DFI Day 5

Day 5!

Animations using Explain Everything, Digital Digs using Chromebooks and then we moved on to using Screencastify and looking at embedding.

Explain everything was a really new tool for me and I had a bit of a giggle about the challenge of that.  Mine wasn't particularly successful but it made me laugh.




We explored our Cybersmart Curriculum using Screencastify to see what's there.  I love the way the curriculum is set out and all the wonderful resources that are there because teachers can then utilise these in later years.






Reflections:


Time to reflect and share with colleagues

• What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy? I learned more about how Manaiakalani have trialled different devices in the junior school before settling on iPads as the best tool for use. Using EE today was really awesome and it became really obvious how much pre-work is needed before using this effectively.

• What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional? Working with the Manaiakalani Cybersmart Curriculum more would enhance my ability to create flexible learning for the classes I work in by meeting the needs of that class.

• What did I learn that could be used with my learners? As mentioned above, working more with the wonderful tools that can be found within the Manaiakalani Curriculum as there are so many great resources there that are going to support our kids in being Cybersmart and knowing how to negotiate this awesome world that helps them with their learning.

• What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow in my personal life?Using the keyboard shortcuts is so great! Especially that there's a shortcut for the shortcuts tab!

It's been wonderful seeing the progress everyone is making. There is so much learning and laughter in our DFI room and it makes me so happy.

DFI Day 4

This week at DFI was so exciting!  So many people had rich and valuable learning or questions etc and the conversation in the room was great.  Lots of important pieces of learning coming up and often things that are applicable to many people in the room, which is great.

Some of these things include:

• Permissions/ sharing on Google Slides
• Blog Gadgets moving
• Removing backgrounds on pictures that aren't photos of people

Share:
The way we share has changed rapidly over the years and particularly with the innovation of Facebook and YouTube and Twitter, the capacity for us to share has amplified rapidly.


Later we looked at Google Forms, which I've used quite often, but have discovered some other interesting ways we could use them, such as wellbeing, tracking which of our kids have wifi at home etc.

After that we looked at Google Sheets:

• Freezing rows and columns
• Highlighting a whole lot of columns and resizing them all
• Using the function symbol that looks like Sigma to input the functions for SUM etc
• Conditional Formatting etc

Later we worked with Dave Winter on the different ways we could extend our use of sheets.

Time to reflect and share with colleagues

• What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy?

• What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional?

Looking at the way we can link sheets together to import data is really exciting - especially as I learned about this earlier in the week with our blog admin accounts with our schools.

• What did I learn that could be used with my learners?

More ideas about how I could be using Google Sheets to help track our work with our teachers for the year.Looking at the way we could run Screencastify with our learners to get them to assess their blog post numbers across the year as a statistics.  

• What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow in my personal life?

Great ways to use spreadsheets! I am particularly enjoying the Command F tool to help me find things.

DFI Day 3

This morning we had a great discussion around some of the tools from last week that we've been using and our experience with them.

My next step was to try to work out how it is that I needed to set up my Google Meet so that it doesn't ask me to 'allow' people from outside of my organisation to join as it was quite distracting and I wasn't as able to attend to what I was presenting.

CREATE
Next, we're exploring the concept of 'Create' within the Manaiakalani model.  There were some wonderful quotes and examples of how early childhood has long supported the idea of creativity.

Robin Sutton, Principal of Hornby High has a wonderful blog that focuses a lot on the Learn, Create, Share model.  I'd like to explore this further and find out a few more examples of 'Create' that our learners could be engaged in with the learning I'd like to look at across our region in terms of engaging with our community resources as well.

There are some wonderful examples of creation in a document here and an interesting conversation around how much we can scaffold and then how perhaps at times we should let go of controlling that 'create' process - and allow a bit more flexibility and choice for learners to be engaging in setting that creation task.

We looked also sisomo to encourage learners to be able to assess the level of creation they're engaging in.

Next we had a Google Meet with Kent Somerville from Point England School and he talked us through YouTube Live and drone work to live stream footage of cross country etc to their whanau in the islands etc.

Next we moved on to Google Draw and had a play with a template to create something for us.
Here's my example.

Next, we moved on to Google Slides and looked at animations.
My animation needs some work, but this is what I created.



Later, as part of my Google Slides work, I tried out DriveSlides which is a new extension that inserts photos quickly from Google Drive to a slide, without me needing to do anything.  So awesome!  The challenge we found is that new iPhones save photos as a new file type .heic which means they don't work with DriveSlides unless you alter the filetype to jpg instead. Great learning!

• What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy?

Understanding more about the 'Create' element and how empowering that is for learners.

• What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional?

DriveSlides could really support with this too! So much more time efficient to put photos into presentations and onto blogs and Sites.

• What did I learn that could be used with my learners?  

Animations using Google Slides! Super fun and engaging for storytelling!

• What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow in my personal life?

Again .... DriveSlides! Also creating posters using Google Docs. This is much easier for creating really precise designs.

DFI Day 2

Really excited about heading back to the DFI this week.  Although I thought perhaps I wouldn't learn that much new information or skills last week, it was a wonderful informative day and the learning sparked new ideas for me.

This week's outline includes:
Google Docs
GMail
Google Keep
Google Meet



Resizing this was annoying so I learned how to do this:

Embed Code for Doc

I also learnt how to embed a doc and have it show up as a reasonable size.

<div style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; display: block; width: px; height: px;">
<iframe width='600' height='400' frameborder='0' src="Copy and paste the embed code of
your Google doc here/pub"></iframe></div>

So I used all the red code from publish to the web>embed:

<iframe src="https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSDtsnsxUfLtOQuijR8rERfx2Z-MbV9-gsVyuH-sf2iGQ3nMtxARm5iWA-vLbXr3pFXlQ1ZHi7aY31C/pub?embedded=true"></iframe>

Recapping on last week,
What worked well:
Being able to focus the whole day on these skills has been great.

What didn't work well:
I was a bit slow getting my blog post up last week, so I'd like to do that this week.  I'm going to take my notes here during the day and so should be organised by the end of the day with much of my learning ready to post.

LEARN
First, we were introduced to a video of Dorothy explaining how "learn" fits in and the understanding about us all being learners.
Acknowledgement of effective practice that exists all the way across the cluster.  It would be wonderful to have more of our teachers sharing their expertise in a toolkit during the Online Toolkits.

What does learn look like in your school?
This question was asked of us and we were then presented a number of different effective learning practices.  Some examples were the ALiM and ALL learning cycles as well as things like PB4L etc.


Recognise
Amplify
Turbocharge

Technology enables the removal of barriers, previously inconceivable solutions to problems, opportunities for new ways of learning.


We ran through some of the GSuite apps:
Google Keep:  I learned how to share my notes with other collaborators, so I shared all my old school notes with my new Manaiakalani account, so now I can view them in my new account.  I was worried when they didn't come through straight away, but after a little lag they came through.

GMail:
Looking at the view options
Readded Boomerang, which I've used before but with another account.  It was helpful to do that because I'll appreciate being able to know which of the teacher's I'm facilitating with have read the email that I recently sent out to them.

Today's reflections are:

Time to reflect and share with colleagues

• What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy?

Looking at the initial slides around learn, got me thinking more about the pedagogy that's been explored below the concept of 'learn'.

• What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional?

Going back to Google Hangouts and Loom and playing with screen recordings. I'm running an Online Toolkit soon for how to use Google Docs for Writing and Language work within the classroom so it was great to have some practice. I like that QuickTime recorder can trim clips. So can Loom though, so that's equally as helpful. I've had lots of great feedback that the Loom videos I'm using are quite helpful for people's learning, so I'd like to continue doing so.

• What did I learn that could be used with my learners?  

Definitely more videos to demonstrate learning. I also really enjoyed going back and using Google Keep.

• What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow in my personal life?

Better use of calendars for writing down birthday gift ideas or places we could go for dinners etc. What is also helpful is navigating around my calendar by using the shortcuts.

Local Curriculum Resources

This morning we began our day with the Principal's PLG Hui at Mangapapa School.  We discussed a number of the celebrations and challenges of our growing Manaiakalani Cluster.   As part of this, we looked at the Convenor Notes from the Auckland Manaiakalani Hui last week.  Embedded in this was a website on local curriculum design.
Check it out here:
https://curriculumtool.education.govt.nz/

I'll be interested to see if they discuss collaboration and the design of high-quality real-life learning resources.

Collaboration Models

Part of the exploration I'm undertaking for my Google Innovator project is to look at how teachers and community resources (read: The Mind Lab, Tairāwhiti Museum, Waka Hourua, etc) could better collaborate to produce high-quality digital resources that are visible and rewindable in order to involve learners in real-world learning that is engaging and accessible to all.

Collaboration is a challenge when working across a whole region.  Many people are time poor and overwhelmed by other tasks, so although they are excited about the idea of collaboration, it's either not achieved or it's not turbocharged to the level that it could be.

This video was an interesting watch:
James Hopkins on Collaboration

This also led me to look at some new information around Practitioner Research and I found this "Inquiry on Inquiry" here.

Looking further, I realised that Google Scholar has a number of recent resources available as well.  

A bit of light reading for later: here.

Loads to unpack, but I'm excited about the impact it could have for our region if we can explore best practice for regional collaboration.

Core Business DFI

Friday of Week 5 saw us begin our first Tairāwhiti Digital Fluency Intensive.  As a new facilitator, I'm so lucky as I get to attend as well!  As someone who's already completed the Google Certified Educator Levels 1 and 2, I wasn't sure how much more I would learn, but I definitely still got some new learning out of the day too!  I love the way the day was split into Deep Dives, Chalk and Talks, Level Ups and Explore.  It means we've had exposure to loads of different content and now have the inspiration to undertake my Apple Teacher work for the end of these nine weeks of DFI.

Today we were using docs to create posters, which I had never thought to use.
I began creating this today.... but haven't yet finished it.

What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy?

Today we learned all about the inception of Manaiakalani and how it began as Literacy Cycles.  It was so interesting finding out about that because so many people often think it because with loads of access to technology.  When in fact, it didn't.

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional?

Some of the wonderful add ons that I haven't used before would be wonderful to improve the efficiency of what I do in my work, but also with the learners and teachers I work with too.  Docs to Forms sounds awesome, particularly in regards to setting up some quizzes in our learners' classrooms.

What did I learn that could be used with my learners?
Using the URL for the kids labels in their blog posts could be particularly helpful to get them to post reflections about what they've been blogging about.  For example, when looking at how many maths posts, versus how many reading posts, and evaluate coverage for blog posts.

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow in my personal life?
Docs to forms could make like so much faster!  So many of our teachers have had worksheets for their kids for years!  Docs to forms would allow them to make use of what they already have but in more user-friendly ways.