Digital Fluency Intensive #9

 Looking back on the week that has been:

This week I introduced the pencil tool in scratch to my students.  Of course many of my students were already familiar with scratch however many had not discovered the pencil tool before.  The students in my class are much more competent with coding than me.  One thing I did notice though is that although they are capable themselves they were not as good at explaining what they were doing to me or others. THis oculd be a next step for them.

How the DFI went for me?

Overall I found the DFI course to be enjoyable and I picked up many tips and tricks for use both within my personal and professional life and particularly for implementing with my students. I have many ideas that I am going to explore during the holidays and then use with my students during term 4. It is so great to have the presentations from the course to refer back to in the future. The usefulness of these resources really highlighted for me the importance of providing rewindable learning opportunities for my students also. I really appreciated the computational thinking sessions as this helped clarify what the wordy progress outcomes actually look like in action and I feel much more confident about exploring these outcomes with my students.

The exam:

 I sat my Level 1 Google Certified Educator Exam today. I found some of the first questions very wordy however enjoyed the practical tasks as I felt well prepared for them after doing DFI.   Update: Very pleased to report that after a long week of waiting I have been notified that I passed my Level 1 exam. 

What next?

My next steps are to go back through the resources and presentations from the DFI so I can set some goals and make a plan for myself in regards to implementing some of the new ideas I learnt.

Difital Fluency Intensive #8

Looking back at the week that has been

This week I went back and looked at the smart parents resources.  There is a wealth of information there so need to spend some time working out how and what to share with my whanau.  I also used the smart share through hapara to share some resources with my class this week.  I like how it filed correctly for the students, my only concern is that by sharing the resources this way that it may lessen my students engagement with my class site.  I won't share everything in this way with all of my learners however for some target learners this will definitley be a tool I utilise more often.

Week 8: Computational Thinking

Manaaiakalani Kaupapa and Pedagogy - Empowerment

Empowerment presentation here.

Within the Manaaiakalani programme we not only use ICT to supplement our more traditional methods of teaching but we can also transform the way students learn by opening up new and different ways. It also enables our students to make connections.

The new digital technologies curriculum

Presentation here

Although related concepts there is a difference beween digital technologies and digital fluency.

Digitally fluency is about empowering our students to be confident in the digital world.  This means being able to synthesise information across the internet, validate the information and being able to be collaborative online.

Digital technologies is about creating their own digital technology solutions.There are two parts to the new curriculum as detailed below.

Computational thinking - such as programming, unplugged activities, algorithms, robotics, makey makey, scratch coding

Designing and Developing Digital Outcomes - such as making your DLO's, graphics animations, 3D models and films

Explore this site https://rarangamatihiko.com/resources/decoded-for-learners-series 

It is important to use the language with the students. Here is the langauge of the digital technologies curriculum decoded for learners: 

Learners Computational Thinking

Digital Outcomes

Although this is designed for learners it was also helpful for me to understand what the progress outcomes were describing so I can plan activities.

Exploring Coding

I really enjoyed the exploring coding session. I had limited experience with coding and enjoyed exploring the different activities to see the range of activities that can be used to teach computational thinking. Presentation here  Over the holidays I would like to revisit this presentation and explore some more of the links. I found the compute it challenge here really engaging and challenging as well as slightly addictive.  I will defitniely revisiting this to see how many levels I can pass.

Creating with Coding

In this session I explored different ways to use coding within a mathematical context. We explored drawing shapes and discussed the range of possibilities such as creating transformations, particular shapes and exploring angles.  I had used scratch before but had never added the pen tool and explored using the sprite to draw shapes. This was new for me and at times frustrating as I certainly had to do a lot of debugging of my code to get the sprite to draw what I wanted. I am going to run a mini session on this during the next week with my class and see how they go.

 

What next?

Over the next week I plan to spend some time revising for the exam. I am also going to:

1. Scratch: Introduce the pen tool within scratch to my students and get them to explore shape drawing within this application.
2. Watch the Nigel Latta - technology and empowerment video clip here

Digital Fluency Intensive # 7

Looking back on the week that has been:

This week we had a class discussion around our class learning site. what the students like, dislike, find helpful and not helpful.  It was interesting getting their perspective. I anticipated that they would say that the instructions were too wordy however most learners siad they appreciated the detail as if the were away or forgot they could easily go back later and still know what to do. A couple of learners said that audio instructions would be helpful so this is something for me to explore. They said it was easy to find the learning tasks for the week however they also said they would like on the weekly timetable there to be a list of the weeks tasks across the curriculum to refer back to, like I had during lockdown.  This is something I will reimplement. My next step is to create a google form and get some feedback from my learners and their whanau about the functionality of our class site and their engagement with it.  I will do this survey next term to inform my 2021 site planning. I have also browsed a variety of sites in regards to how they put their rewindable learning on their sites so students can easily access it again as an ongoing goal for me is to add rewindable learning and helpful hints on the maths section of my site.

Devices: Week 7

Connecting with Manaiakalani Pedagogy and Kaupapa: Fiona Grant

Fiona Grant spoke this morning about the importance of the cybersmart programme. Cybersmart is being smart and secure digital citizens.  Presentation link here.  The important points were:

• There are 10 categories to focus on.  
• Things to consider - whole school focus, planned and deliberate teaching.  
• Core componenets of the cybersmart programme are smart learners, smart footprint and smart relationships. 
• The learning intentions are relevant across all age groups.  The difference is the way you present the information to the learners that changes.

How cybersmart ties into the Manaaikalani pedagogy

1. Empowering -  Our students are empowered through cybersmart to be connected citizens - Smart learners following the kawa of care. Students need to learn that every time  they connect, collaborate and share online it combines to create their digital footprint.
2. Ubiquitous - is about learning being accessible and students using technology in smart and clever ways.  This relates to smart relationships cybersmart learning.
3. Connected - The key message here is teaching our students about how to engage in behaviours in the online context that "elevate positive action"
4. Visible - Everything we do in the digtial world is visible.  THis is about teaching students to be confident decision makers when sharing and interacting online.

My next step is to: Explore the smart parents resources and think about how to incorporate sharing this with my class whanau.  One idea is to  incorportate one tip each week into my weekly parent email.  I could have a tip for parents or perhaps a family challengeto encourage whanau to engage with their students online learning.

Deep Dive: Hapara Teacher Dashboard Presentation

We looked again in detail at Hapara Teacher Dashboard. My next step is to explore the use of smart share for some activities. Smart share could be a good way to share the class site initially so they can bookmark it at the start of the year.

Devices:  For the next couple of sessions we explored the two main devices used in 1:1 schools which are the ipad and the chromebook.

When using the ipad we particularly looked at the Explain everything app.  This was an interesting session and it seems like a valuable tool for learners to use as it can be used in a variety of ways.  My class are 1:1 on chromebooks so although I enjoyed this session I have no takeaways to implement.

Chromebooks: In our chromebook session today we did the digital dig which I have done many times with my learners. It is a greaat way to revisit the capabilities of the device our learners use daily.  Fortunately staff at my school each have a chromebook as well as a laptop.  I use my chromebook everyday for my planning and teaching so am now quite proficient with this tool. Screencastify

What next?

After reflecting on today's session I have come up with some things I would like to focus on:

1. Look at incorporating some of the smart parents cybersmart ideas into my weekly emails.

2. Experiment with using smart share to share tasks and resources with my learners.

Digital Fluency Intensive # 6

Looking back at the week that has been.

This past week I presented my first online toolkit.  This was a great opportunity to practice with google meet. I shared some of my integrated literacy and science ideas.  I got some fantastic feedback from some of the teachers who attended so hopefully I have shared some useful ideas.

Enabling Access-Sites:  Week 6

The focus for this weeek was around exploring our own class sites to maximise visible teaching and learning.

The Manaaiakalani Pedagogy Focus:

Today Dorothy talked about how empowering it is for our learners to be able to connect with the wider world through the digital platform. Tuhi mai tuhi atu is a great way to connect with other learners.  I really need to focus on my students replying to their comments to create meaningful learning conversations.  Next step is to go back and look at Dorothy's presentation around attracting an audience to class and student blogs.  Presentation here

One suggestiong I am going to follow up on is to put the twitter feed for toki pounamu blog posting on to my class site.  This will be great for kids to make connections with local children from other schools.

Evaluating Class Sites

It was great to have an opportunity to explore some other class sites and see how other teachers harness th digital platform for visible teaching and learning.  I am going to spend some more time looking through these sites.

My Class Site

I really appreciated having some feedback on my classs site and the time to look at ways to tweak and improve this.  I updated some of my links as some were only visible to Grey Main School.  I also looked at ways I could extend my site with rewindable learning.

What next?

After reflecting on today's session I have come up with some things I would like to focus on in regards to my class site:

1. Create a google form and get some feedbcak from my learners about the functionality and engagement of our class site.

2. Continue adding rewindable learnig on the mathematics section of my site and build this up.

Digital Fluency Intensive # 5

Looking back at the week that has been:

This week I have been looking at ways to use google forms and sheets to support our PB4L programme.  We already have ways of gathering data on behaviour using our school management system which is working well however we are not collecting data on the positives.  Google forms and sheets looks like an easy way to do this.

Collaborate with Sites - Week 5

The focus for this week is about using sites effectively for our learners.

Pedagogy Focus: Making learning visible 

Planning, process, assessment, outcomes all visible.  They day to day functioning of the teaching progression and learning should be visible.  This is about the equity of access for all learners.  There are two parts to visibility:

• The visibility facing the learner:  Google site is so our learners have one space to go to that every one can access.  Keep it simple, limit the links. 
• The teacher facing visibility - Hapara teacher dashboard is our visibility to the learning.  Everything the learner does comes to us as the teacher.  Parent Portal - what is this? How can we use it?

There should be clear links between the class site with the plan for learning, quality feedback on student work and then also sharing of learning visibly on blogs.

Class on Air has some great examples of visible teaching and learning to explore.

Multi Modal Sites - Why?

1. Engage the learners and hook them into the screen and the learning.  

2. Enable and empower our students to learn online and become a life long learner as they can access and learn anything now in the digital world.

3. Battling disengagement - so many distractions on the digital platform.  We need to really sell our learning. Make your class site a place that inspires the students to go in and explore, a visual feast,  it should reflect what we are about.  It needs to be dynamic. 

Multimodal design - behavioural engagement is about students accessing the learning, having a voice and an authentic audience for sharing.

Multi textural design aligns with t shaped literacy - It is about kids being cognitively engaged and get the brains working so they feel challenged.  Rich literacy resources to deepen students understanding.  Go back in and watch the videos in this slide.  

Universal Design for Learning - Thought to ponder: Have I presented the learning in a way that is going to reach everybody in the room.  Individualising learning - use sound bites, graphics etc?

Site idea for next year - use remove bg for student photos for class site home page linking to their blogs - insert as png's s, have a variety of poses.  

Making a multimodal text set

When selecting texts for a multimodal text set think about including:

Focus text - the one text they must read and you are going to look at deeply.

Complementary Text -  text that supports and extends the ideas in the focus text

Scaffolding Text - a text that simplifies the concepts for the students or helps them to understand the ideas.  This could be a video, diagram or visual text.

Challenging texts - cognitively challenge the learners.  Could offer a different perspective

Learner selected text - Attach a padlet and the students add the texts they find related to the theme and it builds as a resource.  You can then add additional texts that support the learning.

Today we spent some time making  a multi modal site for our learners.  I chose to make my site about critical thinking around texts.  The big question to explore was: Can you believe everything you read?  This site will be really valuable to implement with my learners to make sure they check the validity and reliability of the information they source on the internet.

Here is my site; 

What next?

After reflecting on today's session I have come up with some things I would like to focus on this week. They are:

• Harpara -  Do a drive by with my class, put up unshared doc screen on the big screen.  Get students to file all unshared docs
• Finish the activities for the t shaped literacy site that I made today so it can be used in the classroom.

Digital Fluency Intensive #4

Looking back at the week that has been.

This past week I have attended  this term's Toki Pounamu staff meeting which was focused around the create part of the Learn, Create, Share pedagogy.  This was really fantastic as it cemented some of the ideas from last week's DFI and gave me another opportunity to explore different ways of incorporating create into the classroom.  I introduced the remove.bg tool to my class which gave them some new ideas for presenting their work. We are currently doing a geography interchange so we will be incorporating this into the amazing race section of this unit to create mock photos of visits to famous landmarks around the world.

Dealing With Data - Week 4

Here is the link for all of theManaiakalani Mailouts which is a great resource.  Has some fantastic examples of student work to share with my class and inspire them with their create tasks. Here

The Manaiakalani pedagogy focus: 

Share presentation here.  SOme of the important points form this presentation were 

• Sharing with a purpose to an audience.  What makes an authentic audience? An audience where people choose to listen to you for example when you are sharing on your blog people click on your blog and leave a comment.  They are choosing to engage with your post so they are an authentic audience.  
• Share is a way to acknowledge that learning is finished and completed but we also need to know that sharing can be the starting point for new learning.  

Next step: Investigate further this concept of sharing to learn.

Google forms

During this presentation we looked at creating google forms within the classroom.  This is not new learning for me as I do use them in the classroom regularly.  SOme of the new points I picked up from this session were:

• You can now shuffle question order in settings.  
• Could be good to use for current events especially if you go into the quizzes section and change the settings so they have to do it in locked mode so they can't use any other tabs
• Could be used as a form of formative assessment at the start of lessons.  

Here is my current events form that I started:

During one of our break out sessions we were discussing ways to take selfie pictures with chromebooks and this webcam site was mentioned. It has some fun filters to use and I am going to introduce this to my class.

Google my maps 

Google my maps is a tool I have used before in the classroom.  I have never imported data from a spreadsheet to google my maps before however and I could see a lot of scope for using this in the classroom  e.g. collect information via a google form from students.  Where does your family originate from form?  My favourite place in the community? My great NZ road trip.  Here is my map.

Google Sheets 

I have used google sheets in the classroom before however only for very basic data recording and as a hand in sheet for student work.  Some of the great ideas to look into further are:

• Explore the conditional formatting tool in sheets for analysis e.g to highlight students needing support or extension.  Also to quickly identify students without links by highlighting empty cells
• Protect data:  Protect names so they cannot delete the names on the hand in sheet.
• The sigma ∑ tool was new for me.  A great way of finding and using the formulas for the data.  I need to explore this function further.
• Another great tool was the filter tool as you are able to sort data e.g. boys, girls etc and this can then be saved.

A great tip I picked up today was:

• Inserting a link into a blog comment copy this and then delete insert URL here and put your link in then put in the text you want to display in the insert display text here.  Once you publish the comment it will be there as a link<a href="insert URL here">Insert display text here</a>
• Applications of this can be to add links to next step learning resources for students, links back to the learning site.

What next?

After reflecting on today's session I have come up with some things I would like to focus on this week. They are:

1. Practice importing data into a google map
2. Use the code above to add links into comments on my students blogs and share with my hub.
3. Get the students to analyse their blog posting using the lesson here

Here is my example:

Digital Fluency Intensive #3

The week that has been:

The big aha moment for me last session was the use of labels within both gmail and google keep. I have spent time during the last week using labels to organise my digital life. I finally sorted and organised my gmail with labels. I also added labels to my google keep. I had a large number of notes in my google keep so it had been becoming increasingly difficult to find specific notes. Not anymore!  I also worked with my class to organise their bookmarks.  I was amazed at how many bookmarks that they had.

Media Session

Today we had our 3rd Digital Fluency Intensive.  The focus for today was Media.

The first session today was focused on looking at the Create part of the Learn, Create, Share pedagogy.

The key points I took from this session were:

• Create is the hook for students.  
• It gives students the opportunity to explore, problem solve, communicate and collaborate. Check out the everyone creates link as there some fantastic project ideas in the classroom. 
• Creativity empowers learning.   Allow the time for creative exploration with students. 
• When introducing the activities for the week start with the create to inspire children to build the learning knowledge so they can get creative.

You Tube

We looked at ways of organising content for our students through the use of channels and playlists.  Some key points onYou tube channels for teachers are to set any content as unlisted, turn commenting off and share links via our blogs and sites. 

My next step for You tube: is to look at creating playlists on You Tube of useful videos for teaching various maths concepts.  These can be embedded on my class site for rewindable learning for students.  It will also make it easier for me to locate useful videos that I have used in the past to reuse with new groups of students.

Creating Media in the Classroom

Media is the creativity tool of the 21st century.  It is engaging and multisensory for students when consuming or creating content. We need to harness the power of SISOMO in the classroom which is combining sight, sound and motion.    Suggestion to get a tripod.  Landscape always for videoing.  Adobe spark and we video are fantastic to create video. 

My next steps for creating media in the classroom are to explore this site here about how to create film in the classroom.  I am also going to explore adobe spark with the class.

Google Slides

Within the google slides session we looked at different creative ways we can utilise slides with out students.  One of the interesting points covered was the importance of explicitly teaching students to create effective presentation.  The points to cover with students are: discuss layout, colour (maybe pick a colour pallette of 3 colours to use in a presentation), font (choose just a couple of fonts each time with maybe one for headings and one for body text) and editing to make sure the students check that their presentations are easy to read.  It is also important to check that the students understand the purpose of the task and then check that the way they have presented the information meets the purpose.

Hapara tip - change the order of students on the screen so can have priority learners at the top.

In one of the breakout sessions today I explored using google slides as a way of creating pick a path stories or quizzes for the classroom.  Here is the beginning of my quiz.  I am still working on the pages linking correctly.

What next?

After reflecting on today's session I have come up with some things I would like to focus on this week.  

They are:

Explore some of the create ideas from the break out sessions and introduce pick a path writing with my students as an option for our upcoming narrative unit.

Create my first playlist for the classroom on Youtube with the useful videos I have been using in my maths unit.

Share with my class some exciting creative tasks from other learner in the Manaiakalani schools to inspire them.