Session 6 - Digital Fluency Intensive

We met at Tōnui Collab today for our session which I was excited about, having never been there before.  I was very impressed with the wide open spaces, use of colour and of course the amazing view out of the windows!

We started off the day with Dave Winter, looking at learning being Visible.  This has definitely been a focus for Lynne and I this year with our Class Google Site.  We created it with visibility in mind so that when children have been away or want to access learning to work on at home, it is all on our site so they are able to do so.  It was nice that Dave acknowledged our site for this, thanks Dave.  It makes things so much easier for the learners too as it's all in the one place and it can't get lost or thrown out!

Then it was over to the team at Tōnui Collab for an introduction to the future of technology and what it means for our tamariki.  We watched a clip about the 'Superhero Arm', which highlighted for me how important technology and digital technology is when you see what advancements something like a robotic arm has made.  We then looked at the digital technologies curriculum and structure and I worked with Perky and Cathy to discuss how are we using the Digital Technology Curriculum.  We concluded that we are pretty proficient with the orange areas, but are fairly new on our journey in the blue.

Next was a fun Kahoot using questions from The Mind Lab’s Digital Fluency Playing Cards, which were designed to help integrate digital technologies into the New Zealand curriculum in a fun and engaging way.  Well done to Perky who came out tops, winning a set of these cards and a smartphone microscope converter - I didn't even know there was such a thing!

We watched the peanut butter and jelly sandwich video, which was an introduction into coding.  We have used this video with our learners to highlight the importance of specific instructions!  I teamed up with Perky and Cathy again for our next challenge which was to make a code for a person who couldn't see to navigate from their number on one side to their number on the other without squashing any dinosaurs!  I was the coder - this was tricky, as you had to think about specific instructions and estimate variables like the size of the step taken.  Cathy was the reader of the code and Perky attempted to cross the dinosaur infested path!  After a couple of unsuccessful attempts and some 'debugging', Perky made it!

I really enjoyed my little play on Lightbot and I think this would be a great introduction to coding for my Year 4's.  And then our next challenge was getting into a group and solving tangrams!  NOT as easy as it looks, I'd like to do some of these with our learners too, maybe onscreen and physically.  It was cool to pop on the Virtual Reality googles and have a go with M-Bots too!

Last but not least - Cospaces!  I really enjoyed creating and animating characters with Briar using coding and think this could be the next step for our Year 5 and 6 learners who are using Scratch at the moment.

I really enjoyed my day at Tōnui Collab, I hope to be back someday.

Session 5 - Digital Fluency Intensive

First thing, we had a Google Meet with Gerhard to look at the Share component of the Manaiakalani pedagogy and kaupapa.  It gave us a overview of sharing over time and how sharing has evolved with the introduction of social media.




We then looked at how sharing since time began (with one another, the class, the school, the community) can now go beyond that - to the world (global) in the digital age.  Blogger is Manaiakalani's choice for this global sharing platform and by using it people who access our learners' blogs are choosing to listen to them.  Gerhard also talked about the model that is used for commenting on blogs.  Comments should be positive, thoughtful and helpful and if we are giving our learners this scaffold, then we are helping to eliminate negative posts and bullying.

And I am sharing this seriously cringey video clip, which is a parody of One Direction's 'You don't know you're beautiful', because it does have great messages and I think the kids actually might be into it!!!!

Next up, we had a look at some class sites.  This was great and just what I had wanted to do when I gave feedback last week.  I found this so useful and have heaps of ideas of what I want to try and how I want things to look.  Themes, links, introduction about the class, image carousels and buttons, lots of buttons!!!!  Unfortunately I will have to wait for next year when I start a new site to implement it all, but for now I will use some of this on our current site.

Anyway, back to buttons...

I am in love with creating buttons!!!!  It is so much fun!  I have added some of these on my own personal site.  I am keen to teach Lynne how to make these too and add these to our class site.

The remainder of the day was improving and changing our current class sites after getting some feedback from fellow DFI'ers.  I made a couple of image carousels which was great, they take up far less space.  I changed some access settings so that anyone with the link can view and of course I made some buttons.

Great day!  Back off to school to see if we beat Ubby's Riverdale rugby team haha!  Looking forward to next week.

Session 4 - Digital Fluency Intensive

Today's session focussed on devices.  Unfortunately we couldn't connect with Dorothy for a hangout session this morning, so Maria took us through the 'Being Cybersmart' component.  It was good to get an insight into the thought behind this - being Cybersmart, empowering student voice through digital citizenship, celebrating being internet awesome - all positive messages for our learners.  It is about empowering "confident, connected and actively involved, lifelong learners".  It was also remembering that learning that we share online always being visible.  Also blog comments need to be positive, helpful and thoughtful.

I like the graphic below and would like to share this on our class site, as a reminder for the children when commenting on other learners' blogs.



Next we looked at Hapara - which allows us to 'focus on the teaching not the technology' by giving us greater visibility and access to learners' work and what they are currently working on and the ability to keep learners organised and focussed online.  I am already using Hapara in my classroom.  Less as a sharing platform now, as we are using our class site as the go-to for everything learning related.  I find it really effective for being able to track what the students are working on and for having access to their learning.  I wasn't sure how to enable focussed browsing sessions, so this was new learning for me and I am keen to try this next week with my learners.

It was interesting using a chromebook so that I had the experience of my learners.  I enjoyed the 'digital dig' and found the shortcuts in it especially useful.  I may need to go back to it to remember them all!  The iPad session was less successful for me, as the iPad I was using was stubbornly refusing to let me into the activities, no matter what I did!  I enjoyed looking at the class site and blog though and hope we are able to do more of this in the next few sesssions (please!!!).

Then it was time to get creative with Screencastify!  Check out my clip on digital footprints...



Lastly, Ubby and I had a Hangout with Monique from Glen Innes, who had just sat the Google Educators Level 1 exam.  She passed!!!!  And reassured us that we could too!!!!

Phew!  Raquel out!

Session 3 - Digital Fluency Intensive

Today's session focused on supporting visible teaching and learning through building collaborative, multimodal Google Sites.

Firstly, in our Google Hangout with Dorothy Burt, we looked at the Create component more closely. It is all about the hook - creative ways of engaging your learners. There were some links to video clips that I want to go back and look at, so will do when I get a spare moment, hopefully before next week's session.

Looking into the multimodal learning sites highlighted the importance of being creative for me. Some of the examples I thought were quite bland, so can imagine that the children would think so too! So with that in mind, when it came to picking a theme and then resources from the Multitext Data Base to make into a Google Site, I wanted to make it attractive and easy to use for the learners. I picked up some tips for making a site to add to my knowledge from Maria's tutorial too and was pleased that it is not just me who gets frustrated with changing the size on images! As well as the links provided, I added 2 youtube clips on how to make a Manu Tukutuku and a paper kite and also a STEM Challenge slide using the Learn, Create, Share model as the scaffold for this learning. I'm looking forward to using this site in the future - perhaps during Te Reo Maori language week.

Here is the link to the site...

I have started a Google Site on speeches as well, so will try and get this finished as these are fast approaching! It would be great to have it set up to support them in their speech writing.

Another enjoyable day, looking forward to next Friday already.

Session 2 - Digital Fluency Intensive

Today was our second session in Digital Fluency - Workflow. I feel that my laptop is a whole lot more organised after this session!

Looking at Google Keep was useful. I have used this in the past to save art ideas and I can see I will use this in the future for reminders and lists of things to do. I am amazed by the function that allows you to take the text out of an uploaded photo!

My tabs are better organised now. I changed the naming of all of the ones on my favourites bar so that they all fit on it. I pinned my regularly used sites so that I don't have to worry about opening new tabs for them.

I have made tweaks and changes to both my Gmail account and Calendar. I have added a signature to my emails and have personalised the appearance of my account. Being able to unsend a message was a light bulb moment for me and I changed the timing of this from 5 seconds to 30 seconds! That will stop me sending messages with forgotten attachments, as I often realise as soon as I've sent it! It was good to colour code my Calendar dates so that I could see clearly School dates from personal dates. I also changed the date to New Zealand format.

The big learning today for me was Google Hangouts. It was great to have a turn at this and I feel that I will need to have a couple more hangout sessions to really cement it - especially sharing screens so that the other members of the group can see what I'm looking at. Using Quicktime was new to me as well, but I managed to download and share it with my group members on my own. It would be beneficial for me to have another go at Hangouts and then feel confident to use it with my learners.

I look forward to next week's session.