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...