn't used before. 

One thing I do need to go back and double check are the settings on youtube and organising my playlist to suit my class and their use of youtube.

Digital Fluency Intensive #2

Day 2 of our DFI course brought more learning about our Manaiakalani Kaupapa as well as exposing us to areas of the GSuite we have yet to use.

One of my takeaways from the AKO section of the Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy was RATE. Recognise, Amplify, Turbocharge, Effective Teaching. This led me to a very useful blog post from one of my team members which triggered all the learning that took place in one of our Learn staff meetings at the start of the year. Here is a link to Kiriwai's blog post.

One of my biggest takeaways was from our deep diving session about Google KEEP.
Normally during a DFI session, I would make quick notes on my phone using Samsung notes so I could remember the things I needed to go back and have a look at and the most useful things for me and my class to start using. With google keep, I can use this on anything google on my laptop as well as on my phone and it would update immediately. Here's a list of all the things google keep can do which include: can take photos, shopping list, can draw, can get notes or comments shared across team and plug then in along docs and so much more. The best and most useful part of google keep which I will definitely be using in my class is the fact that it can grab text from an image! I could take a photo of a piece of text from a book and using google keep, extract the text from the photo and have students use this in docs for students to highlight and write notes/comments next to it.

Something that I could use with my team this coming holidays would be our session on google hangouts. This enabled us to talk to each other in a group setting and screen sharing. We combined this with quicktime player to record our google hangout. We trialled this in small groups of 3 so here is a short video of myself sharing with Jenny and Elena.

Digital Fluency Intensive #1

I have been looking forward to my chance to join the DFI course and finally I've made it in cohort #3. An exciting start jam packed with an enormous amount of knowledge, tricks and quick fixes which would all add towards making my teaching life a lot more manageable in our Google world.

We are very fortunate to have quite a packed class in this cohort as it makes for more rich sharing of experiences from novices and experts alike.
Having been at Pt England and therefore part of Manaiakalani for the last 5 years, I was immediately immersed in the Learn, Create, Share pedagogy which has become just what we do as teachers. Something new and interesting I found out today during Dorothy's coverage of the 'Origins of Manaiakalani' was that this was born out of classroom teachers literacy learning cycles and the realisation that we were actually already doing Learning, Creating and Sharing just in smaller settings and maybe using different academic language.

One of the things I really enjoy about DFI so far is the set out/ layout in which the course is delivered I've shared this in my top tips poster below (which is a big achievement in itself as it is made in google docs!). This is using the Deep Diving, Chalk 'n Talk, Explore and Levelling Up model. It definitely felt like all those things and I particularly enjoyed the levelling up so that if we felt up to the challenge, there is still more to be learnt, or we could choose to stay and keep familiarising ourselves with some of the things we've covered already.

My biggest takeaway is the amazing wonders of google docs. One thing I could share with my students come Monday would be the explore button on docs which only give you images that are free and good to use with citations already imbedded.
One thing I will be working on is to do a complete Marie Kondo of my drive so my folders for the last 5 years are more organised.

There is so much more I have picked up and can't wait to revisit. This is also made easy as everything is rewindable and constantly being updated for us. So I've had such an enjoyable 1st session and am looking forward to our next DFI session. I also highly recommend EVERYONE needs to make sure they do this course.