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: