Friday, 31 July 2020

The Journey Continues (Day #2 of the DFI)

The day started with refections from our last session then we had a look at the first component of the Manaiakalani pedagogy: Learn/Ako. It was interesting to note the relationship between the analogue world and the digital world - what we do as teachers to support students using digital technologies runs alongside the support we would give students without these technologies. When I think about all the skills I have developed over the years as a teacher to encourage students and scaffold their learning, I see how theses same skills can apply when students are learning to use and navigate on digital devices.

Much of the learning today was more focused on managing my domains effectively (gmail, calendar, tabs). It was good see some of the things I can do to pimp these, and how I would go about doing this. I'm inspired to use my calendar more for my class reminders (generally I only refer to it for schoolwide happenings) and get back into using Toby to manage my tabs. Using Google Keep to create checklists, reminders, notes etc

During this session I was able to add to my understanding and capabilities of Google Meet. As a school, we used Google Meet during the lockdown to connect with our students but I had basically only met with students. It was nice to upskill and learn how to create a meeting on my calendar (rather than linking it on my class site) invite others, and present my screen so the viewers can see a particular tab I want to share.  

Looking at a student's blog and reflecting upon it was a good activity. It has given me some clarity into what kinds of posts my students could be sharing - what information is good to include and what can be left out.


One helpful tip before using a video clip: share it and open it in a new window (both done by clicking on the three dots at the top right).

Friday, 24 July 2020

The Journey Begins (Day #1 of the DFI)

Today was the first session for the Digital Learning Intensive (DFI) Term 3, 2020. Leading up to the DFI I have been feeling excited (and a little anxious). Excited because I have been hoping to learn more about how I can use digital technologies to help support the learning in my class of Year 3-4 learners, and anxious because, let's face it, technology can seem daunting at times.

We began our day with a brief history of Manaiakalarni - how it came to be, how it has developed over time and how instrumental it has been in enhancing learning for so many. The Learn-Create-Share pedagogy highlighted the importance that each of these components contribute to learning (and interestingly how this was done with minimal digital technologies back when it was first introduced).

Throughout the rest of the day we went back to basics and looked at setting up our chrome account and sorting our drive to easily find things. Some of these things I feel I already have a grasp on so this helped to give me the confidence I was doing well and acted as a scaffold for extra learning. There were also number of new things I learned from today's session...things that added to my existing knowledge...things I could use to work smarter, not harder.
These included:
  • creating a contents at the top of a Google Doc to help when accessing specific information
  • using the voice typing tool
  • creating titles and headings using the correct tools and being able to apply the same size/colour/font etc to the headings
  • how we do not underline anything (unless it's a link)
  • using shortcuts
  • removing a background from a picture
There were some great ideas I could take straight to my class to teach. Some of the new things I mentioned above would be useful for my learners and other things I could consider include:
  • using tables to set up the layout of a Google Doc (usually I would use Google Draw for things like this) as this also allows the voice typing tool to be used - helpful for some students
  • using the Explore tool to find word information and images
I really liked how we had time set aside to explore these tools and had a facilitator 'present' to help us out if we needed it.

Anyway, here is the poster I designed in Google Docs for my class...

 


Revision (Day #9 of DFI)

For our final session of our DFI we looked at Ubiquitous Learning (learning at any time, anywhere and at any pace from anyone). This has bee...