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 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.