Monday 31 August 2020

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.


Monday 24 August 2020

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.




Sunday 16 August 2020

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:

Friday 7 August 2020

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.