Session nine - exam time

Well, today we had our exam for our Google Certificate, and I was not successful. I was pretty gutted I didn't get a pass, and I did have a huge long story of my why's - keyboard issues, frozen screen, etc - that would have sounded much better with a sad violin playing in the background.

  However, the journey has been pretty epic, through the Digital Fluency Intensive course I have met some amazing people, heard some inspiring stories and most importantly I went back to basics with google drive, sheets, forms, docs, eg.

My biggest take home from this course was looking back into the 

Manaiakalani Learn, Create, Share Pedagogy again.

My highlight of the course was - the people.

P.S  I will re-sit this test ... will post about it later

Session eight continued - Hanging out with Google Hangouts

For the second half of our day - we were asked to explore Google Hangouts in small groups.  This was perfect as Toni, her team teacher Verbina and I are all planning to connect with a school in Auckland through google hangouts.  There were a lot of technical difficulties, the entire cohort was exploring hangouts so the bandwidth could have been affected, the microphones were picking up a lot of "noise" etc.  After speaking with Gerhard, he said that we shouldn't experience this issue when we connect with Tamaki Makaurau. I will upload a reflective blog after next week giving everyone an update on how the google hangout went.
Tips for teacher's planning to use Google hangouts:

• Practise with your class first, it is pretty hectic and pretty crazy - teach them how to mute their mikes, take turns, etc - let your tamariki go crazy on it under your watchful eye, then after the craziness settles, connect with others.
• Headphones make the difference - make sure everyone has headphones.
• No glass or windows behind the speaker - this creates a glare and your face is not clearly seen.
• Make sure the students on the hangout are not close by unless you are keen to hear a very annoying screeching sound.

Below is a screencasting of Toni, Dwayne and myself, as you will notice there is no sound, not sure why (could possibly be the muted microphone? I have no idea) and underneath the video is, of course, some funny photos we managed to capture during this exploration.

Above is a picture of Dwayne's screen whilst presenting his screen with everyone.



And this is Dwayne's Korero - Take one lol

Session eight - Making our work flow

Today we met  Gerhard Vermeulen from Ako Hiko, Auckland. His keyword for the day was Empowerment and his aim for the first half of the day was to give us the tips and tricks for improving our workflow. I was really happy that he mentioned this as I have been looking for ways to work smarter online, not harder.

Some of the tips/apps that I found useful were:

• One tab - a chrome extension that takes all of the tabs that you have open and puts them all into one space. First of all, this frees up your memory on your laptop but you don't lose that quick access to the page you are looking at.

• Organising your Gmail account - while I know about some of these settings, this was a good reminder that it might be time to check the organisation in my Gmail. Oh, and today I decided to "star" my Principal and create a filter so that I don't miss those important emails that she sends me.

• Making the most of your google calendar - I used to use Google Calendar a lot with my planning, appointments, etc but this year I have gone back using my Diary just because I still prefer having things on paper. But I have added the KEN's calendar to mine so now I'll know when all our PLG's + Toolkits are coming up.

Where to next with my workflow?

• I plan to organise my folders in my Gmail and create filters.

• Have a tutu with one tab.

Session seven - Site Seeing

Unfortunately, I was unable to attend our digital fluency intensive course today, But I was able to look through the resources available on our agenda.  I was also fortunate to connect with the guest speaker Clarelle and did ask her to give feedback on my class site.

Feedback from Clarelle:

• Easy to access the learning.
• Layout in writing, maths was well thought out.
• Headers and theme are consistent throughout the site.
• Really liked the idea on my spelling site.

Feedforward from Clarelle:

• Put my Treaty on my homepage, this is important.
• Reading site links to an outside site.
• Images are clearer than Google Draw.
• Gather feedback and feedforward of my class site with my students.

I really appreciated the critique from Clarelle.

My 2018 class site is the 3rd sites that I have had, below are links to my previous class sites and my current class site with a small summary of each site.

Click here to go to my Class site 2016
Adopted the site from the previous teacher and I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, learned the ropes by "copying" others.  

Click here to go to my Class site 2017
Went absolutely berserk on my own site, creating multimodal pages, still copying off others.  Realised halfway through just how confused my students were because I had links everywhere.





Click here to go to my Class site 2018
Originally went into the year team teaching and my co-teacher originally designed the class site - when we separated into 2 classes, rather than make a whole new design, I reworked the site slightly to look similar to hers.  Thank Whaea Chloe 😼

Started off my site by looking at the senior class sites that my students were stepping into after me, is what I have on my site going to help set them up for next year?  Constantly asking my students if what I am putting on the site confusing them or making it easier for them.



I spent a few moments looking through some of my other fellow DFI colleagues and their class, and it's really great seeing how everyone's sites are developing.  I really liked what I found on Anna's class site - she has a link to homework and newsletters which I would like to add to my homepage next term - Thanks Anna.

Session six - Making our learning visible

Today the keyword was "Visible", and we had the lovely Danni Stone from Point England School in today to talk to us about the power of visible learning.  I really enjoyed listening to Danni as she shared her story with us, a lot of what she had shared reminded me of my first year in class.  A lot of what I have picked up from google sites I owe to my colleagues and some of the other wonderful schools in the Kaikohekohe network - shout out to Ohaeawai Primary School & Paihia School.

Danni touched on the Tuhi Mai, Tuhi Atu blogging programme that some Manaiakalani schools are currently involved in - this is a platform where 3 schools connect with one another through their classroom blogs - In 2016 & 2017 my class participated in this programme and my tamariki absolutely loved it.  I am definitely signing up for TMTA Term 3 now that my students have their blogs ready to go (Thank you, Tania Coutts & Mrs Henare).

Danni also shared a tip on how to get increase traffic on your blog.  She mentioned another teacher who posted prompts on her blog page and encouraged children to share their ideas in the comments.  This is something that I am definitely going to explore.

We explored multimodal sites and had a go at making one ourselves in groups.  I was grouped with Shelly and Deborah and together we started planning and looking into a multimodal site based on "The science of gardening."  I managed to finish the homepage, but there are 3 other pages that have been created, maybe we bit off more than we could chew? - so I guess the best tip I could give someone who is creating their site (especially with a time frame of fewer than 2 hours) is KISS (keep it simple, sweetheart).  

 

To have a look at the site click here

Some things that I will definitely try in the next week:

• Post a Prompt onto our class blog, to encourage more writing in my classroom, and maybe get more traffic.
• Post a reflection giving an update on student agency forms and voice typing.

One last thing - something else I have been doing is visiting other blogs from our Taitokerau DFI members - and tonight I visited Vanessa's blog, I was so happy to read that she completed her google educator level 1 exam.  You can read about it here

Session five continued - Scratching the surface with scratch

In all honesty - I absolutely love anything code, last year I went nuts playing around with the HTML code on my class site (a lot of trials, and A LOT of errors), and this year I have been making an effort to show my class scratch so they would have another way to present their mahi. 

To wrap up our day at DFI, we were asked to create something from scratch for our blogs. I made a quick scratch project below by using the tutorials that you can find on scratch, the tutorial is called hide and seek and very easy to follow along with. 

Next is another scratch project that I started in Taipa but finished off at home.  Since discovering scratch, I have always wanted to animate my name (my reason is ...just because).  Quite a fidgety task if you ask me, and I had to watch about 3 tutorials to achieve what I did - and it is not quite what I had envisioned - but wallah, here it is.

Session five - Coding Crazy and Makey Makey Madness

Today we explored coding through code.org and Makey Makey. First, we looked into coding through a website called Code.org.  I really enjoyed this website because it was straightforward with teaching how coding works.  My tamariki have recently been looking into coding through the CSFirst website, but I feel that my students are quite lost when it comes to this website, maybe this is a more simplified website for them to explore.

Next, we were given a quick tutorial of Makey Makey.  This was a very hands-on activity which I also enjoyed.

Makey Makey important tips:

• If you don't connect to "Earth" - nothing will happen.
• You can connect your Makey Makey to anything that is conductive.
• Can be connected with scratch, code.org

Below is a screencast of me having a little tutu with Makey Makey.  Putting it all together was a little tricky but, once everything was hooked up it was very fun.  I could imagine my class creating their own game with code.org or scratch, and then using Makey Makey as a way to create a joystick of some sort.  I may revisit code.org later after I receive more feedback from my students about how they would feel about this.

Learn, create and SHARE

This morning after our cohort reflected - what worked in our classroom and what hasn't worked - Dave Winters went through the Share aspect of the Manaiakalani learn, create, share pedagogy, more specifically blogging and how this has made a positive impact on the students learning.  One thing Dave mentioned was encouraging people to be a good audience, to visit another blog and leaving them a comment instead of waiting for them to come to yours.  Last year and the year before, I signed my class up for the Tuhi atu, Tuhi mai programme and fully recommend this to anyone in a digital 1:1 classroom.

I have only just started working with my students blogging and their individual blogs now, and I have been taking the slow approach to help set a solid foundation around how to write a quality reflective blog.  My fellow colleague Whaea Verbina showed me something that has been working really well in her classroom, students write their blog post in a google doc, where it is checked by the teacher before being posted on their individual blog.




I really like this for 2 reasons:

• I am able to see all of their posts in one place, &
• The students who are not confident with writing a blog post can see the other's example to help them write theirs.

For the rest of the term, I am going to make an effort to encourage my students to blog.
Whaea Toni and I spoke during our break about creating some rewindable learning resources for our tamariki, simple "how-to" videos.  At our next staff meeting, we are going to ask our senior teachers if their students are up for the challenge.

My next steps for the following week are:

• Teach my students how to be a good audience with blogger.
• Give more opportunity for the students to post to their individual blog.
• Ask our senior students to create rewindable learning videos for blogging.
• Keep working on google forms and voice typing

Using Google Forms to promote student agency

This term our Kaikohekohe Cluster have decided to look into 4 key areas where we feel we need improvement.  At our PLG meeting, the cluster split into 4 groups with the intention that each group will then create a mini-inquiry into each of these areas.  I have decided to choose student agency as my focus because I believe that fits well with my main goal in my classroom.

While looking into effective practices that promote student agency,  one key practice that stood out was exposing the students to their data and to the curriculum, progressions, etc.  Of course, me being me, I rolled the idea out into my classroom the next day and I decided to use Google forms to help me introduce this to my tamariki. 

How I did this:

• I rewrote the  NZ Curriculum level 2 achievement objectives for Reading/ listening and viewing in plain language in a google form.
• Explained to the students what the NZ Curriculum is and that we would be going through indicators in level 2 together in small groups.
• In the small groups, we went through the google form together. The students completed this on their own,  I was only there to help clarify some of the statements.

Interesting thoughts on this exercise

• There was a lot of rich conversations that came from this exercise, my students were very interested in the curriculum, and a lot of them found themselves on common ground, most did not make connections, most did not know affixes and suffixes, most did not choose books to read that they enjoyed  - they just chose any books.
• I realised that I had made some assumptions about some students prior to this exercise, I am glad I had done this especially before report writing, this has also forced to really think about what I am teaching (or what I am forgetting to teach)

Where to next from here?

• Continue to use google forms to gather more of my student's voice.
• Find other teachers who have implemented this practice into their learning environment.

Session four - Drones, Drawings and Animated slides

Today we had Kent Sommerville from Point England school to talk to us about Youtube and amazing ways to connect and share your classes learning with whanau and people around the world.

I learnt more about my Youtube channel, I was aware of my channel and use it to post some of my classes work as well as my own.  Kent showed us two ideas we can think about (playlists and live stream).

We also had a chance to explore Google drawings and Google Slides.  I have made a couple of google drawings for my class and below is my animation I had little tutu with.  It made me a lot more aware of the time and effort my tamariki put into creating an animation and I'm looking forward to showing them what I have learnt.

Things I m going to try this week

• Embed my Youtube playlists on my class site.
• Post a reflective blog giving an update about the soundboxes in class.
• Set aside some time to look back into the resources given today.

Session three - Hapara, the teacher's lifesaver

Guess who is my best friend again? Hapara Teacher Dashboard.
Today for our Digital Fluency Intensive course we looked at all the different folder buttons in Hapara teacher dashboard.  I really enjoyed this lesson because I use hapara a lot in my classroom to send messages, monitor and share mahi with my tamariki.  Some of the things that were extremely helpful were:

• Making groups within Hapara where you can group certain students for example reading/ spelling groups.
• Workspace - a place where you can upload units of work onto Hapara for students to access.
• My most favourite of all, the sharing folder - where you can see all of your student's work (even the work that is not in their correct folders)

We were asked to screencast ourselves talking about one thing we have learned in today's lesson.  I thought I would screencast the sharing folder and what is so cool about it, tomorrow, I will share this with our staff at Kawakawa Primary.

Updates on my digital adventure.

Between appraisal, reports and my teaching as inquiry, it has been super busy juggling everything around, as well as having a tutu on some of the new things we have learnt from our DFI course.

I have managed to create a map - I did explore maps last year and used maps as a way to share my student's recounts last year If you want to have a nosey click here
I've had to refresh my brain a little with things like adding icons and photos etc.  I know I said that I would add my professional development and I have the layer ready, but that is something I can have a tutu with when I have a little more time

I did have a look at google earth and tried adding my map to it you will find it here (note: it really does not look cool until you click on 3D), I wanted to give this a go because my tamariki absolutely love exploring google earth.



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My soundbox reflection

As I mentioned before, I was very interested in voice typing which Dorothy Burt mentioned at our first DFI session.  I had previously tried something similar the year before and was met with frustration.  Luckily, Dorothy gave a tip - to create a "soundbox".   Another school had made these from apple boxes - but she said all you really needed was a way to project the voice to the speaker.  And because there was no way I could have apple boxes stacked in my class,  we opted for party cups instead.



My tamariki have responded well to the tool, my reluctant writers as well as my more capable writers.  Last week, one of our other teachers in our cohort mentioned the "read & write" extension and I thought that just made sense for a next step, so all week I have been encouraging my students to read back what they have written using read & write, reflect and share their thinking with someone, and then use voice typing to record their ideas.  Below is a snapshot of both tools in action.  This student had found some facts and copied them straight on to his document, it was only at the last minute I decided to record this so apologies for the camera work.



One thing I am really enjoying about this is that my students are slowly starting to see chromebook as a tool to make life easier, I myself have been using voice typing to write my reports and it is a game changer for me.  Recommend this to anyone that loathes typing.

Session two - Diving into Google Forms, Sheets and Maps.

Today for our Digital Fluency Course, we looked a little deeper into Google Forms, Sheets and Google Maps.  Some of the tools that I found very helpful were:

• "Autofill" in sheets where Google predicts the pattern or sequence that you are writing in the columns/rows for example 1,2,3.... 10,20,10.....,etc
• "Find and replace" (ctrl + H)  where Google scans the data in your sheet, doc, etc and replaces a certain word or letter with another, for example, you can replace all lower case "i" with a capital "I" - I will definitely share this with my tamariki (Goodbye lower case I's FOREVER)

We were allowed to explore forms, sheets and maps on our own, I decided to look into a pick-a-path story in forms as it is something that I am hoping to roll out in my class as they become more confident in using GSuite.  And I have decided to create a google map that will pin where I have had Professional development for my appraisal site.
My next steps for the following week are:

1. To share "find and replace" with my tamariki.
2. To complete my pick-a-path story in Google Forms.
3. To complete my "PLD" Google Map and posting onto blog.
4. To upload a reflective blog post that gives an update of "voice typing" in my akomanga. 

Session one - Exploring Docs

After we were all settled and introduced ourselves, we began our Manaiakalani Digital fluency intensive course by learning about the backstory behind Manaiakalani and how it all came about.  Our cohort then took what is called a "deep dive" where we looked into something on google that would make our life a lot easier.
One thing I really liked learning about today was how to reorganise my google doc headings and using the outline tool in "view".  I am definitely going to use this for my BT notes.  I was really glad that I am on track with organising my folders in my drive.
My next steps for the following week are:

1. Implementing "voice typing" into my reading, writing.
2. Creating sound boxes for my tamariki to use during writing time.
3. Complete my first reflection.

We were assigned some homework to complete before next session. The task was to create a poster in Google Docs based on one thing that we learnt from today.  Using Docs was a real challenge for me, especially when it came to positioning images on the doc.  What I really liked about this challenge was using explore to find images.  I found myself creating my own images when there was nothing available on images or nothing to my liking.

Beginning my digital fluency journey

This morning we began our digital fluency course with introductions at the beautiful Taipa Area School.  I am really looking forward to working with the Northland Cohort as we grow together in Gsuite and all the other amazing things that technology has to offer.  I am also looking forward to travelling back to my old Kura - Northland College every second week.

Check out my introduction on slide 16 and click on some of the images.  It takes you to my class site, this blog page and other things my class and I do

Here are the Label's that I will be using while I have this Professional Blog.